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 | May 17, 2008Getting up in the small hours on Thursday morning paid off: I'm on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe #147!
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2008I'm frustrated about Wikipedia. Cultists are slowly and surely readjusting the Falun Gong article to their own rosy and "oh-how-persecuted-we-are" perspective. The other day I watched some anonymous loon create a new user account for the single purpose of deleting an article about someone he doesn't like -- and he's succeeding. And Alun Salt is retiring from Wikipedia to redirect his efforts to the forthcoming Google Knol, whose name reminds me of the Swedish word for "fuck". Check out Alun's farewell speech!
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2008I'm at my son's end-of-term violin concert. Wonder if I can blog from the new smartphone w/o using email and a human intermediary?
[Yay, I could! The Samsung for some reason comes with both IE and Opera preinstalled. Though Sb's Moveable Type installation still doesn't work with IE under Windows Mobile 6.0, it does work with Opera.]
aardvarchaeology | May 16, 2008Tim of Remote Central has kindly stepped in to host the upcoming 41st instalment of the Four Stone Hearth anthro & archaeo blogging carnival. Send links to good recent anthroblogging to him! It needn't be your own stuff: submit all the goodies you've read lately.
The next open hosting slot is on 2 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | May 16, 2008After some deliberation, I bought a Samsung SGH-i780 smartphone to replace my Qtek 9100. It has served me well for 2 1/4 years, but I felt it was time, and I've put it up for sale. I've only had the Samsung for two days, but I'm very happy with it so far.
Improvements over the Qtek:
GPS navigator
3G network support offering much better internet bandwidth
Mousepad
More flash memory for mp3s
Thinner, thus fitting better in my pocket
Less heavy
Comes with two web browsers preinstalled, making more web sites accessible
The only drawbacks I've noticed so far is the Samsung's much smaller keyboard…
aardvarchaeology | May 14, 2008
Yesterday I did 5.5 more man-hours of metal detecting at the "Hall of Odin" site in Västmanland with Per Vikstrand. No prehistoric finds: just a piece of a 15/16/17th century brass cooking pot.
Bob Lind's craziness is once more repeated uncritically by a local Scanian newspaper.
I had a nice chat with the panel of the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe podcast this morning. At 9 pm EST, i.e. 3 am local time. Which was not a very good idea, seeing as my wife was trying to sleep in the next room. But I think the show will be good. Hear Rebecca Watson say "Suckle the teat of the Mother Goddess"!…
aardvarchaeology | May 13, 2008My home municipality of Nacka is governed by a coalition of right-wing parties. (This, in Sweden, means that our local politics are somewhat to the left [!] of the US Democratic Party.) Aard regular Lennart Nilsson is the chairman of the Nacka section of the Liberal Party, Folkpartiet. I just received a fresh copy of the local newspaper, Nacka Värmdö Posten, whose main front-page headline reads "Folkpartiet politician: 'The Christian Democrats have Medieval moral views'". Interestingly, this is one of the governing coalition's members criticising another. And who is the Christian-bashing…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2008
Logged my 600th geocache this bright May morning, took a picture of a treehouse ruin near the cache, then drove home listening to the Nashville Pussy. After lunch, me and the Rundkvist ladies took part in the annual street cleaning & planting day. I headed the cleaning of two sandboxes, cleared shrubbery that was engulfing one of the boxes and collected trash in the parking lot and front door bays. Unlike Blaine Cartwright, I am not lazy.
Lazy White Boy
By Blaine Cartwright of the Nashville Pussy
Got rhythm, just too cool to show it
Got a future, can't wait to blow it
Sit around getting…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2008
My kid's spacy English writing assignment makes me so proud! He's nine, he's only been once for a few days to an Anglophone country, and we rarely speak English at home. Yet he seems to have picked the language up from on-line gaming, and he's long been able to read e.g. the Harry Potter books in English. With his permission, here are his ideas about space colonies.
I think that in the future those who want to will be able to move onto another planet, or into a space station. People will breathe using space suits, and at home they will have air inside their houses. They will get food by…
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2008
Members of the Manx Detectorists Society have found fragments of the hilt of a Viking Period display sword. It's cast in bronze with rich Borre Style decoration (c. AD 850-1000) and silver wire frills. Though settled by the Norsemen from about AD 800 onward, the island has not previously produced very many any of their swords.
Via BBC, 24HourMuseum and Manx National Heritage. Thanks to Greenman Tim of Walking the Berkshires and Dear Reader Eleanora for the tipoff.
[More blog entries about archaeology, vikings, vikingperiod, swords, isleofman; arkeologi, vikingar, vikingatiden, svärd.]
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2008
Had a beautiful day in the field with Per Vikstrand today. He has a new metal detector, a C-scope 1220R, and it seemed to work very well. Not that the stuff we found was terribly interesting: four man-hours in the Field of St. Olaf garnered us only a flint chip and a piece of slag apart from the perennial clay pipe stems and aluminium bottle tops.
4½ man-hours on a promising site near Sala got us only the above piece of an openwork strap mount. It does look like 3rd/4th/5th century to me, though. (As reconstructed, it would have measured 42 by 35 mm.) Our Sala site has great place names:…
aardvarchaeology | May 7, 2008
The fortieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology, and all relating to the Plzen Plaza!
The Plzen Plaza is a new large (20,000 square meters) shopping mall and entertainment center in PlzeÅ, Czech Republic. The facility built by Plaza Centers was opened on December 5, 2007, on the former land of Ex PlzeÅ, gastronomical exhibitions located very near the center of the city, more precisely 250 meters from the central Square of the Republic.
The next open hosting slot is on 18 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
aardvarchaeology | May 6, 2008
Tobias Bondesson treats us to the tale of a recent find that blew his mind.
Oh, mercy mercenary me!
Being a detectorist is damn hard work! I get out of bed at the crack of dawn on my day off from work to perform the ritual of "sweep, beep, dig deep" for as many hours as I can before I really, really, have to head back home, lest I want my detecting privileges revoked by a higher power (i.e. girlfriend). And what do I have to show for it? A bum knee, sore shoulders and a mild case of tinnitus are some of my more prominent achievements. On the other hand, metal detecting is the best hobby ever…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2008More good and witty UK rapping, this time a year-old hit from Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip.
Thanks to Paddy K for the tip-off.
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2008For readers with an interest in Scandy archaeology and academic gossip, here and here are two brand new evaluation reports (in Scandy) on the applicants to an assistant professor job (forskarassistent) in Stockholm. According to the evaluation verdict, the job is likely to be given either to a 43-y-o theoretician or a 39-y-o Mayanist. Both are older than me and far more in tune than myself with the ideals of the post-processual generation of scholars to which the evaluators belong.
As for myself, the evaluators gave me a pretty low grade. Both correctly describe me as strongly empiricist,…
aardvarchaeology | May 3, 2008
I wrote my 1990 high-school graduation paper about the search for a trans-plutonian planet. (That's where I got hoodwinked by Zecharia Sitchin.) In its conclusion, I suggested that the search for such close-yet-dim objects could be automated with computer-controlled telescopes and automated image processing.
This is actually what happened. Here's an informative new video clip by my brother in skeptical blogging, Jeff the Blue Collar Scientist, describing work at the privately owned Junk Bond Observatory in Arizona, where asteroids and comets are being sought. Yep, 18 years down the road, in…
aardvarchaeology | May 2, 2008
Now and then I like to play board games: mostly Blokus, Drakborgen (a.k.a. Dungeonquest), Scrabble and Roborally. The latter is an award-winning 1994 game where each player programs a robot to move through a treacherous obstacle course and tag a series of numbered flags. More often than not, your robot ends up a smoking laser-riddled wreck or disappears down a bottomless hole.
On the box, Roborally is recommended from age 12 up. I am proud to be able to tell you that the game works just fine with (bright, geeky) 9-year-olds as well. Yesterday after lunch I took Junior and his pal geocaching…
aardvarchaeology | May 1, 2008
Monastic archaeology is enjoying a boom right now in Sweden. Elisabet Regner has written up and analysed Frödin's many years of fieldwork at Alvastra (founded in 1143), Lars ErsgÃ¥rd & Marie Holmström have published the results of their 90s project around that same monastery, Marie Ohlsén is doing fieldwork at Krokek (founded in the 1430s), Gunhild Eriksdotter has reevaluated Dalby (founded before 1066), Maria Vretemark & Tony Axelsson are finding amazing things at Varnhem (founded c. 1150) and Göran Tagesson is digging at Vretakloster (founded c. 1110 and mentioned here before).…
aardvarchaeology | April 30, 2008
Raine Borg has an amazing web site about locks and keys through history. And it so happens that he's made reconstruction drawings of how keys identical to the one me and Per Vikstrand found in Torstuna recently were used. It's not a padlock key: it's most likely for a lock mounted permanently inside the lid of a chest or a door.
Lena Thunmark-Nylén's Die Wikingerzeit Gotlands informs me that the key type dates from the 11th and 12th centuries. Thus, alas, a bit too late to tell us much about pagan activities in the Field of Thor.
Thanks to Raine for permission to reproduce his drawings and…
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2008From UK rapper Elemental, an extremely witty song about tea with a funny video!
Via Paddy K and Brass Goggles.