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 3, 2007Virginia Hughes -- that bright, lovely and suddenly quite aptly named minion of our Seed Overlords -- has asked me to write something about parthenogenesis. (That's virgin birth, for you non-Greeks.) Now, I don't know anything about biological parthenogenesis. I just suspect that my wife may have that capability, since our daughter looks like a small copy of her with Rundkvist hair. But I can tell you the story behind the Dogma of Virgin Birth.
To a scientifically minded atheist like myself, the whole idea of religious dogmata appears absurd. I have various factual beliefs about the world,…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2007
My Bulgarian ICQ buddy Tatyana Mircheva is studying design in Birmingham, UK. Recently, she published this photograph on her blog. It's really good, and I assumed it was some professional advertising shot she'd lifted from the net. Turns out it's a self-portrait, shot at home with the aid of a bedroom lamp and a blanket from Ikea! Tatyana chose her gear, posed the shot and lit it, and her roomie snapped it. I'm impressed!
[More blog entries about photography, glamour, art, advertising; foto, fotografi, glamour, reklam, konst.]
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2007Wednesday 5 December will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Remote Centrral. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Tim ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
The first open hosting slot is currently on 13 February. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2007Today, the Swedish Skeptics Society celebrated its 25th anniversary with an afternoon seminar in Stockholm. I've been a member since 1997, a co-editor of the society's journal Folkvett since 2002 and a board member since 2004. The >2000-member society is Sweden's nearest equivalent of CSI (formerly CSICOP), but it has certain unusual traits. For one thing, its Swedish name, Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning, says nothing about either skepticism nor the paranormal. It simply means "The Society for Science and Popular Enlightenment". (Folkbildning, a word first documented in 1805, is…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2007Professor Åke Hyenstrand, chair of archaeology at the University of Stockholm from 1988 to 20013, died on Wednesday 28 November, aged 68. He was mainly known for his large-scale analyses of the Swedish sites and monuments register and for studies of late-1st Millennium political organisation. A characteristic piece of his work is the 1978 opinion paper "Fornminnesinventering, kulturminnesvård och arkeologisk samhällsforskning" ("Site surveying, heritage management and archaeological social science", with an abstract in English).
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, obit,…
aardvarchaeology | November 29, 2007Back in June I posted a translation of a remarkable opinion piece written by two senior psychiatrists, commenting on their examination of a mentally ill man who had just committed his second murder. Today the papers report that Socialstyrelsens Rättsliga råd ("The judicial council of the social directorate") has found the man insufficiently crazy to qualify for forced psychiatric treatment. This is bad news, because it means that he will likely be sentenced to jail, and Swedish jail terms for murder being surprisingly brief, he will probably be out again before long.
As I've written before,…
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2007From about 1845 to 1930, Sweden saw massive emigration to the United States. According to one estimate, about a third of the country's population left. In 1900, more Swedes lived in Chicago than in Gothenburg. Many factors conspired to send people on their way: population expansion, a lack of agricultural land, failed crops, economic recession, and the simple pull of the virtual population vacuum beyond the American frontier, the pull of enormous opportunity, as industrialised Europeans encountered the Stone Age societies of the native Americans.
The emigration left its share of…
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2007Reading a good paper by Sten Tesch (in Situne Dei 2007) about porphyrite tiles scavenged from Roman ruins and re-used as portable altar slabs in 11th century Scandinavia, I was reminded of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. It's a really good story about relics, up there with the cross of Jesus being tens of meters tall if all its alleged fragments were actually genuine.
St. Ursula is most likely a fictional character, but according to legend she was a Christian British princess who went on a pilgrimage to Rome before her planned marriage to the pagan Roman governor of Armorica. Early…
aardvarchaeology | November 23, 2007Yay, for once somebody at Sb except me is writing about European archaeology! SciBling Chris at Highly Allochthonous offers a long thoughtful writeup of a recent geology paper on the post-glacial flooding of the Black Sea basin and its possible effect on neolithisation. With a beautiful colour map of the European neolithisation wave!
Note that all the radiocarbon dates in Chris's entry are uncalibrated ones. 8300 BP is the raw radiocarbon date for the flood event, but that isn't equivalent to 6300 BC, it's more like 7400 cal BC. (The Maglemose era, for you Scandies.) Free on-line radiocarbon…
aardvarchaeology | November 23, 2007A royally furnished inhumation cemetery of the 7th century has been excavated at Loftus in Teesside, north-eastern England. The finds are sensational as they hail from the "final phase" of furnished burial, when England had already been re-Christianised and grave wealth was in steep decline. Among the remarkable finds are gold-and-garnet jewellery in a southern English style. The cemetery centred on a bed burial, which is exceptionally rare. Historical sources suggest an explanation:
"The speculation is that the royals buried on Teesside are linked to the Kentish princess Ethelburga, who…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2007
The other day, I started writing my Östergötland book in earnest, and I'm really enjoying myself. Here's a snippet of today's work.
The oldest known territorial unit in Östergötland is the härad district (etymologically, "army council"), of which the province originally had eighteen. This division is generally taken to have been established at a single event in the Viking Period. There is little evidence to allow us to date that event closer, and it may have taken place after AD 1000 [the end-point of the period under study]. Most likely the härad division event had something to do with the…
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2007Blog carnivals!
The twenty-eighth Four Stone Hearth is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology to a most awe-inspiring extent.
The next open 4SH hosting slot is already on 5 29 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro -- come as you are. And do it NOW.
A very fine Skeptics' Circle may be found at Med Journal Watch. So fine, in fact, that I am on it despite forgetting to submit! Thanks Chris!
And all you biology types, check out the latest Tangled Bank at From Archaea to Zeaxanthol.
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2007
Fornvännen is one of Scandinavia's main scholarly journals about archaeology, Medieval art and adjacent disciplines. Its first volume appeared in 1906, and for the past several decades it's been issued quarterly. I've been an avid reader since 1990 and one of the journal's editors since 1999.
I'm very proud to announce that the first 100 volumes of Fornvännen are now available freely on the web! Roughly 3000 PDF files including complete scans, illustrations and all, and searchable text! The site has an excellent search & browse engine.
Most papers in the journal are in Scandinavian…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2007
For a Swede, I believe I have an unusually small environmental footprint as my income is low and my habits relatively ascetic. But compared to most people in the world, anyone with half my standard of living is of course a huge culprit. The only thing I might brag about is having relatively few children, as I've fathered only one in each of my two marriages. Still, so do most Chinese, regardless of income, thanks to the admirable foresight and regrettable heavy-handedness of their dictatorship.
An obvious thing I could do to improve my enviro-karma is to fly less. I generally make two or…
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2007Two months from now I'm going to spend a week on the US East Coast, attending two conferences and doing some sightseeing.
From 18 to 22 January I'll be in the Chapel Hill/Durham area of North Carolina for the 2nd Science Blogging Conference, where I'm co-chairing a session on blogging about the humanities and social sciences.
From 23 to 27 January I'll be in Plantation/Ft Lauderdale, Florida, for The Amazing Meeting 5.5, a skeptical conference hosted by James Randi. I think there's a seat on a panel for me there.
Dear Reader, both of these conferences are looking really good, and I'd love to…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2007Dear Reader, have you lately heard much merry folk rock with apocalyptic lyrics about the coming of the Antichrist over London?
My dear friend Asko is, among other things, a war gamer, a geocacher, an antiquarian amateur, a fiction writer and a musician. Hear him play the bass on releases by 90s stoner rock outfit Dear Mutant! (I have heard kickass stuff from the band's final unreleased album sessions...) Asko recently recommended me a track by Current 93, a band I'd never heard of. Turns out it's a huge body of recordings from the early 80s onward by occult Englishman David Tibet with…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2007
Dear Reader, it's been a while since I asked you to press any buttons. If you like Aard, and haven't already done so, would you please do me the favour of pressing a button in the left-hand column, right below my profile? Good grades make blogger happy! Thanks.
aardvarchaeology | November 17, 2007Archaeologists have an extremely strange worldview. We never simply see what's going on around us right now: we keep thinking about what a place would have looked like hundreds of years ago, or what it will look like in the far future. The Onion has a great piece on-line about just that: "Crime Scene Investigators Find Arrowhead".
"Their bodies showed signs of blunt force trauma to the head, as well as several postmortem stab wounds, although no indications of sexual abuse were present. A steel pipe bearing human blood and tissue matter was found at the scene but did not appear to be related…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2007I'm on a guest blogger roll. Here's something about 11th and 12th century metalworking finds from Sigtuna near Stockholm by my friendly colleague Anders Söderberg. He and our mutual friend Ny Björn Gustafsson are making sense of stuff that usually ends up with burnt daub in large anonymous sacks that nobody ever opens. Impressive work!
The excavation of the Trädgårdsmästaren block in Sigtuna 1988-90 hasn't yet been published, but the dig is of tremendous archaeological value since it covered 1100 square meters and spans about 270 years, from the founding of the town in the late 10th centiry…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2007Maritime archaeologists have found what may be the first Viking ship, or at least some wreckage, in the Lake Mälaren area. A T-sectioned multi-meter timber looking a lot like a keel lies half-buried in the culture layer on the lakefloor just off the proto-town of Birka on Björkö.
Thanks to Hans of Du är vad du läser for the heads-up.
Update 17 November: More details here.