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 | January 24, 2009My lovely Chinese wife came to Sweden with her family at age seven and grew up here. This has given her an unusual level of bicultural competence. I like to quip, lewdly, that she's a dual boot machine with two operating systems and the most awesome hardware, man. She's like this typical bright Swedish middle-class chick who somehow happens to know everything about China and looks like an Imperial princess.
So I can't really say that we have grappled with and overcome our cultural differences. She pretty much does that for me on her own. But there are some details where our different…
aardvarchaeology | January 23, 2009
A few years ago my friend David the Psychonaut gave me an mp3 file with the greatest song, "Jan Pehechan-Ho" by Mohammed Rafi. And now another friend, Tanya the Cosmopolite, links to the song's over-the top Bollywood dance number, straight from the 1965 film Gumnaam. Awesome! (As per standard Bollywood procedure, Rafi himself isn't in the film.)
aardvarchaeology | January 22, 2009As we welcome the Obama administration into its first period, everyone at Sb is eager to see it restore science to its rightful place in US policy making and political culture. Now, from an archaeologist's point of view, there is one area of US law where science is sorely lacking. And in this case, it's not the second Bush administration's fault. Actually, this is an area where US law has lagged behind that of the rest of the developed world for as long as there has been a developed world.
What is science's rightful place in US cultural heritage management law? It should be everywhere, while…
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2009Back in August I blogged about a manuscript where a scholar appealed to Thomas Kuhn's old theory of paradigm shifts in order to evade criticism of their work. At the time I couldn't give the real details as I had received the manuscript in my capacity as journal editor.
I've said before that I consider it an editor's duty to correct muddle in debates, both in the interests of scientific advancement and to help contributors avoid looking silly. So I wrote to the scholar in question and asked her to work some more on her contribution, specifically to address more of her opponent's substantive…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2009
Bronze candlesticks, early 15th century, made in Germany or Flanders. Top: Rute parish, Gotland. Height c. 18 cm. Photograph by R. Hejdström. Below right: Fragment from Tåby parish, Östergötland. Photograph by M.R.
Back in November I checked out the enigmatic Tåby figurine and blogged about it. Now I've found out what it is: it's part of a 15th century candlestick and there's a complete specimen in the Gotland County Museum. The Gotland specimen was kept above ground, in use and in repair from the Middle Ages until recently at a farmstead in Rute parish. Arthur Nordén wasn't aware of it, but…
aardvarchaeology | January 19, 2009
My experiments with the wifi installation in our house and the excellent Bredbandskollen TPTEST bandwidth tester (mainly for machines in Sweden) has taught me a few interesting things about wifi.
Your operating system may report the quality of the connection in percent or columns or somesuch. This is not directly proportional to the actual bandwidth you're getting. One percentage estimate may correspond to a wide range of bandwidth figures.
The bandwidth of a wifi connection is extremely sensitive to obstacles such as walls, doors, even waste paper baskets.
I started with the access point…
aardvarchaeology | January 18, 2009Thanks to a good metal detectorist and a swift response by British Museum archaeologists, all English Iron Age aficionados can now enjoy and study a hoard of 824 indigenous gold stater coins, buried in AD 15 or shortly thereafter. The hoard was in a plain pottery vessel, buried in a rectilinear cultic structure near Wickham Market, Suffolk. It's the largest Iron Age gold coin hoard reported from Britain since 1849.
In Sweden, we don't have a single coin deposited at such an early date, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Danes don't either (though they do have other very cool imports of the…
aardvarchaeology | January 17, 2009Listening to podcasts and reading blogs I've come across a new dialectal quirk of US English. I don't like it. It's ugly.
In standard English worldwide, people will tell you how much or little there is of something, how few or many of them. "I can't get enough of her". "I put too much of my savings into stocks." "There are too many of them." "It's not too much of a problem."
"Of" goes with adjectives having to do with quantity and number. Not, for instance, with size, colour or shape.
Now, look at the fourth example above and imagine that "much" might be exchanged for any adjective. Then you…
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2009After a bit less than a month's wait our new house is finally on-line! The winter of our off-line discontent dissolvèd made glorious broadband summer. So far only at 11 Mbps when we were promised at least 12, but the ADSL modem isn't currently on the first phone socket, so I hope to eventually be able to squeeze some more bandwidth out of the setup.
I now face the slight problem of how our desktop machine will interface with the modem in the long term. I was planning on going wireless to eliminate cables, but so far the USB dongle I bought for the purpose isn't working very well. When it…
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2009Today's the eighth birthday of that excellent open on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Let's all celebrate by going there and contributing some information! Even if it's your first time -- it's easy.
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2009The fifty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Moneduloides. 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 28 January, two weeks from now 11 February. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | January 14, 2009When I was offered a review copy of the new documentary film 10 Yards Fantasy Football, I replied, "No use sending that to a guy with no interest either in real nor imaginary football. But please do send me your award-winning 2006 Segway documentary road movie, 10 MPH Seattle to Boston!". Film makers Hunter Weeks and Josh Caldwell kindly decided to send me both films, and it turned out I was right. I liked 10 MPH with its beautiful landscape footage and charming roadside interviews. It has my recommendation, for what that's worth to a movie that's already won the award for best documentary at…
aardvarchaeology | January 13, 2009It's been over half a year since the last de-lurk. Aard currently has over 150 returning visitors daily (out of about 730 uniques). Since not everyone checks in every day, this translates to several hundred -- possibly a thousand -- regulars who read the blog at least once a week. So, everybody, please comment away, as briefly or verbosely as you like, and do consider telling us a little about yourself!
aardvarchaeology | January 13, 2009If by a "steady job" you mean one that is contracted to last until retirement, then I have had only one in my life so far. In 2002, Roger Blidmo gave me a steady job with his contract archaeology unit Arkeologikonsult. I left it after only a few months as my dig was done and written up, as the unit had no further digs lined up at the time, and as I had received funding to study Vendel Period metal detector finds from Uppåkra.
Today I have signed up with the Royal Academy of Letters for the second steady job of my life. It's actually just a change in the formal circumstances around my work as…
aardvarchaeology | January 12, 2009I have just spent a week nursing my family through an onset of the flu. High fever. Bucketfuls of snotty bog roll. Headaches. Stomach aches. Rattling coughs. Shoving innumerable paracetamol suppositories where the sun don't shine. But I was unscathed myself. Dear Reader, come autumn, do what I did and take your flu shot.
I have sometimes met with incredulity, even opposition, from the district nurse when I've popped down for my annual vaccination. "You're a strong healthy young(ish) man, you don't need a flu shot!" Indeed. I do not need a flu shot to survive. But it costs only $20, takes only…
aardvarchaeology | January 9, 2009ScienceBlogs.com, including Aard, has received left-wing newspaper The Nation's seal of approval and been listed as one of its recommended web sites in a book that's just out. To my Swedish readers, this isn't likely to mean much, as left-wing US politics is what our conservatives advocate: such as when Prime Minister Reinfeldt endorsed Barack Obama. To US readers, however, this underlines the fact that most of us at Sb are screaming pinko dirty commie hippies. And gay-loving potheads. The rightwingedmost among us, like Orac of Respectful Insolence, are in fact centrists in the US perspective…
aardvarchaeology | January 8, 2009Daniel of Neuroanthropology has made an excellent roundup of last year's best anthro blogging. Check it out!
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2009Having moved recently to a house wired only with telephone copper, my family and I are now into our fourth week without an internet connection. It's a really frustrating way to learn just how dependent we've become on the net.
For one thing, we don't own a printed telephone directory, and our only street map of greater Stockholm is in the car. We can't do on-line banking, and we can't mail-order stuff. I can read email on my smartphone, but my wife's going nuts over being cut off. And simple information searching -- woah, I miss Wikipedia five times a day. Suddenly we have to use our printed…
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2009
After my November talk at the County Museum in Linköping I was kindly presented with a copy of the third edition of Inga Wallenquists's book Ãstgötamat, "Ãstergötland Food". It's a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book combining recipes from the past three centuries with bits of regional kitchen history. The text is repetitive and should have been more stringently edited, but the contents are nonetheless interesting and inspiring. Excellent archival photos mingle with new ones by the masterly Göran Billesson.
I made Duchess Anna's cake (p. 59) on New Year's Eve, this being a variant…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2009Back in July I panned the History Channel's documentary on the peopling of North America, Journey to 10,000 BC. Their publicist then sent me a recent re-issue of a 2005 film about adventurous archaeologists, The Real Tomb Hunters -- Snakes, Curses and Booby Traps. Here are my impressions of that picture.
Real Tomb Hunters, though not a very good documentary, is far better than Journey to 10,000 BC. This is because a) it doesn't rely on cheezy computer animation, b) it aims much lower, intending only to be exciting, not to present any research results or debates. We get to follow a number of…