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 | December 21, 2007Dear Reader, have you got a blog or other web site? Seed now offers widget that will put a handy ScienceBlogs Latest Posts feed on your site. This is what it looks like:
Visit Widgetbox to get it for yourself.
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2007
Yet another piece of news about Bob Lind's most recent archaeoastronomical caper (previously covered here and here).
The Scania County Archaeologist has had an independent contractor assess and document the damage done to an Early Iron Age cemetery by Lind and former geology professor Nils-Axel Mörner. The men's interventions will be repaired and the site's protected area will be enlarged, but no charges will be pressed. It's an unusual case as Lind made his unauthorised interference with the site known through a press release!
Here are a few choice quotations from contract archaeologist…
aardvarchaeology | December 20, 2007Dear Reader, welcome to the 76th instalment of the Skeptics' Circle, your bi-weekly portal to the best skeptical blog writing on this or any other world-wide web.
Greta Christina discusses muddled debates where the issue whether certain religious beliefs are factually true gets mixed up with the issue whether religion is mainly a force for good or not.
Terry comments on a new paper claiming that divorce hurts the environment -- sharing a house does reduce per capita carbon emissions.
Coffee House Poetry offers a rousing atheistic rant.
Bing at Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes replies to a…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2007
Responding to my call for archaeopix, Dear Reader Kristi offers us two pages out of her June 2005 travel journal, recording a visit to Björkö / Birka, site of Sweden's first town c. AD 770-970. Explains Kristi:
"I sketched the things that made an impression on me, from the island and the Birkamuseet. [...] Art journaling, such as that in my scan, is very popular as a means of documenting amateur archaelogical, historical, and biological interests"
News to me, though I'd heard of scrapbooking which seems to be somewhat similar. Any more art journalers or scrapbookers around here? Somebody…
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2007The thirtieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Greenbelt. Archaeology and anthropology to satisfy even the most demanding of connoisseurs!
While I'm at it, Dear Reader, let me ask you to please send me some good archaeological photographs or drawings, with a brief explanation of what they show, to be published here on Aard. Fame and link love can be yours!
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2007Here's one to send you into the vaults, Dear Reader: following John Lynch's lead, I offer links to the first Aard entry of each month this year, each with its first sentence (disregarding carnival announcements).
Jan. "I miss the porn surfers." [link]
Feb. "One thing I've never fought about with my ex-wife nor my wife is money." [link]
Mar. "My friend Stefan Kayat is a truly original man of many talents." [link]
Apr. "Archaeological periods are defined by artefact types." [link]
May. "Archaeology consists of a myriad of weakly interconnected regional and temporal sub-disciplines." [link]
Jun…
aardvarchaeology | December 17, 2007
Johan Jönsson of Månskensdans has identified a lookalike of my future self: German musical singer Jerzy Jeske, "Multitalent und Darsteller bei mehr als 40 Premieren in 5 Sprachen". Go Jerzy!
There's also a British actor who looks like I do currently, but I've forgotten his name. I think he was in a TV adaptation of the life of Tsarevna Catherine the Great, but I can't seem to find him in IMDB.
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2007In early October two years ago, we had a party. During that evening, a journalist friend helped my wife set up a (pseudonymous, s3kr1t) blog on Blogspot which persists to this day.
I didn't catch on immediately. I'd been a BBS aficionado since the late 80s, regularly spending an hour or two a day conversing on-line. But after two months of reading my wife's blog, I started to feel that maybe blogging might be something for me too. After all, I was already writing on-line anyway, but for a small audience of longtime BBS friends who didn't necessarily share my obsessions. Also, the BBS format…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2007Yesterday myself & Junior met up with Paddy K. Sr. & Jr. and went to Cybertown, a laser-game place in central Stockholm. Here we paid SEK 60 ($11) per head and donned vests with laser sensors and attached laser guns, forming Team Blue. Teams Red and Yellow each consisted of five ten-year-olds, and Team Green was a dad and his daughter. Then we entered a blacklit dry-ice-smoking dark labyrinth and spent 20 adrenaline-soaked minutes happily sniping at teams Red, Yellow and Green. We won! Not very surprising, given that our team was the only one with two dads. Individually, though, Green…
aardvarchaeology | December 14, 2007This is really great. Everybody else has realised that Bob Lind's new "discovery" was a canard. But today, local paper Ystad Allehanda's credulous reporter nevertheless conveys the man's ideas that
Standing stones are unlikely to mark cemeteries. (They are in fact enormously common in early-to-mid-1st Millennium AD cemeteries in Sweden.)
Many of the stones in the new cemetery Lind has been spinning his astronomical yarns about hardly protrude above the turf. The reason, he says, is that the ground level in the meadow has somehow risen 80 cm since the stones were put in place, and nearly…
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2007
The Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm has recently completed a new permanent exhibition about Swedish prehistory. It was planned under the stewardship of the controversial Kristian Berg, a non-archaeologist whose attitude to the museum placed in his care may be summarised as politically expedient, instrumental and post-modernist.
I haven't seen the new exhibition, and so can't have any opinion of my own about it. But I am not surprised to find that it is getting some very bad press, and with a recurring theme. This exhibition is asking questions and not providing any answers.
"...…
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2007The German language now has its own ScienceBlogs. Thirteen new SciBlings! I can read them but I can't write German well enough to take part much. So far they don't have any archaeologists, but I've found a few entries of interest to people with such predilections.
Volker at Darwins Erbe ("D's legacy") writes about Neanderthals and space aliens.
Jürgen at GeoGraffitico tells us about America's christening certificate: a 1507 map with the first printed mention of the continent's modern name. You do know, Dear Reader, about Amerigo Vespucci?
Christoph at Wissen schafft Kommunikation (it's a…
aardvarchaeology | December 11, 2007Here's another snippet from my on-going book project. Context: I've surveyed the central-place indicators of the Late Roman Period (AD 150-400) in Östergötland, and now I'm moving into the book's main period of study from AD 400 onward, starting with an evaluation of the Migration Period hillforts. Are they useful for my present king-chasing purposes?
A somewhat relevant site type in the search for Migration Period elite settlements is the hillfort, of which Östergötland has many. They appear to have about the same date distribution as the field walls (Late Roman and Migration Periods), but…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2007Dear Reader, according to my server logs, you are likely to live either in the US or in Sweden. Considering the blog neighbourhood I'm in, and the contents of Aard, I believe you care about science. Regardless of party politics, and wherever we all are in the world, I think we can agree that we urgently need the next US president to be science-friendly, science-savvy and reality-based.
The Science Debate 2008 initiative has been launched to push science policy as a central issue in the US presidential campaign. Specifically, and using their not inconsiderable media clout, the original…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2007
An album I can really recommend is LA quartet OK Go's 2005 disc Oh No. It's catchy, glammy rock with swagger and brains and decadence, recorded in Sweden and beautifully produced by Tore Johansson and the mighty Lindgård/Mopeds brothers. In addition to them kicking ass musically, the band's lyrics (by Damian Kulash) are unusually poetic and literate. Dear Reader, I bring you the lyrics to the delicious "Oh Lately It's So Quiet", which are sung in a bedroom falsetto by the hugely talented Mr Kulash.
Oh Lately It's So Quiet
By Damian Kulash of OK Go
Oh, lately it's so quiet in this place
You'…
aardvarchaeology | December 8, 2007
Bob Lind chalking some apparently quite genuine cupmarks, a ubiquitous type of Bronze Age rock art.
Alternative archaeoastronomer Bob Lind (note that I do not call him an unhinged man with crackpot theories) felt himself vindicated this past summer by the Swedish Heritage Board. On a set of new visitors' signs, the Board didn't actually endorse Lind's alternative interpretation of the stone ship of Ales stenar, but the signs recounted his ideas alongside the scholarly consensus interpretation without taking a stand on the issue. This was enough to make Lind a very happy man.
Now, local…
aardvarchaeology | December 7, 2007This 88-page booklet by Åsa Virdi Kroik is named "You'd rather lose your head than turn in your drum". The title refers to shamanic drums among the Saami. The book is based on an MA thesis in the history of religion defended at the University of Stockholm in 2006. Reading it, I soon realised that it can't simply be evaluated from a scholarly point of view: this is at heart also an ethno-political tract. I'll comment on the political aspects first and then on the scholarly ones.
For the non-Scandy reader, I should explain that the Saami are a sub-Arctic indigenous minority in Norway, Sweden,…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2007The twenty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology gonna be fun, gonna be fun, gonna be fun in de sun!
The next open hosting slot is on 27 February. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro.
aardvarchaeology | December 5, 2007
Here's a funny toy: a remote-controlled car with a built-in metal detector. Drive it over a piece of metal and it'll go BEEP and light up. It doesn't have anything like serious ground penetration, but still, a cool toy.
There are several reasons that metal detecting has not been made into a mechanised remote sensing technique. I guess the main one is that only archaeologists would have any use for such a machine, and we don't have the money to make it worthwhile to develop and market it. Also, while building a mechanised detector and find mapper would be easy, it would be considerably more…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2007
A long-time friend of my parents wrote me a letter recently, telling me that she'd found something unusual in her late mother's jewellery box. Today I visited her and had a look.
It's a small cast copper-alloy crucifix, darkly patinated, with a semi-obliterated image of the crucified Christ incised onto the front surface. The piece is made like a box, hollow on the back side, with loops at the top and bottom as if it had originally been joined to a back piece. Its dimensions are 82 by 45 by 5 mm, length 70 mm if you disregard the loops.
The crucifix has no provenance, and its owner can only…