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 | February 14, 2015I've finalised the cover of my upcoming book with designer Bitte Granlund!
Cover image: detail of a rock-art panel at Hemsta in Boglösa, Uppland. An axe with its characteristic s-shaped haft, an incomplete ship and two cupmarks. According to Johan Ling, the panel’s ship types and the level above the sea indicate a date in Per. II, about 1400 cal BC. The closest known Early Bronze Age deposition site is Hjältängarna at Grop-Norrby in Vårfrukyrka, about 14 km to the NNW. An axe was deposited there a century or two after the Hemsta carvings were made. Photograph by Sven-Gunnar Broström.
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2015Facebook's Android app seems to be monitoring whom I talk to on my phone. A few days after I've called somebody who wants to submit a paper to Fornvännen, or after I've texted the mom of one of Jrette's buddies, the web site will suddenly suggest, "Hey, maybe you might want to be Facebook buddies with this person you didn't even know was on Fb, and with whom you have no shared Fb contacts!". And there's that person.
It's possible, I guess, that this is actually set off by those people looking at my profile on Facebook. But it's happened a few times too many. I wonder...
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2015Medical marijuana is just a backward strategy to get recreational marijuana legalised. It's like the potheads twenty years ago who would praise hemp's excellent properties as a fibre and fuel source. They didn't care about any other fibre crops. It was a transparent ruse.
A medical intervention's legality should be pushed by worldwide medical consensus, not by a regional cultural predisposition to enjoy the compound's recreational use. Medical marijuana is a non-issue in European medicine.
That said, I believe the enormous public money put into the customs, legal and punitive systems to…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2015Bitte Granlund of Happy Book has sent me PDF proofs for my forthcoming Bronze Age book, looking bee-you-tiful!
If you'd like to help me proofread it, please email me. Everyone who finds ten errors gets a dedicated copy sent by mail.
To my delight, the response to my plea has been strong. At the moment I believe I have enough volunteer proof readers.
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2015Me & Jrette just sat in deck chairs and took turns watching comet Lovejoy through hand binoculars. The nucleus is like a big pale fuzzy blob among the stars. Start from the Pleiades, which are gorgeous in simple binoculars, and move about 10 Pleiades diameters in the 4 o'clock direction to find the comet. Last time I saw a comet was in 1996, Hyakutake.
Movie: Birdman. Possibly psychotic former action movie star puts on Broadway play. Grade: pass.
My ex's winter swimming buddy lost her gold chain on the beach yesterday. It was a recent gift from her hubbie and she hadn't told him. I lent…
aardvarchaeology | January 30, 2015 Country Funk -- Country Funk (1970)
Here are some good albums that I’ve been listening to lately.
Country Funk -- Country Funk (1970). Not country and not funk: folk psych.
GOAT -- Commune (2014). Eclectic psychedelia with screamy female vocals and bongos!
Opeth -- Pale Communion (2014). When black metal ages into virtuoso prog rock.
Pixies -- Indie Cindy (2014). Eclectic alt-rock, does not look back.
Teenage Fanclub -- Shadows (2010). Fannies doing what they do best.
Wooden Shjips -- West (2011). Drony stony spacey.
aardvarchaeology | January 26, 2015I'm not a big blog reader, sad to tell, and I have almost no insight into what's going on elsewhere in the science blogosphere including ScienceBlogs. But a few days ago I got curious about what the network I'm on is like these days, and I did some investigating. I was surprised by what I found. In the following, when I talk about active blogs, I mean blogs that have seen an entry in the past month.
On 24 January, ScienceBlogs had only 19 active blogs.* Eleven of these opened in 2006, Sb's first year. The network had no less than 112 inactive blogs, most of which started after 2006. This…
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2015The Opportunity rover landed on Mars eleven Earth calendar years ago today, and it still works fine after driving ~42 km! This is the farthest any off-planet vehicle has gone so far. Oppy's mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years and then functioned as a stationary science platform for another year before getting killed off by a Martian winter it couldn’t avoid. Amazing engineering that keeps working year after year without a technician so much as touching it.
At the moment Oppy is still exploring the rim of Endeavour crater, where it's spent several years. The rover…
aardvarchaeology | January 24, 2015After my first marriage I briefly dated a stoner girl. She was sweet and mild-mannered, her conversation laggy. There was a sleepy micro-pause before each of her replies. She'd spent four years on social security in a Copenhagen squat, smoking pot as a full-time occupation, before moving back to Stockholm and finding a job. Here's her festival pregnancy story, as I remember it.
"I met Robert from Ringkøbing at the Roskilde rock festival. We got along really well and ended up in my tent together. Weeks later I realised that I was pregnant. This turned out to be a pretty complicated thing. I…
aardvarchaeology | January 17, 2015Fornvännen 2014:2 is now on-line on Open Access.
Hans Göransson on Middle Neolithic vegetation history.
Frans-Arne Stylegar reinterprets a famous Viking Period grave find with smith's tools.
Ronnie Carlsson & Christian Lovén on the urban parish churches of Medieval Uppsala.
Anders G. Nord & Käte Tronner analyse the paint residues on Medieval church sculpture and murals.
Påvel Nicklasson on Eva Brag and Ida Nilsson, two Swedish women in 19th century archaeology.
Håkan Svensson argues that the current setup of Swedish contract archaeology and metal detector legislation poses a constant…
aardvarchaeology | January 17, 2015Five years ago I blogged about a study by the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education, identifying the higher education degrees that were likely to give you the best chances of a Swedish job in the period 2010-2020. This was because I complain a lot here on the blog about how useless a degree in anything even remotely similar to archaeology is, and I wanted to say something positive for a change. The careers that looked promising in 2010 were in lower-paying positions in healthcare, education and tech.
Now the Swedish Public Employment Service has published a similar study of what…
aardvarchaeology | January 16, 2015
From now on I'm not appending my CV with job applications any more. I'll send a list of my LinkedIn endorsements instead.
We've seen a series of arson attempts on Swedish mosques, almost certainly motivated by xenophobia and racism. A lot of good people are showing their solidarity with the country's Muslims by sticky-taping paper hearts and letters of support to the doors and walls of mosques. I'm conflicted. I condemn arson, xenophobia and racism. But I also oppose collectively organised religion. I don't want the country's mosques or churches burned down. I want them converted to secular…
aardvarchaeology | January 9, 2015Fornvännen 2014:1 is now on-line on Open Access. We've had trouble with our on-line archive for more than a month. This was because the UV units, Sweden's largest contract archaeology organisation, moved from the umbrella of the National Heritage Board to that of the Swedish History Museum. The IT folks were super busy with the move, but now they've got Fornvännen's stuff up and running again.
Sven Kalmring on evidence for contacts with Eastern Europe from the Viking town Hedeby.
Anne Monikander on Early Iron Age strike-a-light stones.
Robin Lindblad on Viking Period fishing and sheep…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2015Last spring I stepped down from the chair and the editorial board of the Swedish Skeptics, but I remain an enthusiastic member of the association and we have a really strong executive board these days. Now they have announced the Swedish Skeptics' annual awards for 2014.
The Enlightener of the Year award is given to Viralgranskaren, “The Viral Investigator”, a column in the Swedish version of the free subway newspaper Metro. Here journalists Jack Werner, Linnéa Jonjons och Åsa Larsson investigate claims that go viral on the social media: everything from fake celebrity deaths to racist…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2015 Yay! The new reading chair finally arrived!
Sw. kujon "coward" is cognate with Sp. cojon "testicle". Both go back to Lat. coleus "leather sack". In the Swedish case the cowardly sense comes by way of a word for eunuch.
I never did understand what exe2bin did.
Wife: ”After I've been out running I always feel so good-looking!” Me: ”You mean running improves the accuracy of your eyesight and your powers of objective observation?”
Rossi, the founder of the French ski manufacturer Rossignol, was the son of a gnome and a troll and did much to improve tolerance of gnolls in Alpine sports.…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2015Here are the ten boardgames I played the most during 2014.
Sechs nimmt / Category 5 (1994, gets swift intense buy-in even from non-gamers) *
Innovation (2010)
Magic: the Gathering (1993) *
Plato 3000 (2012) *
Keltis (2008, travel version, very handy)
Glass Road (2013) *
Archaeology: the Card Game (2007) *
For Sale (1997)
Qwirkle (2006) *
Samurai (1998) *
These are mostly short games that you can play repeatedly in one evening. Only Glass Road, Qwirkle and Samurai are a bit longer. Another long game that I played a lot was Elfenland. All are highly recommended! Except Archaeology, a game of…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2014Things are coming together with the post-excavation work for last summer's castle investigations so I'm putting some stuff on-line here.
I've submitted a paper detailing the main results to a proceedings volume for the Castella Maris Baltici symposium in Lodz back in May. There are no illustrations in the file, but you'll find all you need here on the blog in various entries tagged ”Castles”.
Osteologist Rudolf Gustavsson has completed his reports on the bones from the two sites (Landsjö – Stensö).
For the Dear Reader who doesn't read Swedish, a short summary of Rudolf's results is in order.…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2014I’ve been blogging for a bit more than nine years now, and today Aard turns eight! Traffic for Oct, Nov, Dec has been ~450 daily readers. Dear Reader, is there anything you'd like me to write about?
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2014 GOAT: the new groovy weirdness from Gothenburg
Here are some good albums that I've been listening to lately.
Dowling Poole - Bleak Strategies (2014). For all who miss the later Beatles and the Super Furry Animals.
GOAT - World Music (2012). Eclectic psychedelia with screamy female vocals and bongos!
GOAT - Commune (2014). Again!
Mahavishnu Orchestra - The Inner Mounting Flame (1971). Proggy jazz fusion with violin and odd time signatures.
Nashville Pussy - Say Something Nasty (2002). AC/DC rock with dirty funny lyrics.
Soundtrack of our Lives - Behind the Music (2001). Classic rock updated…
aardvarchaeology | December 27, 2014 Jon Peterson: Playing at the World. Highly recommended to gamers!
Here are my best reads in English during 2014. My total was 49 books and 14 of them were e-books. Find me at Goodreads!
In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build a Perfect Language. Arika Okrent 2009.
Redshirts. John Scalzi 2012. Space opera from the viewpoint of the nameless extras.
The Bone People. Keri Hulme 1984. This novel has great strengths in the language and characterisation. And a major weakness in the almost nonexistent plotting.…