Aardvarchaeology
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, board gamer, bookworm, and father of two.
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2009Imagine that you're ten years old, you've got a cageful of gerbils and your weekly allowance is just big enough to feed five of them. If one of the females pops out a brood of pups, you're in trouble. You can either try to weedle a bigger allowance out of your parents, try to give gerbils away, starve the gerbils... or start killing gerbil pups.
Now, at more than six billion people in our worldwide gerbil cage, we've pretty much got the same choices, only we can't give people away -- but we can control the number of pups born. And we need to. Because within the next century, our global…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2009Bohuslän province on the west coast of Sweden is known internationally for its many and varied Bronze Age rock art sites. But its archaeology is rich regardless of what period you look at. My maternal great-granddad's people came from Tanum and Kville parishes, so I'm sort of a Bohuslän aborigine.
The discovery of a Medieval shipwreck off the Bohuslän coast was recently announced. Or rather, the wreck has been known for centuries, and local tradition held it to date from the grim early-18th century reign of warrior king Carolus XII. Now maritime archaeologist Staffan von Arbin from the…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2009
A central theme in post-modernist archaeology of the more science-friendly, not radically relativist kind for the past 20 years has been the study of the after-life of monuments, or "the past in the past". Archaeologists are of course keenly interested in the archaeological record, and I think there's a reasonable argument for studies of how the people we study engaged with the remains around them in their era. Mind you, I think this should be treated as a side issue and a bit of a novelty. I've heard Mesolithic scholars proclaim that a lithics scatter in a river bank was as significant to…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2009To celebrate Charles Darwin's bicentennial, Dear Reader, let me tell you about a less well-known way in which his great idea was misunderstood or misappropriated. You may have heard of social Darwinism and eugenics. The former took Darwin's description of long-term biological change and applied it as a prescriptive excuse for not showing compassion to the poor and weak. The latter held that a species that was protected from selection pressure by such compassion would degenerate and all its members become weak. Both are thoroughly discredited.
The Origin of Species appeared 150 years ago in…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2009The sixtieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Middle Savagery. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 11 March. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2009The University of Helsinki has something called a Collegium for Advanced Studies, whose aims are:
to enhance scholarly excellence within humanities and social sciences;
to endorse dialogue between different academic orientations;
to provide an innovative environment for concentrated study;
to encourage theoretical and methodological reflection in research;
to promote international visibility of Finnish research and interaction between scholars from all over the world.
Every year the Collegium offers a number of researcher positions concentrated on interdisciplinary work. Helsinki is the…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2009The Stockholm County Museum has just put my report on last summer's fieldwork at Djurhamn on-line (in Swedish). As you may remember, I blogged about it at the time (here, here and here). The results were actually a bit of a let-down after the sword I found in '07.
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2009On Saturday night I attended a talk by bright young philology and religion studies comet Ola Wikander. In 2003, at age 22, he published a Swedish translation of the Baal cycle and other Canaanite mythological matter for the lay reader. In the five years since then, he's done the Enuma Elish, the Chaldaean oracles, an essay collection on ancient languages, a popular introduction to Indo-europan studies and a historical mystery novel co-written with his dad. His PhD thesis on the relationship between certain themes in Ugaritic and Old Testament mythology is due in 2011. In his spare time he…
aardvarchaeology | February 7, 2009Standing in line to board the jet to Sweden yesterday, I read over a woman's shoulder in Times Higher Education that ERIH, the European Reference Index for the Humanities, is scrapping its A-B-C-nil grading system (previously discussed here in October). It's come under heavy fire because of the fundamental differences between the natural sciences and the humanities. There is no such thing as independent Swedish chemistry or medicine, but there's any number of fields of research in the humanities that are almost entirely confined to single countries. As Horace Engdahl pointed out last year,…
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2009Chester library has two thematic fiction sections that I've never seen at Swedish libraries. One offers historical fiction. The other, also quite large, is all mystery novels set in the distant past -- labelled "Past Crimes".
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2009
The Pillar of Eliseg, being the remains of an inscribed 9th century cross, sitting on a barrow of probable Early Bronze Age date.
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday with Howard and his students on field trips into north-east Wales and back across the border into Cheshire and Shropshire. I got to see the area under highly unusual circumstances: covered in snow and lit by an unclouded sun. Beautiful! We've seen the early church site of Shotwick, the Cistercian abbey ruins of Basingwerk and Valle Crucis, the hillfort of Oswestry, the Offa's Dyke and Wat's Dyke defensive walls and the stone crosses…
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2009Greetings from Chester, founded in AD 79, whither I'm come to accept a position as Visiting Research Fellow with the university's archaeology department. Inclement weather delayed my flight, but the taxi driver who took me into town was a clement man and we had a nice chat. I have located my friend Howard Williams and my room on campus, and I expect to have a login for the ambient wifi there soon. Wifi is not a common offering in UK cafés though -- took me a while to find one that had it among the quaint shops of central Chestah. Have started to make friends with the staff and faculty, and…
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2009My first wife had a cat named Cassandra, and she had a litter of three kittens. One was grey, black and white, and we called him Batman. Two were ginger, and I don't remember what we called them, but the neighbour who took one of them in called him Sophus. He grew up to become a fine tomcat and a great hunter.
Sophus and his owner lived on the ground floor with a little garden on the edge of a park. So the cat would come home with prey and lay it at his owner's feet. There were birds, including the fast ones, and small rodents. Sophus was good. But hunting wasn't always good. After his second…
aardvarchaeology | January 30, 2009The fifty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 11 March. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | January 30, 2009I entered into organised skepticism because of anti-science tendencies in academe. Though a member of the Swedish Skeptics since 1997 and co-editor of the society's journal since 2002, I've never been much of a skeptical activist outside academic archaeology. I've written articles and a few letters of protest. But I've visited no spirit mediums, gone to no New Age fairs, crashed no fundie revivals. I have engaged with Teh Woo only in the manner of a sniper. In fact, I hardly ever meet any true believers apart from my New Age mom. But last night I had two such encounters: first one that was…
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2009Fornvännen -- Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research has had a number of different cover designs over the past century and the colour of the stock has varied. Starting with the first issue for 1966, it has had a beige rusticated cover. Starting with the current issue, 2008:4, it suddenly has a pale grey rusticated cover. My buddy Leif at Arkeologi i Väst speculates as to why this may be -- is it because I got a steady job working with the journal? No. We had to change the cover paper because the makers of the beige stuff suddenly quit offering it! Leif also has some incisive comments about…
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2009Since getting a smartphone, I never use my iPod anymore. (I handed it down to Junior who is now getting a psychedelic musical education. He's into the Marbles.) But the switch of course led to a huge drop in the ease of use. Here are the steps I have to go through to get my phone to play my mp3s in random order:
Unlock phone.
If need be, navigate to "Favourites" tab of start screen.
Start Windows Media Player.
Click on "Menu".
Click on "Library".
Select "Storage Card" from top-left menu.
Click on "My music".
Click on "Play".
And the software is absolute crap at remembering where I was in a…
aardvarchaeology | January 26, 2009Next week I'm going to Chester in England to visit the archaeology department there and accept a position as Visiting Research Fellow. I'll be in town from 2 to 6 February. Any Dear Readers in that neck of the woods who'd like to meet up?
aardvarchaeology | January 26, 2009
Happy Chinese New Year, everybody! Today is the first day of the year of the Ox according to the farmers' calendar.
The Rundkvist family is heavily secularised, to the extent that I have let slip almost all Western observances and have very vague ideas about the Chinese ones. So, to learn what this day is traditionally about, I turn as always to Wikipedia, and learn that I should:
Welcome the deities of the heavens and earth.
Not eat meat.
Not cook.
Visit the most senior members of my extended family.
Hire a lion dance troupe.
Give money to my kids.
Set off fire crackers.
Of these…
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2009Being a married man and a father of small children, I am very rarely alone in the workday evenings or weekends. Indeed, in the past five or or six years, my capacity for sustained self-entertainment (yeah, yeah, OK; "nudge, nudge") has atrophied to the point where I no longer know what to do when faced with a free Sunday. Yet this was the situation I found myself in last night. Wife off on business trip. Son at mom's place. Daughter likely to spend day at friend's place. Now what?
After some thought, I reached the conclusion that I would very much like to spend the afternoon with friends at a…