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 | March 21, 2008
Swedes have taken up US Hallowe'en customs only very recently and half-heartedly, the whole thing being driven by merchants. But we do have something like trick-or-treating: the Easter Crone custom of Maundy Thursday.
Traditionally, there's no Easter Bunny in Sweden. (My mother once shocked our American nanny by serving a rabbit for Easter dinner.) Instead the holiday is associated with witches, believed to make an annual broom-borne pilgrimage to Blue Mountain on Maundy Thursday. There, of course, they celebrate orgies with the Devil. (Don't we all?) About 300 people were executed for the…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2008Seed's recently taken up with a new advertiser, Proximic, that tries to put relevant ads into bits of the page that us Sbloggers don't control ourselves. Unfortunately, they do this in a mechanised manner that treats "relevance" in a simplistic way. This means that Sbloggers who criticise something may find their sidebars advertising this very thing.
As a Firefox user, I never see the ads on my blog and I have no idea what they are like. Dear Reader, if something turns up in the ads that you suspect that I may not like much, would you please tell me? Because I can get rid of individual ads.…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2008
Last night I had the pleasure of catching two of my home town's best live music acts, each playing in a basement venue a couple of hundred meters apart on Stockholm's southern island. The Crawfish Cook and the Skandalites are both 60s-70s cover bands, but since they cultivate genres I usually don't listen to, they might as well have performed original material.
Crawfish Cook play New Orleans soul funk, with material culled from Doctor John, Professor Longhair, the Neville Brothers, the Meters and Little Feat. Last night they were an eight-piece: male singer, guitar, bass, drums, percussion,…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2008As I mentioned the other day, I'm hoping to do some Bronze Age research once my current project about Dark Ages magnate farms is done. The Swedish Research Council's annual application deadline is less than two weeks from now, and I've put a grant proposal together. The project title is
In the Landscape and Between Worlds. Bronze Age Sacrificial Sites in the Lake Mälaren Area.
The text is just two pages, and it's all about the research, no financial details. Dear Reader, I'd appreciate it if you would have a look and perhaps offer some constructive criticism!
Update 26 March: I've submitted…
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2008Having done some surface investigations with non-destructive methods, a group of volunteer investigators including Patti Hearst's Sharon Tate's sister calls for the excavation of the Manson Family's last hideout.
"Vass said that, considering the quantity and the types of markers of human decomposition found, the cadaver dog's response, and the probing exercise, he found enough evidence to warrant further testing at a deeper level and a full-scale excavation at Barker Ranch, according to the report he issued to law enforcement."
Thanks to Luanne Efird for the tipoff.
[More blog entries about…
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2008Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia and most of its contents are naked text that hardly takes up any disk space. Thus there is no reason to limit the subjects its contributors can write about. Fans have written hundreds of detailed articles about Pokémon characters. This is fine with me though I have no interest in the subject: the articles are not in my way and they are apparently of interest to a lot of other people.
When I started adding my first bits of stuff to the Swedish version of the encyclopedia, I was surprised to find that higher-up users would delete my short contributions…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2008Dear Reader DuWayne asked what I think about prostitution. By way of answer, here's a re-run of an entry on that issue from May 2006. Two years later, I am no wiser.
News reports from the German brothel industry pending the World Soccer Championship have set me a-thinking about prostitution. It's one of those tricky issues where I find it hard to make up my mind.
Is prostitution a problem? If so, who are the victims? Who are the perpetrators? What are the ethical aspects of prostitution? Quite apart from ideals, what is the best practical stance for society to take regarding prostitution?…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2008
Locksmith Patrick Stübing and Susan Karolewski are a German couple with four children. They are also full biological siblings. "Eeeeewww", I hear you say. And I agree. Eeeeewww. But why do we feel that way?
The incest taboo is as close to a cultural universal as you can get, and is most likely genetically determined. It is counteradaptive to want to bonk your siblings, as this may lead to the accumulation of harmful recessive alleles in the offspring. But how is this implemented from a practical evolutionary perspective? Humans have no physical way of identifying their biological siblings,…
aardvarchaeology | March 13, 2008Lore Sjöberg at Wired celebrates the achievement of recently deceased gaming wizard Gary Gygax with an entertaining look at what it would be like if Dungeons & Dragons characters behaved like archaeologists.
May 16
We have nearly finished our initial survey of the outer flagstones of the dungeon entrance. Already we have made wonderful discoveries! Initial tests indicate that the stones may have come from an open pit quarry near the Elonges River, nearly two miles from here! Also, we were attacked by a Phantom Fungus and lost two more graduate students.
Thanks to Johan Lundström for the…
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2008PLoS ONE, the Open Access science journal, has finally published something with an archaeological bent: a fine genetics paper about the original peopling of the Americas. As part of their effort to stimulate scientific conversation about the journal's papers, they've put a "Journal Club" on-line where discussion can take place. Myself and Greg Laden offered initial remarks on the paper, and now the mike is free for anyone who wishes to contribute.
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2008
The thirty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Archaeology and anthropology, and this time dealing exclusively with koryÅ«. Explains Wikipedia: "KoryÅ« is a general term for Japanese schools of martial arts that predate the Meiji Restoration (the period from 1866 to 1869 which sparked major socio-political changes and led to the modernization of Japan). While there is no 'official' cutoff date, the dates most commonly used are either 1868, the first year of the Meiji period, or 1876, when the HaitÅrei edict banning the wearing of swords was pronounced."
The next…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2008I've discovered that the Wikipedia entry about Falun Gong is heavily biased. Indeed, before I took it upon myself to insert a few words about the criticism the organisation has met with, the article was entirely about a) how good FG is (and I disagree), b) how nasty the Chinese government is (and I agree).
Now, this article is guarded by a bunch of FG devotees who undo all attempts to introduce a more balanced view into the text. Their antics on the discussion page are quite a sight. I think it would be good if some of Aard's readers joined me in making improvements to the article.…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2008At PZ's suggestion, I've twiddled some knobs behind the scenes to force the blog to speak utf-8 instead of iso-8859-1. This will hopefully allow you guys to write even stranger comments than usual. Maybe I'll even be able to stop writing stuff like "& a u m l ;" Please try it out! Såy sömëthïng ïn Swëdïsh! Mattias, have you any lewd suggestions to make in Koiné Greek? Is anyone able to rattle off a few lines of Arabic love poetry? Go nuts, y'all!
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2008
An blind activist buddy of mine is on the war path. This time it's about guide dogs on Swedish Rail:
"Three years ago I got a guide dog. It turned out to be one of the best things I've ever done. Since then, my life has changed fundamentally. I exercise to an extent that I never thought possible. My physical condition has improved enormously and I feel much better to my soul. I used to avoid going out. Navigating a noisy city full of lamp posts and speeding cars was so demanding that I would avoid it completely for long periods. But since I got my dog, things have changed. It's a pleasure to…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2008
9-y-o Junior has had a remarkable streak of luck involving the kids' fantasy movie Spiderwick Chronicles. First he managed to check his e-mail just as the book-club he's a member of sent out a mass-mailed invitation to yesterday's pre-screening of the film. Then, when he and I sat down to watch the thing, the Spiderwick books' Swedish publishers ran a lottery with the seat numbers, and he was the first winner, harvesting two new books and a merch note pad.
In Junior's opinion, the movie was a 8/10. I'm not a member of target audience, and I give it a 5. It's a contemporary-world children's…
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2008In every story there is a villain, and his adversary is either a hero or a hapless victim. But we don't live in a story.
Most people with democratic opinions see the Chinese government as a group of autocratic villains with a history of persecuting good people. When such a government persecutes a religious movement, it's easy to assume that this movement must be quite nice. This not necessarily the case.
The much-publicised and long-standing conflict between the Chinese authorities and Falun Gong is an example of a nasty autocratic regime persecuting a nasty manipulative cult. Falun Gong's…
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2008
I've been a devotee of Escape Pod, the weekly science-fiction short-story podcast, for 2.5 years now. Its audience has grown and grown and grown until Escape Pod is now the world's second-largest paying market for sf short fiction regardless of medium. It's second only to Analog! Steve Eley, who runs the thing, is a fixture in my life, the way Oprah wouldn't be even if I watched TV. Now, in a blog entry, Steve's giving the world a look behind the scenes at Escape Artists, Inc. Though you'd never guess it from Escape Pod's solid record of weekly publication, things have been rough for the guy…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2008
Sweden's first town was a place called Birka, frequently mentioned in Viking Period written sources such as Rimbert's book about Bishop Ansgar. The town was on an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. Its remains are extensive and highly visible, and have been the object of constant archaeological attention since the birth of the discipline. Nevertheless, there's a tendency among local-patriotic amateur scholars all around the Baltic to try to argue that Birka was in fact located in their favourite spot on Earth. This is so common that it's a running joke in the trade. In the following, my…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2008
Yesterday I began my return to the Bronze Age. For most of my career I've mainly worked with the Late Iron Age, a period that dominates the landscape of agrarian Sweden completely through its cemeteries and place names. But my first published piece of research, indeed the first research I ever did, concerned the Late Bronze Age. And now I'm thinking of going back there once my current book project in Östergötland is done.
My old Bronze Age studies, I'm ashamed to admit, involved no field trips and hardly any artefact studies, but lots of archive work. I had no driver's license, hardly any…