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 | August 30, 2007The twenty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to send you spinning into space like a SPACE APE.
The next open hosting slot is on 24 October. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2007
Welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 68th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival! For first-time visitors, let me say that this is a blog about whatever runs through the mind of a skeptical research archaeologist based in Stockholm, Sweden. For first-time carnivalers, let me explain that here, skepticism means to not believe anything without good reason, and to reserve judgement in uncertain cases. This carnival is about reason and critical thinking from all around the world. Onward to glory!
Swiss blogger Christian at Med Journal Watch discusses a study of US preterm birth whose authors draw poorly…
aardvarchaeology | August 29, 2007There's been some discussion lately about chess-playing software and intelligence. Some smart humans play chess well. Certain software can beat them at chess. Does this mean that the software is smarter than those humans? Of course not.
For one thing, intelligence is about versatility, about being able to perform innumerable different and unfamiliar tasks that take smarts. No software in the world, least of all chess software, is anywhere near passing the Turing test. If you talk to present-day software you soon become aware that there's no intelligence in the box. If we came across a human…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2007Tomorrow, 30 August, Aard will be the site of the 68th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival. Please submit good skeptical writing to me!
Today, the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will be held at Hominin Dental Anthropology. If that isn't a heavy metal blog name, then I don't know what is. It ain't too late to submit there either!
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2007
Dear Reader, you of course know that there's a rare moss named Anomodon attenuatus. But did you know that its Swedish name is piskbaronmossa, "Whip Baron Moss"? I wonder if it grows upon the grave of the Marquis de Sade.
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2007
My friend and colleague Robert is a collector, and so is his wife. She's into Oscar II memorabilia and vintage lingerie in its original packaging, he's into almost everything. Robert's collector's heart of hearts, though, is with cartoon figurines. Wallace and Gromit in particular, but he ranges widely. Above is shown his latest acquisition: a 1970s Sesame Street alarm clock with Ernie in the Bedroom Scene! Many thanks, Robert! And check out the Bert figurine to the left -- that's Robert's own handiwork. He has a morbid fascination with the Evil One.
(You do know, Dear Reader, that Ernie is…
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2007It is with mixed feelings that I note that Seed has recruited an archaeologist for its Seed Salon dialogue feature ("yesss!"), and that the one they've chosen is Mike Shanks ("nooo!").
Now, why would anyone dislike Mike Shanks? Well, because of, in one word, post-modernism. I read Shanks's dreadful 1987 co-authored book Social Theory and Archaeology, and nothing I've seen of his activities since has suggested that he has become any less of an obscurantist jargon-spewer, academic joker and opponent of rationalist science. He's archaeology's equivalent of Jacques Lacan, whom Noam Chomsky…
aardvarchaeology | August 27, 2007
Last Monday, we had a guest entry by my friend Howard Williams about his excavation of a Devon manor site abandoned in the 1580s. Here's his account of some other recent work of his, stuff many people may not recognise as archaeology, but nevertheless treating source material that very few non-archaeologist scholars pay much attention to.
Further Fieldwork in Devon in July 2007
By Dr Howard Williams
Churchyard Survey
In addition to the archaeological excavation, we conducted other forms of fieldwork. Very few historical churchyards in Devon have been recorded to a high archaeological…
aardvarchaeology | August 26, 2007Lately I've repeatedly come across two bits of English usage that look really wrong to me. Checking them up, it turns out that in one case I was right, in the other wrong.
Principle/principal. Many native English speakers of extremely high academic accomplishment don't seem to know that "principle" is a noun and "principal" most commonly an adjective. They will happily write "my principle objection is blah blah bla". Wroooong.
Jealousy/envy. In Swedish, the words svartsjuka and avund have distinct meanings. Svartsjuka (literally "black illness") is what you feel when you fear that your…
aardvarchaeology | August 25, 2007One of the brightest stars of Swedish literature is Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795). Much of his work is a kind of humorous beat poetry set to music, chronicling the lives of Stockholm drunkards and whores. Central themes are boozing, sex and death.
"You think the grave's too deep?
Well then, have a drink
Then have another two and another three
That way you'll die happier"
"A girl in the green grass and wine in green glasses
I feast on both, both gather me to their bosom
Let's have some more resin on the violin bow!"
But Bellman wasn't strictly speaking part of the underworld he wrote about…
aardvarchaeology | August 24, 2007Almost half of Aard's Dear Readers are based in the US, nearly a fourth are in Sweden, and the remaining fourth is dominated by people in the UK, Canada and Australia. Alas, the citizens of my Scandy neighbouring countries show very little interest in the blog, and so I don't know if I have any readers in the Norwegian city of Trondheim.
I'm going to be in Trondheim from 1 to 6 September for this year's Sachsensymposium. It's the main conference for archaeologists working with post-Roman, pre-Viking Northern Europe, and I will be accompanied by Professor Steve Steve. If you're in Trondheim…
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2007Back in 1996 I played Curses, an extremely good text adventure game. I also read the inspiring documentation for Inform 3, the programming language Curses was written in, and found it extremely elegant. (The game, the programming language and its documentation were all the work of one Graham Nelson.) I had vague plans for writing my own game in Inform, but never got round to it. Instead I went through various interesting upheavals in my life (mainly involving women and the resulting children) that pretty much catapulted me out of geekdom, certainly as far as gaming was concerned.
Now,…
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2007
When someone dies their ID card and on-line banking code-dongle are destroyed to prevent identity theft. Their signature dies with them, so that's not a problem. In the past, people with a bit of money and influence had seal matrices filling the function of all these things. They "signed" documents by affixing wax seals to them, stamped with their unique design. And when the owner of a seal died, the matrix was generally destroyed and then molten for scrap or buried with him.
For this reason, Medieval seal matrices are rare finds, and when they do turn up they tend to be in pieces. But…
aardvarchaeology | August 21, 2007Like myself, Martin Carver at Antiquity wants good archaeopix. Unlike me, he's offering a cash prize and publication in a top-tier print journal.
Antiquity would like to announce the Antiquity Photography Prize. This will be a cash prize awarded for the best archaeological photograph published in the journal in that year. The first prize will be announced for the year 2008. As well as photographs published as part of articles in the journal, consideration for the prize will also include frontispiece photographs published in the editorial.
We would be very grateful if you could spread the word…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2007
My friend Howard Williams teaches archaeology at the University of Exeter, England. He's joined me in Sweden three times so far, once for a rural bike trip, twice for co-directed excavations, and he's soon returning for yet another jaunt around the country's sites, museums and archaeology departments. Attend his lectures there if you can!
Here's a guest entry by Howard about his fieldwork during the past summer. I would have been there too but for my paternal duties.
Stokenham Fieldwork, July 2007
By Dr Howard Williams
This summer I led the third season of fieldwork exploring the Medieval…
aardvarchaeology | August 18, 2007China's interest in the natural resources of Africa has ballooned lately and received much media coverage. Apparently, the last time somebody was that interested in metal ores and scrap, they were Germany in the late 1930s. This political force field across Africa is now, of course, being dressed up in cultural finery, including the manipulation of historical perceptions.
Under the leadership of Admiral Zheng He, China enjoyed a brief era of transoceanic power with insanely huge ships in the early 15th century. These efforts were apparently terminated because the Chinese failed to reach…
aardvarchaeology | August 17, 2007I sometimes make reference here to how godless Swedish public discourse is, particularly compared to the fundie-infested US situation. Here's a good longer piece about this issue by Jerker (it's not a funny name in Swedish, being simply a dialectal version of Eric) of Allotetraploid, also partly available in an English translation by Felicia of Life Before Death.
(No wonder God hates Sweden. We don't like him much either.)
[More blog entries about atheism, agnosticism, religion, politics; ateism, agnosticism, religion, politik.]
aardvarchaeology | August 17, 2007I got to thinking about my most-prized possessions. Which are they really? Which of my stuff would I try to rescue if the house caught fire, or if we had to flee enemy troops and bring along or hide our valuables?
One way to look at it would be to simply enumerate the most expensive stuff I have, the things that would cost the most to replace if they disappeared or would fetch a good price if I sold them. But YuSie and I don't really have any valuables. No gold or precious stones or artwork or other collectibles worth mentioning, and our home electronics are simple and years old. So's our car…
aardvarchaeology | August 16, 2007
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The original text adventure game, ADVENT, was written in the mid-1970s by Stanford student Will Crowther. This game begat Zork, then King's Quest, then any number of other adventure games on various computer platforms until the present day, when Second Life and World of Warcraft are scarcely recognisable as its descendants.
ADVENT is still around and has been ported to pretty much every machine in use today. But this is a late version of the game, expanded and beefed up by Don Woods. Crowther's original version has long been considered…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2007The twentyfirst Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeolog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to make you squeal and titter with delight.
There's an open hosting slot on 26 September 10 October and further ones later in the fall. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.