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 | December 4, 2008
Here's something neat. Annika and Bengtowe Angare are photographers and digital retouch artists (check out their site and hover your cursor over each picture!). They've photographed the early-16th century sword I found at Djurhamn in 2007 and stuck it point first into the find spot on a vintage map of Djurö!
This post is timely as I have a short talk scheduled for tonight about my work at Djurhamn. Wish me luck!
Thanks to Annika & Bengtowe for permission to blog publish their © image.
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2008
Kai reports from an on-going exhibition at the Stockholm Museum of Natural History on homosexuality among non-humans. It is based on Bruce Bagemihl's research.
I am impressed by the gay dolphins' invention of nasal intercourse. To pull that off, one human would have to be hugely endowed in the nose department and the other very petite indeed elsewhere. I wonder what happens if you sneeze?
In the title of his entry, Kai reminds us of the Flintstones, who of course had a gay old time. Now, the bit that I've been wondering about is "they go down in history". On whom?
In other news, I came up…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2008The fifty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Cognition and Culture. 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 31 December, less than a month from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2008Conversing with a friend recently, I mused, what could be the background to the expression "batshit insane"? My friend suggested that it might have something to do with having bats in the belfry. I then wondered what the Swedish equivalent of this expression would be.
In Swedish, you don't have bats in the belfry. You have gnomes on the loft. Thus, "batshit insane" translates to tomtespillningstokig: gnome poop insane.
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2008"In the morning I left voice mail messages to call me on my mother's and sister's numbers. As I came in to work I saw S still logged in to his Skype account, where he'd left it going for his final exercise round. More subdued phone calls during the day, there would be a viewing at the hospital the next day. I was unfamiliar with the term, but googling confirmed that it was an opportunity to see the body. When had this procedure been (re-)introduced?"
Read more over at Pointless Anecdotes.
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2008Four of my favourite authors were born in the 1890s and wrote mainly from the inter-war years onward.
H.P. Lovecraft 1890-1937
J.R.R. Tolkien 1892-1973
F.G. Bengtsson 1894-1954
F. Nilsson Piraten 1895-1972
There seems to be something about that generation's idiom, taste and experience that resonates with me. But maybe it's just an artefact of chronology. I got into them all as a boy: I was born right about the time when the kids of the 1890s were dying off, which turned the spotlight on their generation once again and led to re-issues. Anyway, check them out!
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2008Dear Reader Michael Merren of the Religion, Philosophy and Other Oddities blog is a married man and a father of three. He also used to be a Catholic priest. Learning this, I asked Michael to write a guest entry on his personal history. And now I know whom to turn to with any theological question that might pop up.
I don't know where else to start than from the beginning. I was raised Roman Catholic and always felt drawn to do something to give back to humankind, to be great and benefit my fellow man in some way. Some might call that a "vocation" or a "calling" I suppose. As a Catholic boy the…
aardvarchaeology | November 29, 2008
Driving home from our auto mechanic shop (notable not only for its brisk service, but also for being run entirely by first-generation immigrants, which is rare in that business) yesterday, I heard two new songs on the radio that made a big impression on me. More exactly, the two singers amazed me, each in their own way.
Antony and the Johnson's "Shake that Devil" is completely eerie. It's bleak science fictiony avantgarde roots blues. I'd heard Antony before as guest vocalist on Current 93's otherworldly 2006 album Black Ships Ate the Sky, and this is even weirder. Beautiful!
"Shake that…
aardvarchaeology | November 28, 2008
Here's something pretty damn cool: Ossington airbase in Nottinghamshire, England. From 1942 to 1946 it was an RAF bomber airfield, and then it reverted to farmland. Just look at the big X on the aerial photograph from Google Maps. Six decades of abandonment, and it's an archaeological landscape!
Thanks to Kai for the tipoff.
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2008
Chris, the most highly allocthonous of the SciBlings, just did something neat over at his place that immediately called for emulation. He's a geologist, and he's graphed what periods of Earth's history he's been studying when. So, Dear Reader, here's my graph: not as pretty as Chris's, but hopefully legible. You may note that I specialise in the later 1st Millennium, that my work in the Neolithic must be rather superficial, that I have never worked with the Mesolithic nor the Early Iron Age nor the Middle Ages, and that I plan to return to Bronze Age studies next year.
Oh, and one more thing…
aardvarchaeology | November 25, 2008
You know the Iggy & Stooges track "Penetration"? The one where Iggy sounds like he might be the penetratee rather than the penetrator? Now, I want you to imagine me singing that song, only with the word "affiliation" rather than "penetration".
For the second time, my friend and frequent collaborator Howard Williams provides me with valuable university affiliation. Through his good offices, I have been appointed Visiting Research Fellow of the University of Chester, students from which made up most of my fieldwork team back in September. This is really good for my troop morale. They may…
aardvarchaeology | November 24, 2008
I've been a science fiction fan since I was four. It started with TV shows like the original Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man, Batman (the shapeless tights 60s version) and Saturday morning superhero cartoons. One of my first visits to the movies was when my mom took me to see Star Wars in 1977. Then I started to read novels and ploughed through Heinlein and Clarke. I remember finding Stranger in a Strange Land a little weird at about age eleven, but I enjoyed it. Later I became a devotee of LeGuin and Lovecraft.
Sf was such an obvious thing to me from an early age, and so the fantasy…
aardvarchaeology | November 24, 2008There are too many of us on Earth, our numbers keep growing, and we need to do something about it. Now, let's never lose sight of the reason we want to do something about it.
I'm not an ecological romantic. I don't think the planet would be better off without humanity. In fact, I think a planet without intelligent life is completely pointless from the perspective of an intelligent observer. Our goal should never be to rid the planet of humans: we need to make sure that humans can continue to live happily and safely on Earth and avoid dying catastrophically. We should save the spotted owl for…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2008I'm here to tell you there are lots of Christians who aren't anything like the preconceived notions you may have. We're not all into "turning the other cheek." We don't spend our days committing random acts of kindness for no credit. And although we believe that the moral precepts in the Book of Leviticus are the infallible word of God, it doesn't mean we're all obsessed with extremist notions like "righteousness" and "justice."
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aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2008Polish bishop asks archaeologists to find the unmarked grave of Nicolaus Copernicus under the floor of Frombork Cathedral. Archaeologists find a damaged burial including a jawless skull, and note that it's a male of the right age and with signature wounds visible on contemporary portraits of the astronomer. But they're still not quite sure if they have the right bones. So they do something extremely smart.
They vacuum a book known to have belonged to Copernicus, kept in a library in Uppsala, and they get little bits of human hair out of it. Then they have the hairs and a number of bones and…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2008The fifty-fourth 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 17 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2008
So you're the principal of an English-language high school in Stockholm, Sweden. And you decide to put some serious money into an advertising campaign in the city's subway. Now, you want to express what we in Sweden call att behärska engelska, "learning English really well".
And that's when the idea hits you: "I'm gonna say it in home-made mistranslated Swenglish! That'll give everybody a really good impression of my school, and they'll send their kids here in frickin' droves!"
"Commanding English -- Those Who Dare, Win."
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2008Here's a brand new and particularly fine piece of world-weary goth rock from prolific Uppsala decadents Kurtz. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you "Sex Cult 10". And don't miss the band's RSS feed!
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2008I correspond with a lot of people and my email program remembers them all. Every time I type in the first few letters of an address, Thunderbird suggests a list of people it thinks I might want to write to. The software of course knows nothing about what goes on in the world around it, and so blithely continues to suggest the addresses even of people who have died.
I have heard of ghost email that has been sitting in some screwed-up mail server for months and only reached its adressee after the death of the person who wrote it. But this is something else. My computer wants me to write…