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 | November 15, 2008Here's a grim thought about the environment.
There is no way of life for humans on Earth that is ecologically sustainable for a global population of more than a billion. Our per capita environmental footprint doesn't really matter at this stage.
If we retain our current population and return to a Palaeolithic lifestyle, we're still fucked in the not-too-long run. If we quit having so many children and get back down to a global population in the hundreds of millions, it won't matter any more how each of us splurges and consumes.
You don't need to recycle milk cartons. What you really need to…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2008
I accompanied my son's new class to the Stockholm Museum of Technology today. An investment -- it's good for me to get to know everybody, and it's good for Junior that everybody knows me as a present and available dad.
At the museum, just about the first thing I saw was the XO laptop, about which I've heard so much on Digital Planet. This is the machine developed by the One Laptop Per Child project, known as the "$100 laptop" (though it hasn't quite come down to that yet). Having lugged all 3.6 kilos of my four-year-old Dell Inspiron 6000 through the streets of Lund and Linköping for two…
aardvarchaeology | November 13, 2008
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Easy, you say, eggs were laid by other animals aeons before the first chicken saw the light of day.
But what came first, the first chicken egg or the first chicken? This boils down to whether a chicken egg is one laid by a chicken or one out of which a chicken can hatch. Only the latter definition allows the question to remain open to discussion.
Biologically, a member of the chicken species could be defined by a list of alleles that must be present in its DNA if we're to call it a chicken. And somewhere, sometime, the first bird that fulfilled that…
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2008
I'm at the first Swedish Wikipedia Academy conference in Lund. Yesterday I did a talk on inclusionism vs. deletionism (vs. mergism) on the online encyclopedia (text available on-line in Swedish). Above is my audience who asked a lot of questions and were nice & friendly. Most participants are not themselves Wikipedians, they're largely librarians and teachers. I've chatted with a lot of people, notably Mathias Klang and Lennart Guldbrandsson and Lars Aronsson, and I look forward to future collaborations.
[More blog entries about wikipedia, Sweden; wikipedia, Lund.]
aardvarchaeology | November 12, 2008
Here's some characteristically excellent photography by my friend Lars of Arkland. He's recently moved to Visby on Gotland, a big old limestone slab in the Baltic Sea, where he's the Hauptnetzmeister of the National Heritage Board. The funny thing about the above picture is that it shows young vandals/graffiti artists to have a conscious and highly traditional perspective on the cultural heritage. Much more traditional than today's heritage administrators, who worry endlessly about whether their perspective is democratically informed, in touch with the times etc. While these administrators…
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2008
Last Thursday I went to Norrköping and checked out the Town Museum's collection of prehistoric metalwork. Most of it is decontextualised, but I did manage to collect some useful data on the movements of my 1st Millennium aristocrats across Östergötland.
Among the things I handled was, unexpectedly, the Tåby statuette. It's a stray find from a field near Tåby parish church. Arthur Nordén published it in Fornvännen 1924 and suggested a Late Medieval date about AD 1400. I don't know if the piece has been discussed in print since. It looks neither quite like Bronze Age figurines nor Early Iron…
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2008I've taken out a couple of extremely laddish books from the library to read for fun. Seeing constant mentions of ninjas and pirates on the web, I became curious about the historical reality of these matters. So I've started on Stephen Turnbull's Warriors of Medieval Japan (2005) and I've got David Cordingly's Under the Black Flag (1995) lined up next. Here's a fine passage from Turnbull:
"... even though the Age of Warring States was a time when samurai warfare went through its biggest revolution in history under the influence of strategy and technology from both Europe and China, it was also…
aardvarchaeology | November 7, 2008
[More blog entries about archaeology, astronomy, pseudoscience, skepticism, vondäniken; arkeologi, astronomi, pseudovetenskap, skepticism, vondäniken.]
In this guest entry, German SciBling Florian Freistetter of Astrodicticum Simplex offers a translation of his report from a recent lecture by a spaced-out visionary. Now if only I could say that I've never been fooled by this sort of thing...
A few weeks ago, on 17th October, I had the dubious pleasure of attending a lecture by Erich von Däniken with the title Götterdämmerung, "Twilight of the Gods". The great hall in Jena's Volkshaus…
aardvarchaeology | November 6, 2008The fifty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeoporn. 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 3 December. 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 latest Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | November 5, 2008
When you've finished an archaeological excavation, you always produce an archive report describing the results. Most excavation units these days actually publish their reports in small print runs. If you're lucky enough to find something really interesting, you should also try to publish it in a journal, anthology or monograph. This is good for you, because it enhances your academic qualifications, and it's good for research, because it makes new data available to colleagues and opens up a discussion of the new finds.
In the summer of 2005, me and my friend Howard Williams directed the…
aardvarchaeology | November 4, 2008
Next week I'm scheduled to give talks in two venerable Swedish cathedral towns.
On Wednesday afternoon the 12th I'll speak at the Wikipedia Academy Conference in Lund under the heading "Inclusion/exclusion. How obscure subjects can you write about in Wikipedia?". I'm also gonna talk a little about science outreach, live blogging my research and the importance of amateur volunteers for my work. This event is booked full, but there's a wait list.
The following day, Thursday the 13th at 18:30, I'm speaking about my main research project at the County Museum in Linköping under the heading "A…
aardvarchaeology | November 3, 2008
A year ago I showed some pictures of particularly cool finds that Claes Pettersson and his team from Jönköping County Museum had made in 17th century urban layers near their offices. One of them was the above clay mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. Claes believes that it may have been used to make candy. Now he knows where the motif came from.
The mould is actually a contact copy of a 1631 royal medal used to decorate military officers. And among Claes's finds is a piece of yet another mould copied from a coeval medal, this one an equestrian portrait. Muses Claes, "What have they…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2008
Great images of my childhood are appearing on-line from an unexpected source. My dear Connecticut nanny Lynn Leavey is scanning choice pix from her time with us in Sweden in 1978-79.
Here's my India-goin', safety-match-pushin', ABBA-accountin' grampa Ingemar with a big fish and three small boys on the shore of Lake Lillsjön in Kungsängen west of Stockholm. If I recall correctly, the monster pike weighed 8.3 kg, and I still haven't seen a larger one get caught. Ingemar took it with his favourite method, dragrodd, where you trail a wobbler lure after your boat and row along the edge of the…
aardvarchaeology | November 1, 2008The other day I took a look at how the European Science Foundation's ERIH project grades journals in Scandy archaeology. Dear Reader Ismene pointed me to a corresponding list put out by the NDS, "Norwegian Data Support for the Social Sciences". While ERIH recognises three impact grades plus ungraded journals, the NDS has only two grades plus ungraded. Here's the list of relevant journals.
Grade 2
Acta Archaeologica
Fennoscandia Archaeologica
Norwegian Archaeological Review
Grade 1
Current Swedish Archaeology
Fornvännen
Journal of Danish Archaeology
Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2008
Dear Reader Dveej asked me to write some more about the Purse Torment Tavern south of Stockholm. Its name is Pungpinan which is pretty funny, as pung doesn't just mean purse or pouch, but in modern Swedish more commonly scrotum. The name might thus be translated "Purse Torment" or "Pain in the Ball Sack", or even "Scrotum Torture". (Boy am I gonna get hits from the S/M porn surfers now.)
The heyday of the Purse Torment Tavern lasted from about 1670 to 1805. This was back in the era of horse-drawn carriages, when Sweden was covered by a dense grid of rest stops where you could change horses…
aardvarchaeology | October 30, 2008
Looking at a map of Stockholm's suburbs, you find a swarm of place names denoting housing areas. The housing is almost entirely 20th century. But many of the names go back a thousand years or more. Today they're all just suburbs. But not so long ago, all of these names were part of a hierarchical nomenclature, a ladder of names. The names on the ladder's top rung denoted parishes and were used throughout the county. On the second rung down were the names of farmsteads, used among the surrounding few parishes, and among wayfarers in cases where a farmstead happened to be located on a major…
aardvarchaeology | October 29, 2008The European Science Foundation has a project called the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH).
... there are specifities [!] of Humanities research, that can make it difficult to assess and compare with other sciences. Also, it is not possible to accurately apply to the Humanities assessment tools used to evaluate other types of research. As the transnational mobility of researchers continues to increase, so too does the transdisciplinarity of contemporary science. Humanities researchers must position themselves in changing international contexts and need a tool that offers…
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2008Carl Lipo at Evolution Beach has been kind enough to recommend Aard to his readers. He characterises me as "a big advocator for science based archaeology in the classic 'New Archaeology' sense". It's not the first time I've been called a New Archaeology guy, and I don't consider it unflattering, but I do feel that it calls for a few comments.
Archaeology emerged as a scientific discipline with the work of C.J. Thomsen in the early 1800s. It's a worldwide crazy quilt of regional subdisciplines that needn't communicate much. I don't need to know anything about Chinese archaeology to be able to…
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2008
One or more boat burials have just been excavated on the Estonian island of Saaremaa! Rich weapon burials with multiple inhumations, provisionally dated to the 8th century (though I'm pretty sure they'll turn out to be 9th century). Check out the Salmepaat blog!
Via Kristin Ilves on the Swedish archaeology mailing list.
aardvarchaeology | October 27, 2008The fifty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all dedicated to the memory of Bertrade de Montfort!
The oft-married Count Fulk IV of Anjou was married to the mother of his son in 1089, when the lovely Bertrade caught his eye. According to the chronicler John of Marmoutier, "The lecherous Fulk then fell passionately in love with the sister of Amaury of Montfort, whom no good man ever praised save for her beauty. For her sake, he divorced the mother of Geoffrey II Martel..." Bertrade and Fulk were married, and they became the…