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 9, 2008
Polyhedrical weight. 9/10th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
(Martin here, posting from the hostel of Norsholm on the Göta canal, using my handheld and the cell phone network. To get the post on-line, my dear scibling Janet has kindly agreed to act as go-between.)
Coin struck for Heinrich II, King of Germany. Mainz 1002-1014. Dbg 785. Photograph Tobias Bondesson.
This is the third April in as many years that I'm reporting from a week of fieldwork in Ãstergötland with my metal detector buddies. I intend this to be the final expedition before I complete my book about late-1st…
aardvarchaeology | April 8, 2008New genomic research by Matthias Obst of the Department of Zoology at the University of Gothenburg, due to be published in Nature on 10 April, shows that the oldest extant phylum among Earth's animals is the ctenophores (Sw. kammaneter), not, as previously assumed, the sponges.
Via Dagens Nyheter.
[More blog entries about zoology, ctenophores, evolution; zoologi, kammaneter, evolution.]
aardvarchaeology | April 8, 2008Here's something cool. Norway spruce trees sprout from subterranean root systems, and though the actual trees come and go, the roots are extremely long-lived. In this they're actually a lot like mushrooms.
New research by Leif Kullman at the University of UmeÃ¥ is just being reported on by the media. His team has studied spruce trees on the treeline of Mount Härjehogna in Dalecarlia, central Sweden, and found no standing trees older than 600 years when wood samples were dated. But below ground, the living roots of three trees gave radiocarbon dates at 5,000, 6,000 and 8,000 years BP! The…
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2008
Last night's Hayseed Dixie gig rocked. This is the bluegrass band playing metal songs that I blogged about recently. Me and Paddy K went there after checking out some stand-up comedy with the ladies. We had been given the wrong starting hour, so we arrived at the Debaser Slussen club in the middle of the fourth song. But I believe John Wheeler and the others played for about an hour and a half. Afterwards they scattered into the crowd and chatted with everybody.
I spent the entire gig with a big foolish smile on my face. They placed so fast and so skilfully with a constant feeling of…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2008The Austrian city of Salzburg has been hit by a measles outbreak among private-school children. Measles are no laughing matter, and thankfully outbreaks like these are rare in the West these days thanks to vaccination. So it comes as no surprise that the school in question is the Rudolf-Steiner-Schule in Mayrwies, a Waldorf school run by anthroposophists. Anthroposophy is an old New Age movement based upon the supernatural visions of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Its current altie medical practices include a strong antivaccination ideology.
Said Steiner in the fifth lecture of his 1910 series…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2008[More blog entries about podcasting; podcasting, webbradio.]
I've been laid low all day with a cold. To entertain myself while unable to read, I've listened to podcasts, and when I ran out of shows I subscribe to I started checking out Podcast Alley's top-10. Unfortunately, most people being morons after all, the top-10 aren't any good. Take it from me: you needn't really bother with Keith and the Girl, Red Bar Radio or Nobody Likes Onions.
So, Dear Reader, you clearly aren't a moron: in aggregate, Aard's readers should be a much better authority than the unwashed masses when it comes to…
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2008Reading some US job ads I came across the terms "early career", "mid career" and "late career" applied to academics. As some of you may remember, I decided about this time last year that I had become officially middle-aged (defined as "closer to 50 than 20"). Now it's struck me that I am also mid-career.
Think about it. I've been doing archaeology for a living since I was 20. Standard retirement age is 65 in Sweden. (This is likely to change as medicine improves and the demography morphs.) Currently, society expects me to have a 45-year career, all in all. And I've entered the middle third of…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2008Viking Period Scandinavians had a funny custom where they would bury silver hoards and not dig them out again. On Gotland, the hoards are so common that the local paper has been known to note tersely that "this year's hoard has been found". But not all Swedish provinces are similarly endowed. My native area around Lake Mälaren has far fewer hoards.
Most silver hoards are found by farmers when they till their fields. Once in a very long while, archaeologists get lucky and find a hoard in situ. Of course, they tend to find the commonest kind of hoard, i.e., pretty small ones. This happened at…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2008I'm trainblogging again, somewhere between Norrköping and Nyköping, and the sun is shining. I am pretty pleased with things, not least with how my project about elite sites in Ãstergötland is working out.
Yesterday I received the Kaga parish landowner's permission to excavate in his field after the harvest, that is, in mid- and late September. This is where a gold-foil figure die turned up a year ago.
Then I received information that the Royal Academy of Sciences has given me the largest grant so far in my career, meaning that I wouldn't have to worry about my livelihood before Christmas…
aardvarchaeology | April 1, 2008Over the past few days I've had an exchange with a paper-mag editor that highlighted the extent to which blogging has eroded my respect for printed media.
I was asked by a print mag to write 400 words about archaeology, and they were in a big hurry. I wrote a quick piece (blog-entry length composition sort of comes naturally to me) and submitted it. The editor then began to fuck around with my text. He did things to it that I didn't like at all, and when I reinstated a few key bits of my original wordings he politely asked me to be more cooperative. "I know it's frustrating for a scientist to…
aardvarchaeology | March 31, 2008For the past two years I've been packing a soap-sized handheld computer named the Qtek 9100. It's a version of a design named the HTC Wizard, sporting a slide-out qwerty keyboard and running Windows Mobile. The machine's been good to me, though is has a few annoying quirks & glitches, and I would never go back to carrying anything with lesser capabilities.
As I am phasing out Windows XP for Ubuntu Linux on my machines, one of the 9100's shortcomings has become an acute problem. It will only let you transfer files by cable using a glitchy piece of Microsoftware named ActiveSync, and this…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2008
It's a running joke around Sb that the single most popular blog entry on the whole site is one where a scibling calls Britney Spears the High Priestess of something not very flattering. In fact, as Spears's latest hit demonstrates, she is the High Priestess of Swedish dance pop.
Look at her run of chart toppers.
1998. "...Baby One More Time". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
1999. "(You Drive Me) Crazy". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
1999. "Born to Make You Happy". Written & produced by Swedes, recorded in Stockholm.
2000. "Oops!...I…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2008
Local newspaper Ystads Allehanda reports on new fieldwork in Ravlunda by amateur archaeologist Bob G Lind and retired geology professor Nils-Axel Mörner. The last time the two enthusiastic gentlemen interfered with the Iron Age cemetery in question, they were reprimanded by the County Archaeologist. Now they are clearing brush from the site in order to make their imagined Bronze Age calendar alignments clearer.
Future plans include magnetometry mapping. Mörner is quoted as believing that this technique will allow the pair to map individual ancient footprints in the subsoil, because in his…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2008
Bluegrass music is rootsy acoustic proto-country. 70s heavy metal is bluesy electrified hard rock. Imagine what classic heavy metal songs would sound like if played by a bluegrass band -- banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass... Imagine that. Imagine Hayseed Dixie!
This US quartet has released nine albums in the past eight years. The first one was all AC/DC covers -- thus the name Hayseed Dixie. But they record a lot of their own material too, and they rock. Excellent stuff if you like bluegrass, or classic heavy metal, or both!
On Sunday 6 April, at 19:00 hours, the Hayseed Dixie will perform at my…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2008The thirty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology from outer space!!!
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2008
A couple of recent Skepticality interviews (with environmental engineer Kelly Comstock and environmental toxicologist Shane Snyder) taught me something that may seem obvious, but which was radical news to me. Tap water is an industrial product. It occurs nowhere in nature. Water suppliers use natural water to make tap water according to current scientific understanding of what's healthy for humans to drink.
To make tap water, you need to remove a lot of stuff, such as micro-organisms, industrial pollutants, organic residues and mineral particles, perhaps also salt and lime. Then you need to…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2008
Childcare is a context where people from different class backgrounds come into intimate contact. Indeed, for as long as there has been childcare, this work has been done largely by working class women, even when the kids in question have been middle- or upper-class. There's a common literary trope where an upper-class young man has a warm "natural" relationship to his working-class nanny and a cold distant one to his blood mother.
I've blogged before about how academic middle-class ideals of gender homogenisation clash with more traditional views among working-class daycare ladies. And…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2008
Bajs-Arne ("Shitty Arnie") is the family cat. Saturday, in a clumsy attempt to check out the view from the kitchen window, he overturned an hibiscus and created an archaeological pottery assemblage. It consists of a complete Swedish 2000s flower pot, a complete Swedish 1940s glazed China soup plate that the pot had been sitting on, and a large sherd of a Chinese 1990s glazed China soup bowl that had been plugging the drain hole in the pot. Shitty Arnie hopes to publish a note on the assemblage in a near-future issue of the Newsletter of the Department of Pottery Technology, University of…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2008
There's actually a use for onion peel. Wrap it around an egg, wrap egg and peel in aluminium foil, and boil the egg the usual way. Red onion peel dyes the shell yellow, while yellow onion peel dyes it deeper tones of brown and orange.
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2008A reader has pointed out that a propaganda website friendly with the Chinese government and hostile to Falun Gong is quoting a recent blog entry of mine. She suggests that this means that I am aiding the government in its harsh persecution of the cult.
I, of course, don't see it that way. Two crooks are wrestling here, and I've made my opinion known that both combatants are crooks, period. I find it really funny that the propaganda site is blithely repeating my words, "Most people with democratic opinions see the Chinese government as a group of autocratic villains with a history of…