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 | September 20, 2008I take a childish pleasure from the fact that Shanghai International Airport is named Poo Dong -- snigger, snigger. Now, reading about tea, I find my scatological spot tickled further by the Poobong Tea Company in Calcutta. Poo bong. Stick that in yer pipe and smoke it! Makes me want to strike the gong in Pugong Monastery, Tibet.
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2008
My son just played me a song he can't get out of his head, "Still Alive". It's the closing-credits music of the 2007 computer game Portal, sung by a heavily vocoded Ellen McLain. As it turns out, the song was written by science fiction pop songster Jonathan Coulton, whose excellent love songs about robots and zombies I have heard on the Escape Pod podcast. And here's Coulton himself performing "Still Alive".
aardvarchaeology | September 19, 2008My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be to mobilise all this funding and personnel and find nothing at all. We're certainly not there.
The best possible result would be to find all the cool things the metal detector finds had led me to hope for, viz the foundations of a 6th century aristocratic manor. We're not there either.
The second best result would be to find other cool things than the ones I had expected, say, something with quite…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2008
We finished machining away the ploughsoil today, and I reckon we've uncovered about 800 square meters. I have a permit for 1200 sqm, but I stopped here. The landowner doesn't want us to expand in the most interesting direction where we have more cool metal-detector finds. And the directions that remain to us are out of the metal-finds swarm and downhill.
Sunken features everywhere, and the team has been busy cleaning away remnants of the ploughsoil, finding the edges of features, sectioning many. None with any finds worth writing home about though. Pete/Fozz did find a seltzer bottle sherd:…
aardvarchaeology | September 16, 2008Adele and Laura joined us last night, and so we were thirteen people digging at Sättuna today plus Niklas the excavator virtuoso. We continued to strip away ploughsoil, uncovering lots and lots of dark splotches underneath, and the team sectioned and sieved about 25 such sunken features visible in the surface of the natural subsoil. Most are functionally indeterminate, some are hearths, one or two are postholes.
Very few finds in the features, a little bone and fired clay. One did give a fair number of find types including a piece of modern window glass, and as the demarcation between its…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2008
I've just sat down in a comfy chair on the top floor of our luxurious excavation headquarters at Tolefors. Phew! I am very happy after a first day of excavations at Sättuna where every little bit has fallen into place as planned. (Hope I don't hit a frickin' elk when I go to pick up stragglers an hour from now. [I didn't.])
After an uneventful two-hour drive this morning I came to Linköping and met up with my buddy and co-manager Petter. We loaded the County Museum's digging gear into his car, picked up our first British recruit Karen and drove to the site, where landowner Christer greeted…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2008
With kudos to Mattias who sent me the link, here are Stephen Lynch & Mark Teich performing a fine song about being a 14-y-o D&D-playing young man. To those of our readers who currently fit that description, let me say that just a few years from now you will no longer have the least interest in sneering high-school jock girls. Instead you will attract the intimate affections of bright college freshwomen, some of whom will demand to do some pretty wild things with you, including but not limited to the playing of D&D.
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2008
For the past ten years, I've lived with my family in rented apartments in a 1970s housing estate that covers the erstwhile infields of the poor tenant farm of Fisksätra. Yesterday, my wife and I signed a contract to buy a 114 sqm house on one of the surrounding hills, Båthöjden, "Boat Hill"!
We need another bedroom for our 10-y-o, and we calculate that it won't be all that much more expensive to pay a mortgage on the house than it would be to rent a four-roomer instead of our current three-roomer. The main proponents of buying a house have been my dad and my wife. My conditions were that…
aardvarchaeology | September 12, 2008The Journal of the North Atlantic is a new on-line archaeology and environmental-history journal published in Maine. You can apply for a login and read it for free until the end of the year. So far, they have three papers up, and they offer some really cool stuff. One is an apparently nature-deterministic GIS study of Medieval property demarcation in the Reykholt area of Iceland where Snorri Sturluson lived. Another one explores the ethno-political situation in Medieval Greenland, where two different eskimo cultures coexisted with Norse settlers.
My favourite is an unbelievably exotic paper…
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2008The forty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology, and all intended to recreate the lost 1921 short drama film The Great Day!
Cast
Arthur Bourchier - Sir John Borstwick
Mary Palfrey - Lady Borstwick
Marjorie Hume - Clara Borstwick
Bertram Burleigh - Frank Beresford
Adeline Hayden Coffin - Mrs. Beresford (as Mrs. Hayden Coffin)
Percy Standing - Paul Nikola
Meggie Albanesi - Lillian Leeson
Geoffrey Kerr - Dave Leeson
Lewis Dayton - Lord Medway
Mrs. L. Thomas - Lord Medway's Mother
L.C. Carelli - Semki
Submissions for the next carnival…
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2008I recently read this year's Hugo-winning novel, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. (Getting it sent to my local branch library from Malmö cost me one euro!) It's a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternative present where Israel was squashed by irate Arab neighbours in 1948 and much of the world's surviving Jewry ended up in a small reservation in south-west Alaska. An exciting read, and very lyrically written. Full of badass Hasidic gangstas.
One detail in the story was so silly that I had to look it up. And whaddya know -- eruvin are real.
There are a lot of things…
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 200820 years ago, radiocarbon dating was transformed by the widespread adoption of AMS analysis, accelerator mass spectroscopy. Willard Libby's original scintillation-counting method demanded large sample sizes and a lot of time per sample. The sample size meant that many interesting things couldn't be dated at all, and that once you had gotten a large enough chunk of organic material together, chances were that it would be heavily contaminated with later stuff. The time demands meant that prices were high.
Radiocarbon technology continues to advance. A few years back, I learned that a method had…
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2008We interrupt this broadcast to explain something to everybody who has ever used the expression "a homo sapien". Sapiens is not a plural. It is an adjective ending in an S, just like erectus, afarensis and neanderthalensis. (It means "wise".) You would never say "a homo erectu", right? Don't try to learn Latin from Del tha Funkee Homosapien.
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2008
The 1640 coin I found the other day came to light at an opportune moment. For some time, my wife and I had planned a trip to Falun for the weekend just passed, and that's where the coin is from.
The great copper mine of Falun was an important part of Sweden's economic backbone during the country's century as a major player on the European scene 1611-1718. The mine's origins are lost in prehistory, but paleobotany suggests that some small-scale ore extraction took place already in the 8th century, and the written record starts in the 13th century. Falun boomed in the 16th and 17th century,…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2008
To compensate for our inadequacies, us boy archaeologists like to search for large phallic objects and measure them. The most extreme case I've heard of was a couple of colleagues who went looking for the crash site of a mismanoeuvred 14-meter V2 rocket. In my case it's the 16th-century Djurhamn sword. All 93 centimetres of it.
I checked it out yesterday, taking a lot of measurements (of course including length and diameter), taking pix. My report on this summer's digging at Djurhamn is nearly finished now, and I plan to write a paper on the past two years' fieldwork for some annual…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2008Swedish has a number of subtleties designed to keep furriners from learning the language of glory and heroes™. A famous one is the genders of our nouns, where almost every one is either of our two neutral genders -- apparently haphazardly selected. Another one is certain non-trivial uses of the definite article suffix: you can't say "I'm looking for that record by Roy Zimmerman, you know", you have to say "I'm looking for that record-the by Roy Zimmerman, you know".
A particularly good thing we've got going is that we don't have any verb corresponding to "to put". Instead, everything you…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2008For historical reasons having nothing to do with engineering or rationality, Swedish nuclear power plants dump a lot of warm cooling water into the sea. In a revealing blog entry, Paddy K offers an estimate of just how much energy that cooling water contains.
It's one third of the energy produced in the country.
I suddenly don't feel very motivated to keep my morning showers brief.
[More blog entries about environment, powerproduction, energy, nuclearpower, Sweden; miljö, energi, kärnkraft, energiproduktion.]
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2008
Yesterday I did two hours of metal-detecting at a manor in Boo parish whose documentary evidence starts in the 13th century. Ancient monuments in the vicinity take it on down at least to the 10th. There are some nice 16th century small finds from the manor grounds, and my visit was intended to follow up on them. Lo & behold: I picked up one of Queen Christina's quarter öre copper coins from 1640. They are generally the oldest coins you'll find at any site, as in their day they were the largest issue yet in the history of Sweden: both as to the number of coins struck and as to the…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2008A memory.
A lot of Swedish middle-class kids get sent to confirmation camp when they're 14. It's basically a crash course in Christianity and ends with first communion. My brother went through his course and then refused the wafer & wine. This actually endeared him to the priest, as it showed him to have taken the issue seriously.
But I went through with it all. I was basically agnostic at the time, but one of the camp counselors imparted a piece of non-standard theology that tipped the scales for me. His name was Roland, and he said "It's the world's best deal. Accept communion and get…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2008Lately I've been listening to the following albums:
Apples in Stereo -- New Magnetic Wonder (2007)
Delays -- Faded Seaside Glamour (2004)
Funkadelic -- Funkadelic (1970)
MGMT -- Oracular Spectacular (2007)
Motorpsycho -- Let Them Eat Cake (2000)
Sleep -- Jerusalem (1999)
And podcasts:
Digital Planet
Escape Pod
Podcastle
Planetary Radio
Skeptic's Guide to the Universe
Skepticality
All highly recommended! Given that I like this stuff, do you have any suggestions for more ear-bud fodder, Dear Reader?
[More blog entries about music, podcasting; musik, podcasting.]