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 5, 2008Everybody with an interest in anthropology and archaeology -- it's time to contribute good new blog entries to the forthcoming Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. You needn't have written them yourself: if you've found something worth reading recently, submit it to Thomas at Clashing Culture.
aardvarchaeology | October 5, 2008Extreme Tracking keeps a list of the most popular search terms that direct readers to this blog. Read in order from the most popular one down, they form the following quatrains.
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aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2008
I'm 36 and still as skinny as in my teens (BMI 20). Why is that, I have wondered. I have a desk job, I eat every three waking hours, I drink sweet tea and snack on cookies, I do no sports outside the marital bedroom, I scoff at gyms and jogging. Contributing factors to my skinny-assedness are skinny ancestors, no snacking between 3-hour meals and no alcohol. But I recently realised what's probably the capping factor depriving me of the beginning paunch that my contemporaries sport.
I cycle to work.
From my home to my dad's house where me and my books occupy one of the guest rooms, it's 2.6…
aardvarchaeology | October 3, 2008
I bought two wooden model kits in Beijing last October. The kids and I finished the Imperial Dragon in late August. Since then, my daughter and I have worked on the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests (ç¥å¹´æ®¿) which forms part of the 15th century Temple of Heaven complex in Beijing. Now it's completed, and I shudder to think of what we're gonna do with it when we move house.
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2008In Sweden, the County Archaeologist's office decides where contract-archaeological fieldwork is needed, how much it can be allowed to cost the land developer, and which excavation unit should do the work. Ãsa at Ting & Tankar reports (in Swedish) about a recent case where the County Archaeologist's representative went quite a bit farther than that in overseeing some contract fieldwork.
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2008
On my way to work in the mornings, I pass the hibernation grounds of the Saltsjöbaden Boat Club. Boat owners are currently busy getting their craft out of the water and onto scaffolding on dry land, as the Baltic winter ice is not friendly to boats.
The other day I found an adjustable spanner on the bike track right by the boats. It was sitting beside a newly landed boat, one of many whose cover scaffolding was in place but whose tarp wasn't on yet. This threw me into a brief ethical dilemma. What should I do with the wrench?
I already own an adjustable wrench. Another one would be somewhat…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2008
On an ammunition delivery run to Kai's place in Rågsved last Saturday, I found a grimy strip of photo negatives beside a lamp post at Stövargatan's southernmost point. Rain had obliterated two of the pictures, but two remained. So, as an installation in my irregular series of modern objets trouvés (lighter, PC, polaroid pic, gynaecologist's chair, soon an adjustable wrench) I present pictures of a nameless kid hiking in the mountains.
(To get the pics into my computer without specialist equipment, I taped them onto a sheet of white paper, taped the sheet to a window facing the sun, shot…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2008
With thanks to Moomin, here's a fine clip with Max Raabe und das Palast Orchester performing "Amalie geht mit 'nem Gummikavalier ins Bad" from 1927. How low haven't the lyrics of the popular song sunk since that golden age of wit and erudition!
Update 22 October:My translation of the song's title doesn't bring across just how naughty it sounds in German. In Bad gehen does mean "to go swimming", and the lyrics make it clear that Amalie and her rubber gentleman are indeed on the beach. But it also means "to take a bath", so to someone who only reads the title of the song, it appears to mean "…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2008
I'm reading Steven L. Kent's engrossing 2001 book The Ultimate History of Video Games, and of course it reminds me of a lot of games I played as a kid. My first real video games were played on the Atari VCS/2600. (The book is in my home because my 10-y-o son is both a video gamer and a bookworm, and took it out from the library.)
A memory. It's 1982 or '83. The Nintendo Donkey Kong Game & Watch is the hottest game around. My classmate Pär comes up to me in the hallway in school and asks me if I "saw Donkey Shot". Confused I reply that of course I've seen Donkey Kong, everybody has one…
aardvarchaeology | September 29, 2008My erudite friend Florence Vilén (historian of religion, haiku poet, aficionado of gems and classical music) has published her first novel in Swedish. Tungelblodet ("Blood of the Moon") is high fantasy set in a northern archipelago where wind-witches help fishermen to make good catches. Florence cites Tolkien, LeGuin and Ende as her favourite fantasists (and I concur).
The book can be had from Litenupplaga.se (SEK 173) and Adlibris (SEK 177). Order your copy today! I just ordered mine.
aardvarchaeology | September 29, 2008I was contacted on Yahoo Messenger today by a chatbot named Alexandra Buford. She greeted me in a foreign language, so I thought it polite to reply likewise.
Alexandra: yhneb martinrund
Martin: yhneb
Alexandra: Hi martinrund. it's Alexandra.
Martin: yhneb
Alexandra: u dont know me Kelly -- gave me your info, :)
Martin: yhneb
Alexandra: I just moved here from outta town cuz my boyfriend just dumped me (loser!)
Martin: yhneb
Alexandra: I'm lookin to have some fun this weekend, wanna join me? ;);)
Martin: yhneb
Alexandra: I have a new profile up tell me what u think
Martin: YHNEB
Alexandra: So…
aardvarchaeology | September 27, 2008
For decades, Stockholm has been the turf of photocopy artist Renate Bauer. She paints too, but her main mode of expression is hand-written prose-poetic screeds covering every square centimeter of the paper. These she photocopies and fixes with sticky tape to notice boards, bus stops and other convenient surfaces all around the Swedish capital, as a kind of analog local blog. I pocketed an entry dated Friday near the NW corner of the Humlegården park yesterday. Here are two excerpts, translated by yours truly.
"26/9 '08. You can really tell that the Minister of Culture in Sweden is a talent-…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2008Here's another whine about academic employment in Scandy archaeology.
Yesterday my PhD diploma turned five years old. This means that I have now, at age 36, ascended to heights where I am automatically considered over-qualified (or simply failed) for a forskarassistent entry-level assistant professor's position at Swedish universities. Having done research full-time for the past 14 years and published about 120 pieces of archaeological work, I allow myself to believe that I am not an entirely failed scholar. It's an over-populated labour market.
In the past five years I have applied for…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2008There is a discussion going on at Wikipedia regarding certain facets of the on-line encyclopedia's controversial notability policy. At heart, it's about where the line should be drawn between notable subjects (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and non-notable ones (Shitty Arnie, my wife's cat), articles about which should be deleted.
There are two main issues with WP:Notability that need clarification by the community.
Does every article need reliable third-party sources to prove it is notable, or can notability be inherited from another article?
To what extent can the General Notability Guideline be…
aardvarchaeology | September 25, 2008
Ammunition is extremely easy to find with a metal detector. Cartridges are large chunks of brass, which would make them obtrusive even if they were just spheres. But they are in fact sheet-metal cylinders closed at one end, which means that whatever orientation they have in the ground, there is usually two metal planes reflecting the detector's signal. They shrill like mad.
Above is a pic of two cartridges I picked up at Sättuna today. The left-hand one is the most common type in Swedish farmland, used mainly to hunt large mammals, but also I believe in standard-issue army rifles of the…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2008We finished digging today. Tomorrow I'll take a few more charcoal samples and return the tools to the units that lent them to me. The dig closes eight days earlier than planned.
A week and a half of digging has identified the following phases on site, none of which were known to us beforehand:
Scattered lithics, knapped and then abraded by wave action on a beach. Mainly quartz, some hälleflinta/leptite, a little flint, one chip off a ground greenstone axe. Also a complete greenstone adze that permits us to date the assemblage to the Middle Neolithic about 3000 cal BC, but more likely the…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2008The fiftieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Yann Klimentidis' Weblog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about Belqas, a town in the north-western corner of the Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt.
Belqas comprises in its jurisdictions the well known resort of Gamasa. Belqas is also known for its natural gas fields in the region of Abu Mady. Belqas remains a mainly agricultural region, although it supports some industrial activities such as sugar, rice and plastic factories. Belqas has a very old secondary school which is known to graduate good highly qualified students. This school…
aardvarchaeology | September 22, 2008Everybody with an interest in anthropology and archaeology -- it's time to contribute good new blog entries to next week's Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. You needn't have written them yourself: if you've found something worth reading recently, submit it to Yann at the Yann Klimentidis Weblog.
aardvarchaeology | September 22, 2008Early experiments with tinned food led to a number of lead-poisoning cases, particularly among people who had nothing but tins to eat. Recent work by Norwegian researchers Ulf Aasebø and Kjell Kjær has documented yet another case, the hitherto mysterious deaths of seventeen seal hunters on Svalbard in 1872. Says Kjær, "Inside the tinned food we found so much lead, that it hung like icicles inside the cans". This prompts me to re-run a blog entry from March 2006.
The hatter in Alice in Wonderland was mad as a March hare. Hares go nuts in the spring simply out of randiness. But hatters went…
aardvarchaeology | September 21, 2008
Sättuna excavation team member Peter Forrester is a big fan of Finnish folk metallers Finntroll. The other day he played me a funny untitled bonus track from the group's 2007 album Ur jordens djup ("Out of the depths of the Earth"). The song sits at the end of the album's closing track "Kvällning" after a quarter of an hour of silence. Here's a translation of the Swedish lyrics.
The troll was sitting on a rock and called out, "Hey!
Who has spilled my mead?"
But none of the animals in the woods or [...]
knew who had spilled the troll's drink.
The troll was sitting on a rock and called out…