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 | September 14, 2007
Olof Eriksson skotkonungr (c. 980-1021) is the first man of whom historical sources of adequate quality tell that he managed to get himself elected king of both the Götar and the Svear. These tribal groups had previously been organised separately, and thus Olof may fairly be seen as the first king of Sweden as we know it.
Olof's main power base was the town of Sigtuna between Stockholm and Uppsala, founded by his father King Erik as a Christian replacement for the pagan trading post on Björkö (Biaerkey, latinicised Birca). Sigtuna was the site of Sweden's first known mint, where English…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2007The twenty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The John Hawks Anthropology Weblog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to scratch your itch and soothe your yearnings.
The next open hosting slot is on 24 October. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. You don't have to be an anthropologist -- you don't even have to be anthropoid!
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2007
Being an archaeologist, I like tombs, and being a science fiction fan, I like Jules Verne. So you can imagine that I'd like Jules Verne's tomb regardless of what it looked like. As it turns out, David Nessle has pictures from Amiens showing the tomb in question, and it's an incredible piece of work. Look at the lettering! Look at that sculpture! "It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's Jules Verne who's been resurrected and learned to fly!"
[More blog entries about books, graves, julesverne, sf, sciencefiction; gravar, julesverne, sf, sciencefiction, böcker, läsning.]
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2007
Seen this? A mashup of a filmed conversation between atheist crusader Richard Dawkins and meth-user cum charismatic preacher cum gay john Ted Haggard, set to audio from Monty Python's parrot sketch. W00t! Many thanks to Dear Reader Martin C for the link.
aardvarchaeology | September 12, 2007
Last night's blogmeet was even better than the previous one: more people, some lady bloggers, some archaeologists and all presided over by Prof. Steve Steve. The professor was in a wild mood and immediately upon arriving did something indescribable with a large tabasco bottle, claiming that this was "good for his posture". Kind of disconcerting to have a conversation with a senior academic boasting that kind of... accommodation skills while he's... on the bottle.
Missing from the picture are myself (holding the camera) and Lars L of Arkland (who ended up outside the frame because it was too…
aardvarchaeology | September 12, 2007Here's a story kindly brough to my attention by Tegumai, Paddy, Hans and Ian Joe (am I forgetting anyone?). Pub in Wirral near Liverpool is torn down in 1938 to make room for a car park. Buried wooden boat is found by demolition men, who are ordered to keep quiet and cover it up. Nottingham archaeologist Stephen Harding hears the rumour and locates the wreck with ground-penetrating radar, hopes to excavate it, suggests that it has Scandy traits, hopes for Viking Period date. There's little info so far, but I look forward to learning what kind of vessel they've got there!
aardvarchaeology | September 11, 2007
The Oseberg ship burial of Norway is a mind-blowing find, full of Early Viking Period carved woodwork and textiles of unparalelled quality. Dated by dendrochronology to AD 834, the long ship and its contents were sealed under a clay barrow, perfectly preserved when excavated in 1904. I consider myself a stakeholder in the Oseberg find, as it was excavated by Gotlander Gabriel Gustafson. In 1881-82 G.G. had performed the first excavations with useful documentation at the Barshalder cemetery on which I wrote my dissertation some 110 years later.
The Oseberg barrow was opened during the Viking…
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2007As mentioned here before, I'm going to The Amazing Meeting 5.5 skepticism conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 25-26 January. Now I've also signed up for the 2nd Science Blogging Conference in Durham, NC, the preceding weekend. If everything goes according to plan, I'll be co-organising a session at the NC conference with John McKay of the Archy blog. The theme will be "Blogging about the Social Sciences and Humanities".
(There was some confusion about what to call this thing. In Sweden, archaeology is in the humanities along with history, religion studies, classics, philology etc. In the US, my…
aardvarchaeology | September 10, 2007
Back in July I went to a big toy store to buy presents for my daughter's fourth birthday. I got her some street crayons, a magnetic drawing board and a head dress with silver antennae. While browsing I found the product in the above picture. I didn't buy it for her. Let us cleaning!
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2007
Punk musician G.G. Allin (1956-93) led a short hard life marked by drug binges, violence, mental illness and on-stage coprophagy. I've never heard any of his music, but reading about this legendary underground figure I came across the above remarkable photograph.
Dear Reader, please disregard for a moment the guy to the left who is covered in blood and feces. Look at the audience members to the right. What are they feeling? What do their expressions signify?
Maniacal glee? Revulsion battling with fascination? Is the bearded guy dancing? Has the leftmost guy just smoothened his features for…
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2007A memory: Eric, one of the kids from mellanstadiet when I was ten or eleven. Him and another boy were taught a tap dancing routine by our gay counter-tenor music teacher Rune, performing it woodenly in the lecture hall for the entire school. They wore striped vests and straw hats, their faces expressing a mixture of concentration and a dawning realisation that perhaps they were making absolute fools of themselves. Steppens söner, "Sons of the Steppe/Tap Dance". But us in the audience didn't know enough to realise how naff it all was.
Anyway, Eric was a pretty boy with an elfin face, and so I…
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2007Hot on the heels of my paean to the Stockholm Sluice, here's something about the Hornsgatan street in Stockholm. Be warned, though: this work has been deemed substandard by the Swedish editor of Vice Magazine.
HORNSGATAN
By Martin Rundkvist, 19 March 2007
Hornsgatan, the Street of the Horn, used to be Stockholm's Wild West. It starts sedately enough at the 17th century South Town Hall but then ploughs straight through the churchyard of St. Mary, the bones of poets and burghers flying. Gathering speed, it passes Marijuana Square (as St. Mary's square was known in the 70s) and shoots off west…
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2007I spent most of the past week with Professor Steve Steve at the Internationales Sachsensymposion in Trondheim, Norway. We had two and a half days of paper sessions and one day's bus excursion in the vicinity, all pertaining to post-Roman archaeology.
Here the professor is studying a Roman/Migration Period large-scale iron production site at Heglesvollen, a shieling in the mountains east of Trondheim. He's in animated conversation with two of his admirers, Oslo PhD students Ingunn Røstad and Gry Wiker.
Here's a piece of production slag that the professor found eroding out of the hillside at…
aardvarchaeology | September 6, 2007My blog has so far landed me one paid writing assignment, and today I got a copy of the mag where it was published. Sort of.
Vice Magazine is a wannabe-controversial fashion mag. Its June issue has a glue-huffing teen boy on the cover and there are web-cam boob pics inside. You get the picture. They commissioned me to write two 700-word pieces on a three-day deadline back in March. The topic was polluted places in Stockholm. I spent about one day's work on the job and they paid me peanuts after I nagged them. But it was fun to do a bit of real journalism.
Only they threw one of the pieces out…
aardvarchaeology | September 5, 2007
Here are the lyrics to a really great of Montreal song off their heavily beatlesque 2001 album Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies.
Penelope
By Kevin Barnes
Penelope, shoot the apple off my head
I need to go to the store to get some sleep.
Because I've run out of sleep.
The row boat came so David stopped arguing
with a mime and waved his arms like wheat.
But when he tried to speak the Prince of Plum fell through the
roof of his mouth and handed David an envelope
Inside was a letter that read 'Sir, you were given this
envelope by mistake please disregard it'
Nicolynn, shoot the candle off my…
aardvarchaeology | September 4, 2007The Liberal Party in my home municipality of Nacka has started a blog and kindly put local bloggers on their blog roll. They've tagged Aard "Extreme Archaeologist". I'm taking that as a compliment -- I mean, they aren't calling me "Archaeological Extremist".
As mentioned here before, Sweden's political spectrum is much wider than the US one. The United States' entire bipartisan system maps onto the conservative half of Sweden's parliament. We're currently governed by a conservative coalition, a rare occurrence in Sweden, but polls show that they actually lost the majority support shortly…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2007The Coral: Roots & Echoes (August 2007)
Power pop and cowboy rock: Lee Hazlewood (R.I.P.) meets Teenage Fanclub. Catchy!
of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (January 2007)
My generation is releasing divorce records. Kevin Barnes has come a long way into disco zombie territory since his Sgt Pepper phase. Unbelievable vocal harmony over decadent plastic electronica.
The Mars Volta: Amputechture (September 2006)
Intricate searing prog rock. These guys are serious, and seriously weird.
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2007
My Norwegian buddy Torkel reminded me of the wonderful site TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME. These guys are beyond words. And there's a second collection that I hadn't seen before! Satan laughing spreads his wings, as TV comedian Ozzy Osborne used to sing back when I was just an evil twinkle in my dad's eye. Oh lord, yeah.
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2007
Internationally reknowned evolutionary biologist and legendary party animal Professor Steve Steve is on tour in Scandinavia. In the above image, taken moments ago, the professor and I discuss evo-devo on the Rundkvist family's balcony in Fisksätra outside Stockholm. I hear he's got some radical new discoveries in zebrafish teratology in the publishing pipeline, apparently the fortuitous result of dropping a bottle of Bushmill's into a bar aquarium. Tomorrow we're off together to the Sachsensymposium in Trondheim, Norway, the main conference for post-Roman, pre-Viking archaeology in northern…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2007My friend and colleague Jonathan Lindström is a talented man. He started out as a teen amateur astronomer and local historian of his dad's coastal Estonian heritage, became a field archaeologist, then an ad copy-writer, then a museum staff writer and artist, and now he's a freelance science writer and artist contracted by Sweden's largest publishing house.
Jonathan called me the other day and told me a new kids' book he's been telling me about had come from the printers. It's named Dödshuset. Mysteriet från stenåldern, "The House of Death: a Stone Age mystery", and it's all about a contract…