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 | October 26, 2008
I've reached an age where some of my generation's brightest pop musicians are doing nostalgia tours. The Olivia Tremor Control reunited! But guys, couldn't you please write us some new songs as well?
aardvarchaeology | October 25, 2008Carina Andersson and Rickard Franzén at the Swedish National Heritage Board have put together a report in Swedish titled "What Does Contract Archaeology Really Cost?". Their answer to the question is, briefly, "less overall than the County Archaeologists would actually allow". County Archaeologists all over Sweden put out lots of contract work to tender and select who will do each job at what budget. And the archaeologists on average keep well within these budgets. Very likely, this is helped to a great extent by sites that look promising but turn out to be duds.
Another way of answering the…
aardvarchaeology | October 24, 2008The Swedish Research Council has just announced its 2008 project grants for research in the humanities and social sciences. 106 out of 993 submitted projects (10%) have received funding. Only two archaeologists got money: Thomas B. Larsson (b. 1953) who works with the Scandinavian Bronze Age, and Susanne Berndt Ersöz (b. 1959) who works with Turkey in the Last Millennium BC. Grant recipient Lena Larsson-Lovén (b. 1956) works with Roman dress, which places her in a border zone between art studies, history and archaeology.
As I have previously documented, you need to be about 42 and a recent…
aardvarchaeology | October 24, 2008Yesterday I gave a talk at a seminar organised by my friends in the Djurhamn project. This was interesting from a scholarly, a professional and a social point of view.
Not least piquant was that I ended up chatting briefly with two ladies whom I have criticised sharply in various media over the Ales stenar sign-post debacle. One was very friendly, telling me that she welcomed my voicing frank opinions, in a way that was too sweet to appear condescending. The other, whom I once offended pretty badly already during the Kristian Berg conflict, had a more restrained demeanour. In her talk she…
aardvarchaeology | October 23, 2008
I've been using Garmin's handheld GPS navigators since the spring of 2005; two models running the same firmware. They have been invaluable in archaeological fieldwork, pinpointing finds and test pits swiftly and accurately in situations where you would once have counted steps to the nearest landmark and put an X on a small-scale map. GPS has also helped me a lot when driving, and lured me to seek out over 600 geocaches.
But recently I discovered a really annoying glitch in Garmin's firmware, having to do with the coordinate readout.
The machine is able to use many tens of different…
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2008
Monday night me and Moomin went to an of Montreal gig at Medborgarplatsen in Stockholm. Amazing stuff. Seven musicians on stage, everybody swapping instruments all the time, three mimes prancing around in weird masks, psychedelic animated films on the backdrop, and a solid 90 minutes of intricate pop music, everything tightly rehearsed. I'm glad I had done my homework on the new album, because this isn't the kind of music that you get the first time around -- particularly not with so-so live sound quality.
The last time I caught the band live, they ended their set by covering Sabbath's "War…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2008
Every once in a blue cheese, a son of Ming the Merciless invites me to speak at an advertising school in Stockholm, Berghs School of Communication. (Yes, they have adopted an English name to sound cooler. No, they didn't put the genitive apostrophe in. I find that really painful.) I talk about cyberculture, on-line communities and what advertising people need to know about the web.
As this entry comes on-line, I am standing in front of 30 fresh-faced Macbook-toting hipsters who will soon learn, to their horror, that Firefox allows you to kill all ad banners and flash clips.
During my talk, I…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2008
Erik Nylén in 1987, holding a ship's vane inspired by 11th century ones, standing in front of Krampmacken, a replica of a 12th century sailing boat. "Krampmacken" means "the brine shrimp". Photograph by Rune Edberg. Thanks Rune!
One of my archaeological heroes turned 90 last Saturday.
Professor Erik Nylén is huge in Swedish archaeology. His name is associated with any number of important fieldwork and publication projects, and also with a strongly pro-science movement during the 60s and 70s where fieldwork and labwork methods were greatly improved. One of Erik's big ideas was wholesale…
aardvarchaeology | October 21, 2008After over a year's near-invisibility on the net, cyberculture guru R.U. Sirius resurfaces as editor of H+ Magazine, a web zine about transhumanism. Explains Wikipedia, transhumanism is a "movement supporting the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical abilities and aptitudes, and overcome what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition, such as disability, suffering, disease, aging, and involuntary death". Shades of R.A. Wilson!
The first issue has loads of interesting content including an interview with hyperclocked science fiction…
aardvarchaeology | October 20, 2008
Fornvännen ("the Friend of Ancient Things") is one of the main journals of Scandy archaeology and Medieval art. It's been issued 4-6 times a year since 1906, for the past several decades on a quarterly schedule, and I've been a co-editor since 1999. The first 100 volumes have been scanned and are available on-line. Later issues are appearing on-line too with a 6-month delay, though we haven't quite ironed out the routines for that yet.
Issue 2008:3 recently came from the printers. Here's what's in it:
Hans Olsson and Katherine Bless Karlsen present an Early Mesolithic (c. 6900 cal BC) site…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2008
I worry about of Montreal's musical motor, pop genius Kevin Barnes. He first got records out in 1997-98, when he was an elegantly naivistic singer of sad love songs. Then he shot like a lysergic rocket straight into Pepperland with four beatlesque albums in 1999-2004. On his 2005 album he suddenly said goodbye to his old band members, returned to confessional mode and sang the praises of married life and parenthood in Norway of all places. And two other new themes appeared: 80s-style electronica and deep depression. That's where he still is.
With his recent album, Skeletal Lamping, Barnes…
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2008
A few hours ago, activists broke into two Swedish arms factories and vandalised weapons destined for US and Indian military forces. Among other things, they rendered twenty m/48 Carl Gustaf bazookas inoperable.
This really takes me back. An older cousin of mine used to be an activist in the Plowshares Movement. In 1993 him and some friends broke into a military airfield outside Linköping and, using hammers, disarmed a number of JAS 39 fighter planes. They made no attempt to escape afterwards, quietly got arrested and spent a year in jail.
While in prison, my cousin was called "Jesus" by the…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2008Recently I organised a few days' excavation that didn't turn up the kind of stuff I was hoping for. Still, I brought some materials home that may serve to shed some light on what exactly it was we dug into. All those nondescript little pits, all those sooty hearths full of cracked stone -- when were they made and used?
Enter radiocarbon. This dating method works on anything organic, that is, anything with carbon in it. Running one sample costs about $500, so you have multiple reasons to be smart about which samples you send to the lab. I thought my thinking about this might interest you, Dear…
aardvarchaeology | October 14, 2008
Dear Reader, it's been nearly a year since I asked you to press any buttons. If you like Aard, and haven't already done so, would you please do me the favour of pressing a few buttons in the left-hand column, right below my profile? Good grades make blogger happy! Thanks.
And while I'm at it: if you click on the headline of an Aard entry, you'll find a version of the entry with a little button at bottom right labelled "Share This". Clicking on it, you'll find a menu of social bookmarking sites. If every once in a while you read something here that you really like, I'd be most grateful if you…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2008
Here's some Bedouin furniture and family history for y'all.
To the left, a folding brass smoking table bought by my granddad Ingemar in Punjab, India, shortly before the Great Depression. Ingemar worked as a safety match salesman for Swedish industrialist Ivar Krüger, whom the Depression would make very depressed indeed. My granddad told lots of stories of his years in India, the greatest adventure of his life. Returning to Sweden, he had wanted to become a philologist, but, lacking money, he instead went to work in his brother's accountancy firm. The coolest thing about his career was being…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2008
A timely must-read: Kevin Nguyen explains the financial crisis to his kid sister using Pokémon cards as an analogy.
Kevin: Imagine that I let you borrow $50, but in exchange for my generosity, you promise to pay me back the $50 with an extra $10 in interest. To make sure you pay me back, I take your Charizard Pokémon card as collateral.
Olivia: Kevin, I don't play Pokémon anymore.
Kevin: I'm getting to that. Let's say that the Charizard is worth $50, so in case you decide to not return my money, at least I'll have something that's worth what I loaned out.
Olivia: Okay.
Kevin: But one day,…
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2008From age 16 to 26 I was an active member of the Stockholm Tolkien Society (est. 1972). This charming association is organised around a schedule of annual feasts and a roster of themed activity guilds. There's the Medieval Dance Guild, the Gaming Guild, the gluttonous Hobbit Guild, the erudite Friends of Daeron and many others. My favourite was -- and is -- the Book Guild.
Though I have long since dropped out of the Society's main activities, I still gate-crash the monthly Book Guild now and then. Last night it convened at my place for dinner, tea and conversation about books. Many reading…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2008The fifty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Clashing Culture. Archaeology and anthropology, and all from the perspective of mashpi'im!
Mashpia (Hebrew: ×שפ××¢â) lit. "person of influence," pl. Mashpi'im (Hebrew: ×שפ××¢××â) is the title of a rabbi or rebbetzin who serves as a spiritual mentor in Tomchei Temimim (the Chabad yeshiva), in a girls' seminary belonging to the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, or in a Chabad community.
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me, not to the old submissions address. The next open hosting slot is on 19 November. All…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2008A rare piece of irate e-mail.
Hi Mr. Rundkvist,
This is Gregory from the US. I was reading your thoughts on Dr. Moller and the Exodus Case. You criticize Moller for not trying to disprove his hypothesis. Tell me; do evolutionists try to disprove their theory? You know they could if they tried. It is the scientists job to gather evidence for his hypothesis. But you lefty liberals don't want to believe in the Bible, so you go to great lengths to discredit scientific evidence that supports the Bible, no matter how irrational you sound.
1. Yes, biologists make a lot of experiments to see if…
aardvarchaeology | October 6, 2008Two of my favourite song writers have revealed themselves as astronomy nerds in love songs.
Frank Black in "Sir Rockaby" (1994):
How many stars girl
Can you both count
And then classify?
I'm standing here in this big swirl
Singing this lullaby
Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo in "7 Stars" (2007):
Seven stars in the sky
You're feeling sociable
Silver stars in your eyes
You feel emotional
And you don't even know my name
And I know every constellation