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 | April 29, 2008I'm messing around with Skype and I find it's working very well indeed. (Skype is in fact the only part of my linux installation that can interact with my Logitech USB headset.) So, Dear Reader, feel free to give a shout to mrundkvist!
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2008Commenters on yesterday's entry broached the subject of being the descendant of European royalty. I'd say everybody alive today with even a vaguely europid complexion is such a royal scion.
Do the math as you count generations into the past. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on through the centuries. Soon you reach a point where the number of ancestors in a given generation is larger than the population of the Earth at the time. (This is possible because as you move back, a single individual may occupy a large number of slots on…
aardvarchaeology | April 28, 2008In the mid-to-late 19th century, just as Scandy (and thus, it's fair to say, world) archaeology was making its first big breakthroughs, a lot of furnished 11th century female burials unexpectedly turned up in the churchyards of Gotland. The chain of events that led to this windfall of new data is convoluted and, in my opinion, quite fascinating.
Gotland is a large limestone island in the Baltic and a province of Sweden. Its first organised Christian congregations came together in the early 11th century, and they had some rather unusual burial customs. They had already practiced inhumation as…
aardvarchaeology | April 25, 2008I just installed Hardy, the brand new version of Ubuntu Linux, on the household's two Dell PCs. They're a Dimension 4550 mini-tower and an Inspiron 6000 laptop, and I'm happy to say that everything's running fine so far. (Almost.) The release is so new that Google hasn't even had time to update their toolbar for the new version of Firefox.
The irritating wake-up bug in Gutsy has been taken care of. Used to be, every time my laptop went into suspension or hibernation mode, it would have to wake up, immediately and spontaneously go back to sleep and wake up a second time before I could resume…
aardvarchaeology | April 25, 2008
A number of prominent people in science and science fiction have had samples of their body tissues launched into space after they died. Thus Gene Roddenberry, thus Timothy Leary, thus Clyde Tombaugh, to name only three. Now, I've come up with a similar honour for particle physicists.
Currently, it appears that the matter being shot into particle accelerators -- protons taken from hydrogen nuclei, lead ions -- is just anonymous off-the-shelf stuff from chemical supply firms. This is boring. Instead, all the big old guys and gals in high energy physics should contribute tissue samples, from…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2008The thirty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. Archaeology and anthropology in honour of Maximiliano Gómez. He was the leader of the Maoist Movimiento Popular Dominicano (MPD), a militant organization opposed to the JoaquÃn Balaguer government and to U.S. presence in the Dominican Republic. Commended by some, repudiated by others, the controversial figure of Maximiliano Gomez is part of the political heritage of the Dominican Republic.
The next open hosting slot is on 18 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2008
The former Cistercian abbey of Alvastra in 1639.
My brother in arms against pomo nonsense, human/cultural geographer Clas Tollin, has put half the manuscript of his forthcoming book on-line beforehand (fully illustrated, in Swedish). The title is StorgÃ¥rdar, egenkyrkor och sockenbildning i Omberg-TÃ¥kernomrÃ¥det under äldre medeltid, "Manorial farms, private churches and the genesis of parishes in the Omberg-TÃ¥kern area in the Early Middle Ages". (These are the Swedish Early Middle Ages, dating from about AD 1100 to 1250.) Hugely useful to me as I'm doing fieldwork and writing about the…
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2008There was a time, around the age of twenty, when I saw some pretty weird movies. First I lived a short bike ride from the Swedish Film Institute, where I caught Kenneth Anger and Luis Buñuel (neither of whom I liked much -- I walked out on Anger's shorts). Then I moved to a place with a TV set just as Swedish commercial television took off. The stations didn't have much money yet and would broadcast the weirdest, cheapest feature films on weekend afternoons. Two stuck in my mind: one a low-budget Italian Conan rip-off whose title eludes me, the other an American picture from 1989 named…
aardvarchaeology | April 21, 2008Restrictions on the use of metal detectors vary from country to country. In England, they are too lax. In Sweden, they are too strict. In Denmark, they are pretty much just right. As I've written before, I think everybody would stand to gain if the Swedish restrictions were eased. My idea is that we should treat metal detectors as hunting weapons: anybody who can demonstrate sufficient knowledge of rules and best practice should be licenced by the county authorities to use the instrument, and then allowed to continue doing so until they prove unfit. (Currently, all amateurs are considered…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2008
Certain place names over most of agricultural Scandinavia suggest that sacred fields were once prominent features of the landscape there. This was in the 1st Millennium AD, the period I work with. We have places named Field of Thor, Field of Freyr, Field of Frigga, or just Field, and all tend to be central locations in their districts, often lending their names to Medieval Christian parishes after the end of the pagan cult. Place-name scholars are uncertain about exactly what these sacred fields were used for, but it seems likely that they were the sites of seasonal rituals having to do with…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 2008
I'm spending tomorrow in a cultic field with Per Vikstrand and a metal detector. So I reckon it were best if we all had a look at the druggiest bit in all of Monty Python first.
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2008
Here's a funny little guy from our site in Kaga. It's a crumpled-up disc-brooch, about 75% complete, original diameter 71 mm, copper-alloy pin extant and folded into the brooch, pin-catch extant on back, apparently soldered on.
On the surface of the brooch are a central large boss with mock-filigree, surrounded by five identical ones, and outside those five are another five smaller bosses. All in all eleven bosses. The surface of the brooch is divided into petal-like fields by lines of tiny bumps. All decoration is visible on the back side too: most of the piece is just 0.6 mm thick.
I…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2008The audio connector on my Qtek 9100 smartphone (handheld computer cum cellphone) has crapped out for the second time in two years. The warranty's lapsed, and repairing the thing would cost a third of what an equivalent machine of a current model would set me back. My 9100's battery life is flagging, it's a 2005 design and it has a number of irritating design glitches. So I'm in the market for a new handheld.
When I asked my readers two years ago to recommend me a machine, I didn't get a single answer. You guys are a wee bit more numerous these days, so I'm thinking maybe you might have an…
aardvarchaeology | April 14, 2008On Wednesday 2 April, British fringe researcher Rupert Sheldrake was stabbed in the leg by a man showing symptoms of severe mental illness. The wound was serious but not fatal. The attacker struck shortly after Sheldrake had called a break in his presentation to the 10th International Conference on Science and Consciousness in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In my opinion, the paranormal ideas for which Sheldrake is known are simply nuts. But I don't think he would be likely to attack anybody with a knife, and he certainly doesn't deserve such treatment himself. Get well soon, Dr. Sheldrake! I much…
aardvarchaeology | April 13, 2008Tobias Bondesson has kindly sent me photographs of several interesting finds, taken during our recent fieldwork with the heavy dudes of the Gothenburg Historical Society. With his permission, I've inserted them into the relevant blog entries:
Fieldwork in Hov and Vretakloster
Fieldwork in Tingstad and Ãstra Husby
Fieldwork in Kimstad and Kaga
Tobias has also opened my eyes to Nordisk Detektorforum, an on-line discussion forum and image database for (mainly Danish) detectorists. These guys are responsible, keen and hugely knowledgeable. One user, for instance, identified a coin we found as…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2008
The thirty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Archaeology and anthropology, and all seen in relation to the the Rice Track/Soccer Stadium in Houston, Texas.
The next open hosting slot is on 4 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must be a trustee of the Rice Track/Soccer Stadium, like me.
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2008Those questionable characters in productive Swedish goth band Kurtz have set up an RSS feed direct from their rehearsal room to your desktop. Coming up next: a song about a dorm mate of singer Pocke who was once in 1976 hung-over and wondered where the cereal bowls were.
[More blog entries about music, rock, gothic, Sweden; musik, depprock, rock, goth, Uppsala.]
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2008A week ago I complained that I couldn't find any good podcasts, and you guys responded with a wealth of recommendations. More to my surprise, a number of irate fans of the popular Nobody Likes Onions podcast showed up. They left a bunch of nasty comments to the effect that I am a stuck-up faggot who needs hair implants etc. This is kind of funny since what I had said in a possibly ironic way was that I don't like the top-10 podcasts, but that this was only to be expected since most people are morons and so anything with mass appeal is unlikely to be any good. I gotta say that the NLO…
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2008
Frag of a brooch decorated with embossed silver foil. 5th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
Our site in Kimstad parish looked even better than I'd thought. This was one of many cases where I've come swooping in to sites that I've never visited before and directed metal detecting. In Kimstad, I had been attracted by Ãstergötland's only (probable) Viking Period wetland weapon sacrifice, a fine sword found during drainage work. But I didn't want more swords. They're too expensive to conserve, and my project is about the settlements of people who could afford to sacrifice that sort of thing…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2008
Frag of a lion-shaped badge with a rivet used to fix it to some surface. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
Another day of fruitful fieldwork, with friendly landowners and pretty good weather. We started out with 20 man-hours in the fields around a fortified hilltop settlement in Tingstad parish. The hillfort was trial-trenched in 1903, yielding the richest finds known to date from a 3rd and 4th century settlement in Ãstergötland. I was hoping that we might run into something interesting of 5th century date. No such luck: our oldest datable find all day was a piece of a 9th century copper-alloy…