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 | July 29, 2007
From Pär Svensson of Kurtz, this fine portrait of a red river hog, Potamochoerus porcus, in Berlin's zoo. These cool-looking omnivores make their home in sub-Saharan Africa.
From the same recent zoo visit, our cerebal rock guitarist provides us with a peek at the nocturnal fellows who give this blog part of its name.
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2007Our local newspaper Nacka-Värmdö-Posten for 24 July has an item by Evelina Stucki that I would be remiss to keep from you, Dear Reader (and I translate).
"Last summer, three Värmdö girls went to Brighton in Great Britain. Before leaving, they had tried to contact their host family, but the phone number they had been given did not work. When they arrived, it turned out that there were thirteen people living in the house. [...] the family was prone to fighting, and the girls allegedly did not get much to eat.
The host father had changed his name to Elvis Presley and the host parents were…
aardvarchaeology | July 27, 2007
I've run into an interesting ethical conundrum involving Molluscum contagiosum. It's a viral infection common among kids, where a pox-family virus causes little pale warts that usually remain from six to nine months. Once the last lesion is gone you seem to become resistant, and the complaint is rare in adults. According to Wikipedia, 17% of kids go through it, mostly between the ages of 2 and 12. There's no antiviral treatment: usually nothing is done about molluscum as removal involves the same regimen of soaking, mechanical scrubbing and mild corrosive agents as for warts, only you have…
aardvarchaeology | July 26, 2007A weakness of mine is that the memories of a few embarrassing events in my past sometimes come back to haunt me and make me cringe with self-loathing. Very likely, I am the only person in the world who ever thinks of (or even remembers) these events, but I just can't help feeling bad about them. Two of the worst have to do with archaeology and English, and so I thought I might as well dump them on you, Dear Reader.
1. Summer of 1993. I am 21, working my second season as a field archaeologist, and I've just learned about context-stratigraphic excavation and documentation methods à la Edward…
aardvarchaeology | July 25, 2007Back in January I ran a Greatest Hits roundup for my pre-Aard blog site. Now Razib has taught me how to check which Aard entries are the most-read ones via Google Analytics. Many are of course carnivals, and the rest are heavily influenced by who has linked to them, but anyway: here are the ten most-read non-carnival Aard entries since 1 January.
Wish I Could Do That In Linux
Scandinavian Attitudes to Nudity
Subway Beggar Retaliation
Are Humans Polygamous?
Jim Benton on the Atheist / Agnostic Issue
Modelling the World in Real Time
Circumcision and Clean Syringes
Book Review: Stenger, God,…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2007In today's paper issue of main Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter is a news item headlined "Hobby Researcher Gives New Signs to Stones" (currently not available on-line, but here's another relevant piece). It relays a few statements from museologist Ewa Bergdahl of the Swedish National Heritage Board regarding the Ales stenar visitor's sign debacle. Bergdahl is head of the Heritage Tourism unit.
--There isn't just one single truth. This place is so incredibly more complex than previously believed, says Ewa Bergdahl, unit director at the National Heritage Board.
[...]
The Heritage Board has long…
aardvarchaeology | July 23, 2007
As discussed here in a recent entry, there has long been a conflict over Ales stenar, a prehistoric stone ship monument in Scania, southern Sweden. Scholarship has argued that like all other large stone ships in southern Scandinavia with ample space between the standing stones, Ales stenar was built as a grave marker (or perhaps assembly site) in the late 1st Millennium AD. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed the date. On the other hand, amateur archaeo-astronomer Bob Lind has led a vociferous campaign asserting that the ship is several thousand years older than that and originally built as a…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2007
"Damn ye, Gods!" Photo by Pär Svensson / Kurtz.
Welcome everyone to Aardvarchaeology and the 71st Carnival of the Godless! The carnival is a bi-weekly roundup of godless blogging from around the net. Aardvarchaeology is mainly about Scandinavian archaeology and various skeptical issues, but I rarely discuss religion much. You see, in my native Sweden, it's not such a big deal. Few people here give much thought to faith issues. Our churches are empty and our political discourse godless. Come visit some time! But now, on to the reality-based blogging.
George at Dirty Greek explores the…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2007
A large and varied 10th century silver hoard of typical Scandinavian character with international components has been found at Harrogate in Yorkshire. Amateur metal detectorists made the find and immediately notified the authorities.
Thanks to Tim at Walking the Berkshires and Jeff Lanam for the tip-off.
aardvarchaeology | July 19, 2007
For years and years, there has been an on-going conflict over Ales stenar, a prehistoric stone ship monument in Scania, southern Sweden. Scholarship has argued that like all other large stone ships in southern Scandinavia with ample space between the standing stones, Ales stenar was built as a grave marker in the late 1st Millennium AD. Radiocarbon dating has confirmed the date. On the other hand, amateur archaeo-astronomer Bob Lind has led a vociferous campaign asserting that the ship is several thousand years older than that and originally built as a calendarical observatory. People have…
aardvarchaeology | July 19, 2007
Some time around the turn of the millennium a friend gave me a cactus. It's been sitting happily in its pot ever since, proliferating into a cluster of green phalli until it was clearly too big for the pot. Yesterday I relented and transplanted it to a larger one. This involved a few arcane steps to make sure it would continue to thrive, steps I will describe in the following. The thing to note here is that I didn't know what I was doing. I have no cactus expertise, instead making it all up as I went along. Watch closely -- and kids, do try this at home.
Getting the cactus out of the pot…
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2007
From that soft-spoken friend of all Sweden's little idiosyncracies, Paddy K, a fresh cell phone snapshot of Kilnaughton abbey in Tarbert, County Kerry, south-west Ireland. The ruins are 600 years old and the site is still in use as a cemetery: among other illustrious lineages, the K clan has a family plot.
Tarbert is a common place name on the Celtic fringe, meaning "isthmus", Sw. näs, a narrow stretch of land between two bodies of water. A well-informed source assures me that the ones in Scotland are quite inferior to the Co. Kerry original.
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2007Over at my buddy Frans-Arne's blog Arkeologi i Nord I found a great quotation from Norwegian archaeologist and anti-Nazi politician Anton Wilhelm Brøgger (1884-1951):
"Det vi vet er så uendelig lite mot det som er hendt. Arkeologen er som den som går langs en strand og finner småtterier, skyllet i land fra et forsvunnet skib. Men selve skibet som gikk i dypet med menneskene får han aldri se."
"What we know is infinitely little compared to what once happened. The archaeologist is like one who walks along the shore and finds little bits and pieces, flotsam from a lost ship. But the ship that…
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2007
People have been everywhere on Earth and whatever they did originally in a certain spot rarely continues into the present. The Swedish legal definition of an archaeological site is that it should contain remains of people's activities in the past that have become permanently discontinued. This means that our planet's entire surface (including the waste-strewn ocean floors) is a cultural landscape, a single humongous archaeological site. Our global culture layer also extends to celestial bodies such as neighbouring planets, moons and even a comet. A weightless culture layer orbits Earth in…
aardvarchaeology | July 17, 2007Yesterday at the beach, Charles Stross's 2005 novel Accelerando in hand, I introduced my dear friend, the Aard lurker and professional logician Tor, to the concept of Singularity. Explains Wikipedia:
The Technological Singularity is the hypothesized creation, usually via AI or brain-computer interfaces, of smarter-than-human entities who rapidly accelerate technological progress beyond the capability of human beings to participate meaningfully in said progress. Futurists have varying opinions regarding the time, consequences, and plausibility of such an event.
I.J. Good first explored the…
aardvarchaeology | July 16, 2007Orac mentioned that he runs recurring De-Lurking Days on his blog. "Lurking" is to hang around a web forum or a blog without making your presence known. "De-Lurking" is to come out into the light of on-line day, however briefly.
Aard currently has about a hundred visits by returning readers every day, and most regulars don't come here every day. This means that Aard must have several hundred lurkers.
Dear Reader, is Aard on your blog reading list? Then please make a comment, as brief as you like. Thank you.
aardvarchaeology | July 16, 2007
Without much fanfare, the Department of Archaeology in Lund continues its excavations at the insanely large and wealthy 1st Millennium settlement at Uppåkra parish church outside Lund. This place was clearly a royal seat and the finds are unbelievably rich both in number and quality. A week-by-week fieldwork diary in Swedish is available here, and that's where I've nicked the photographs of gold finds from recent weeks: one of two gold bracteates and a gold filigree cross pendant, all dating from c. AD 500. The two new bracteates are identical to each other and to one found at the site and…
aardvarchaeology | July 15, 2007
Last night to Tantogården in Stockholm, an outdoor concert venue a stone's throw from the hospital where my son was born, to hear Pugh Rogefeldt. As the long-term Dear Reader may remember, Mr Rogefeldt released Ja dä ä dä, one of the first and still among the very best Swedish psychedelic rock albums ever, back in 1969 when he was 22. The evening promised not only songs from Ja dä ä dä, but those songs played by the same band as on the record, with Jojje Wadenius on solo guitar and Jan Carlsson on drums, with the addition of Ulf Jansson on bass. Pugh played rhythm guitar and sang.
With two…
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2007Starting in 2004, the Department for Zionist Activities of the World Zionist Organization has given the annual Herzl Awards to "outstanding young men and women in recognition of their exceptional efforts on behalf of Israel and the Zionist cause". One of the prize-winners for 2006 is Swedish 26-y-o Ted Ekeroth, who was rewarded for his activities in Fidim, the Society for Israel and Democracy in the Middle East.
After giving the award to Ekeroth, the WZO realised that their net had caught a somewhat unusual breed of young political activist. Ekeroth turned out to be a core member of…