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 15, 2007
Lund
Alsengems are little multilayered button-like discs of coloured glass with incised human stick-figures on one side. Archaeology became aware of them in 1871 when one was found on the Danish island of Als. These gems are pretty coarse and ugly compared to the exquisite agate and intaglio ones of Classical antiquity, but they nevertheless have their place in an archaeologist's heart.
Sigtuna
On the Continent, Alsengems are found as part of church art of the 11th through 13th centuries such as reliquaries, book covers and altar crosses. Their core area is the Netherlands, Lower Saxony and…
aardvarchaeology | August 14, 2007
My dad tried out his new motorboat recently, going with my extra mom from Stockholm around Scania to Gothenburg and then across the country through the Göta Canal to Norrköping and back north to Stockholm again. Passing through Lake Roxen he sought out Sättuna in Kaga parish on the lake's SW shore and took the above picture for me of the Sättuna barrow from the water. Below is a pic I took myself in September 2006. I want to radiocarbon date that mutha before the resident badger trashes its innards completely!
I'm glad to have a picture of the site from the lake, as Sättuna means "the tuna…
aardvarchaeology | August 13, 2007The poet, philologist and bishop Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846) once wrote,
All bildning står på ofri grund till slutet
Blott barbariet var en gång fosterländskt
"All our learning must always stand on a slavish foundation
Barbarism is our single true heritage"
This was in the context of how nice Tegnér felt that the late-18th century reign of Gustaf III had been. This was somewhat controversial in the time of national romanticism, as the Gustavian era had been inescapably saturated by French cultural imperialism.
And Tegnér was right. As European countries go, Sweden was very late with all the…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2007Wednesday 15 August will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Archaeolog. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to one of the blog editors ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
There's an open hosting slot on 26 September and further ones later in the fall. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2007
Last night when I turned out the lights, something the size of a mouse jumped out of a lamp. We've had a bit of summer heat lately, and the balcony door has been open a lot. The creature turned out to be a wart-biter Great Green Bush-cricket female (Dectius verrucivorus Tettigonia viridissima), longer than my little finger and shiny green. I put a plastic box over her and slid a paper under before shooting photos and releasing her into the night. While in the box, she assiduously cleaned her toes with her jaws. A welcome visit.
[More blog entries about insects, photos; insekter, foto,…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2007
My kids have taken to watching LazyTown, this really druggy and garish kids' show on Playhouse Disney. It's got a lot of caricatured puppets of children with the hands of real people, but also three live actors, the main character played by a little girl in a pink wig. The live actors, particularly the tall fey lantern-jawed villain, ham up their performances mercilessly. Their interactions with the vacant-eyed puppets lend an extra dimension of unreality to the show, and when you add the fact that it's all been dubbed into Swedish so the lip movements don't synch, you've got a product way…
aardvarchaeology | August 10, 2007
Long-time Dear Readers may remember that I've written in the past about the wonderful Danish war booty sacrifices. Victorious defenders dunked the equipment of foreign armies they had beaten into sacred lakes, mainly during the Late Roman Iron Age c. AD 150-400. The lakes soon silted up into bogs, whose anaerobic conditions preserved the weaponry and other gear perfectly. Bee-youtiful stuff.
(Also, it's a very good blogging topic if you want heavy traffic, because any mention of booty, particulary Danish bog booty, will attract porn surfers like you wouldn't believe. Server logs show that a…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2007Curious about what the Aard regulars look like? I am! If you consider yourself an Aardvarchaeology regular, then please gimme a pic of yourself and I'll put it into this gallery post. If you've got a pic on-line somewhere, just put a link to it in a comment. Otherwise, feel free to email me a pic.
Here's Greenman Tim of the Walking the Berkshires blog, touching a canebreak canebrake rattlesnake with a less-than-ten-foot pole.
Karen a.k.a. the Ridger keeps the Greenbelt blog.
Jan Morén probably speaks Scanian, Sweden's equivalent of a presidential Texas drawl.
Dennis of Dust in a Sunbeam is…
aardvarchaeology | August 9, 2007Here's a piece of news that hit uncomfortably close to home. A grave digger in Eslöv, southern Sweden, fell victim to a work-place accident yesterday. While the man was in the trench, the grave-side spoil dump collapsed onto him, killing him instantly. I am only somewhat reassured by the fact that this was the kind of grave digger who buries people, not my kind who excavates them again.
In other news. Mauretania has abolished slavery. Keep up the good work, guys! Let's see now, it's 1807, right? 1907? Huh?
aardvarchaeology | August 8, 2007
Dear Reader,
Would you like to read about werewolf communes?
The beasties live quietly in southern California
Doing dirty work for the drugs trade
Sharing pack mentality, each with a queen bitch
Riding their vans to the desert's edge, changing
Into quadruped form and running long nights
Through the sagebrush, panting and exhilarated
Would you like to read about werewolf communes?
Could you chew and digest, Dear Reader,
Could you stomach three hundred pages
Of free verse narrative?
So finely done that you will often forget
That this is no ordinary novel
Page-turner poetry
Fit for loud…
aardvarchaeology | August 7, 2007
I've spent the day metal-detecting for a project called Vasakungarnas Djurhamn, that is, "Animal Harbour of the Sheaf Kings". This name may not make much sense to you, Dear Reader, so let me explain.
In the 1520s Gustaf Eriksson, the most successful of many ambitious young noblemen at the time who tended to end up decapitated, wrested Swedish royal power from the Danes with the aid of Lubeck. He soon implemented Reformation and used the riches of the church and monasteries to repay his debts and reorganise Sweden from the bottom up. A very good 2002 biography of the man has the subtitle "…
aardvarchaeology | August 6, 2007[More blog entries about photography, geocaching, Sweden, sightseeing; nacka, foto, sightseeing, geocaching.]
After my daughter went to bed I took GPS navigator and camera and rode my bike out past the golf course and into the woods to look for a new geocache only 1.5 kms from my home. Took some pix for y'all -- and found the cache.
Above is shown the main street of Fisksätra at sundown. Lots of people from all around the world taking an evening walk, kids hanging around, and near the camera Eddie the goldsmith and his tall girlfriend on their way out for a barbecue dinner by the lake.
Lake…
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2007Registration has opened for The Amazing Meeting 5.5, a skeptical conference in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida on 25-27 January 2008. The conference takes its name from skeptical godfather James (The Amazing) Randi, who will preside over the event together with Hal Bidlack. The theme of the meeting is Skepticism & Activism. Among the speakers are 9/11-conspiracy skeptic Mark Roberts, Skepchick founder Rebecca Watson, anti-psychic campaigner Robert S. Lancaster and sf author Michael A. Stackpole.
I'm going to TAM 5.5 as an emissary of the Swedish Skeptics Society (Vetenskap och Folkbildning) and…
aardvarchaeology | August 3, 2007As an archaeologist you get a funny perspective on time -- occupational hazard. For years I've been musing about what traces our era will leave to last into the far future. I've been thinking about six-lane highways with their cuttings through hills and their earthen banks across depressions. In my mind's eye I've seen my housing area as a pasture, sheep grazing across gridded grass-covered rectangular mounds of building debris.
Journalist Alan Weisman didn't stop at musing about all this. He went out and talked to a bewildering number of people around the world about it. The result is a fine…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2007On-line Open Access "journals" and e-text repositories are very nice, but archaeology doesn't have any big or commonly used ones yet. This may be about to change with the Italian site Journal of Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Archaeology.
At the moment, much of the site is in Italian. Full-text repository searches for the words "Mesolithic", "Mycenaean" and "Merovingian" didn't turn up any hits. "Bronze" scored four hits, "Iron" six. Worse, the material published in the Journal doesn't seem to have been entered into the repository, and I could find no PDF files, only texts hacked up into…
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2007The twentieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to put a spring in your step and a glint in your eye.
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2007Recent discoveries by my friend Lars got me thinking about New Age archaeology. The Mid-summer hippie/druid vs. police battles for Stonehenge are legendary. A few years ago I was given a guided tour of the Salisbury Plain's finest sites by my charming scholar friend Rebecca Montague. Entering the West Kennet long barrow's megalithic burial chamber, I felt a marked scent of joss sticks. Becca told me about Mid-summer nights at Silbury Hill, when she was posted to kindly ask hippies not to scale the vulnerable monument. Many agreed not to, but one greying lady became very irate. Before stomping…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Mesolithic, Sweden; arkeologi, mesolitikum, jägarstenåldern, Stockholm.]
My old buddy from undergrad days, hard-core Mesolithic scholar, painter and woodsman Mattias Pettersson, sent me a pair of wonderful breathless letters on 19 and 21 July about new high-end discoveries. This is all about ancient seal-hunting camps in an area with dramatic shore displacement, which is why Mattias is so happy to get high -- 75 meters above current sea level! High means early here, so early that the top sites are pushing the chronological limit set by the last Ice Age. (…
aardvarchaeology | July 30, 2007
I've been largely oblivious to the emo movement in music and youth culture, but being a pop music fan I feel I should find out a little about this recent mass-market outgrowth of the hardcore punk scene. Opportunity struck in the most recent issue of kids' mag Kamratposten left on the john by my 9-y-o son. Enthroned, I found a feature piece about a heavily eyelinered 14-y-o Stockholm emo-subculture girl, with a list of five emo bands deemed important by her. I read up about them on Allmusic, and offer the list with my commentary in the following for anyone who wants to learn about emo music…
aardvarchaeology | July 29, 2007Wednesday 1 August the will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Afarensis. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to the proprietor ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
There's an open hosting slot on 29 August and further ones later in the fall. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.