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 | June 5, 2008The forty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Neuroanthropology. Archaeology and anthropology, and all related to the song "If You Should Try To Kiss Her" by Dressy Bessy.
The next open hosting slot is on 16 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must have "If You Should Try To Kiss Her" playing in your head, like me.
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2008After yesterday's paper session and civic reception in the church hall, I've had an amazing bus excursion today. The weather's been perfect, sunny and with little wind, and I've been shown great sites by some very knowledgeable people. And the landscape... Unbelievable.
Brough/broch is a Norse loan word around here, corresponding to Swedish borg. As in older Swedish, this word has two meanings in Orcadian place names: either a high headland or promontory on the coast, or ancient fortifications -- perhaps on a high headland. And today I've visited three such sites, the Broughs of Deerness,…
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2008I'm in the Bangladeshi restaurant Dil Se having a nice chicken achari. I tried to get Orkney mutton, but it was only available on advance order. Seems fitting to have a curry even in this storm-swept outpost of the British Empire. I started my dinner with a cold steak & gravy pie (from Hawthorn Bakery, Shotts, Scotland) on the cliffs above Scapa bay, whither I had taken a lovely sunny walk after the day's sessions. But there was still room for a curry.
My surname means "round twig". One of the conventioneers was of the opinion that this name fits me. I guess all the cycling and walking…
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2008Began the day with a solid English breakfast, then a walk to the conference venue, heard ten paper presentations, did one myself, had dinner with colleagues, walked up the hill west of Kirkwall, logged a geocache, walked back to B&B. Phew!
Of today's papers I found particularly interesting the one by con organiser James Barrett, on what caused the nearly three centuries of Viking raids. Eminently sensibly argued, for instance, that anything causing those events must be shown to have existed at or before the first raid. Also, anything that had existed long before the period started cannot…
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2008I'm in Kirkwall on the Orkney islands for a conference on maritime societies in the Viking and Medieval periods. It's a lovely sunny evening, which is apparently a rare and precious occurrence around these parts. The dialect is also something to experience: the waitress at the fish & chips shop I'm in took my order and then asked "Ta se' en?". On the third try I managed to understand that she wondered if I wanted to sit in, that is, to eat my fresh skate on the premises. I do.
And now I'm outside on the dock, smelling the sea, hearing a blackbird and the occasional seagull. Hardly any…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2008
In 2005, a team led by myself and Howard Williams excavated a 9th century boat inhumation burial at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Ãstergötland, Sweden. The finest finds we made in the grave were a collection of 23 amber gaming pieces. These are extremely rare, the previous Swedish set having surfaced in the 1870s when Hjalmar Stolpe dug at Birka.
Now the County Museum in Linköping has incorporated the Skamby gaming set into its new permanent exhibition! The official opening takes place on Tuesday evening 3 June, at 6 pm.
I am very proud that our finds will be seen by so many museum visitors.…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2008Me and Junior just got home from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. First we were shown the portrait collection and the main meeting room where a lot of Nobel prizes have been decided. Then, under the joint auspices of the Academy and the Swedish Skeptics Society, we heard an hour's lecture by one of the Society's long-time members: astronaut Christer Fuglesang.
It was a good talk in plain Swedish, ranging from abstruse physics to everyday practicalities of life in space. (If you lose something small inside a space station, just wait a day or two and then look for it near the intake of…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2008[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, Gotland, religion, feminism, ; arkeologi, Gotland, religion, feminism.]
Some time ago I received a gift from my aunt, bought at the County Museum of Gotland, a limestone island in the Baltic with an extremely rich archaeological record. The gift was a sponge-fabric dish rag, and I found its decoration slightly astonishing.
In the 5th through the 12th centuries, Gotland was home to a unique tradition of commemorative picture stones, comparable only to those of Pictland, with which they do not appear to have had any actual connection. The early…
aardvarchaeology | May 27, 2008Many people are afraid of cell phones and base stations because they emit radiation. These people tend to know very little about physics, and are generally unaware that daylight through a window on an overcast day is also radiation. Much careful research has turned up no significant health risks with cell phone use or proximity to base stations.
So your mobile handset is unlikely to cause you any harm. But a recent case in the district court of Falun, Sweden, demonstrates that cell phone alarmism is in fact dangerous.
An elderly gentleman who feared cell phone radiation greatly saw his grand-…
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2008
Today I joined my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell for a day of digging on an Early Mesolithic seal hunting station in the landlocked former archipelago of Tyresta. The Urskogsstigen 4 site is currently on a wooded hilltop at about 77 meters above sea level, and thus likely to date from about 8000 cal BC, shortly after deglaciation. It's not in the area denuded by the 1999 forest fore. What's really striking about this particular site (Mattias & Roger have found hundreds) is that it's very early, it has enormous amounts of quartz débitage and it has a tent-sized cleared area…
aardvarchaeology | May 25, 2008The Phoenix Lander survived touch-down on Mars, has deployed its solar panels successfully and is transmitting pictures! Yay!
Here's the news feed where this baby's discoveries will be announced over the coming months.
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2008
Bengt Nordqvist has published a preliminary account in Offa of his amazing finds from the Finnestorp war booty site. Check it out (in German)! I hope to contribute to the Finnestorp project in some way or another in the future. For more about war booty finds, se an earlier post of mine.
Indirectly, Finnestorp has had a decisive influence on my own work for the past five years. Bengt has long been working at the site with the Gothenburg metal detectorists. One day in the early 00s when I was a grad student with an office at the Museum of National Antiquities, Tim Olsson came along to check…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2008
Ulf Bodin and his team at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm have built a really, really sweet database and search interface for Hjalmar Stolpe's Birka graves. Between 1871 and 1895, Stolpe dug about 1100 graves in the cemeteries surrounding the Viking Period town of Birka on an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. His painstaking fieldwork and documentation ensured that the Birka record will always be one of the standard databases for Viking studies. And now it's all on-line and searchable! A massively useful research tool.
This morning I attended Anna Linderholm's viva/…
aardvarchaeology | May 22, 2008
I've posted a fine example of Ansiktsburk song lyrics before: listen to a song in a language you don't understand, and try to imagine that it is actually sung in your own language though with a funny accent. Then write down whatever words you can half make out. Thus the Swedish drinking song "Helan går" becomes "Hell and gore, shun hope Father Alan, lay!".
Now Paddy K directs my attention to a new permutation of this idea. Here's a piece of choral music sung in English in such a way that the real lyrics are difficult to make out -- and the ansiktsburk poet has set new English words to it.…
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2008Akusai of Action Skeptics has done something pretty ostentatious and very cool: he's written the latest Skeptics' Circle blog carnival entirely as a collection of dirty limericks!
"An Irishman living with Swedes
Speaks about bodily needs
Eat and drink well
So at sex you'll excel
But vitamins? Useless as weeds"
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2008The forty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about Nswazwi. It's a village in the Central District of Botswana, located close to the border with Zimbabwe. The village has primary and secondary schools and a clinic. The population was 1,741 in the 2001 census.
The next open hosting slot is on 16 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must not have any trouble pronouncing "Nswazwi", just like I haven't.
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2008
My talented on-line buddy, Birmingham-based design student Tatyana Mircheva, has a new photo blog where she puts up some really interesting stuff. This series is a feminist commentary on the superficiality and narcissism of the beauty industry. The young woman worships her own reflection in the mirror, turning gradually into a Playboy Bunny. It's the same theme as in Mircheva's bike crash photo: young women aestheticising themselves to death, becoming pretty corpses.
[More blog entries about art, photography; konst, fotografi.]
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2008Local newspaper Skånskan recently published a highly credulous account of amateur archaeologist Bob Lind's outlandish interpretations of an Early Iron Age cemetery in Ravlunda parish. I wrote them to complain, and staff writer Karsten Bringmark asked me for a statement. Which made it onto the paper's web site, and possibly into print as well?
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2008
Yesterday me and my buddy Per Vikstrand visited the third site in our little exploration program for fields with highly suggestive names on 18th century maps. We've already covered the Field of St. Olaf and the Hall of Odin. This time we went to the Field of Ullr near Gävle, an hour and a half's drive from Uppsala along the new shiny E4 motorway. (On the way we zipped across sites such as Sommaränge skog, excavated for the roadworks and previously covered in my blogging.)
Ullr is one of the old gods that were semi-forgotten in Snorri's day, and so doesn't figure prominently in extant…
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2008
With its extremely late urbanisation, Sweden doesn't have much of an archaeological record compared to Italy or China or Peru. But we keep really good track of the stuff we have: active organised surveying for ancient monuments has been going on for over 70 years, aided by the fact that Sweden has no trespassing laws and affords land owners no ownership to archaeological remains.
Sweden's National Heritage Board has been placing its sites and monuments register on-line gradually over a period of years. At first, it was only accessible to professionals, offering a crappy map and working only…