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 | December 17, 2014 There will be a spring after winter! They're planting bulbs down at the Saltsjöbaden Centrum mall.
Anglophones, why do you say "might" instead of "may" when expressing uncertainty? If you're certain, you say "I'll eat some bread". If uncertain, you sometimes just say "I may eat some bread". But usually you form a needless subjunctive, "I might eat some bread". Sometimes you even use this mode to express certainty! I sometimes wonder if you aim at grammatical optimisation at all. Do you even know that ”may” and ”might” are the same verb?
Some people are angry because they have no voice in…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2014It's been a busy couple of days with a lot of publicity. Monday morning a paper I've co-authored with my friend, geophysics specialist Andreas Viberg, was published in the on-line version of Archaeological Prospection. For reasons of scientific priority (which I myself like to establish by spilling everything I do onto the blog immediately) I've been sitting on this since April of 2013, so it feels real good to finally blog about it. Here's a brief summary.
There's a huge weird barrow at Aska in Hagebyhöga near Vadstena in Östergötland. It's oval and flat instead of round and domed.
My old…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2014This chocolate praline contains something that looks and smells like shampoo. Apparently it's flavoured with elderflower extract.
Jrette prints out song lyrics and fixes them to the outside of the shower cubicle as aids to singing in the shower.
I'm kind of OK with most subcultural dress codes. But I really gotta say: young men wearing oversize baseball caps or stocking caps indoors look like they're in Kindergarten.
I'm confused by the feminism that on one hand condemns the wearing of Hawaii shirts with beach babe cartoons, on the other hand organises proud plus-size burlesque shows. Would…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2014Here's an interesting case regarding Muslim women's veils. They're instruments or symbols of patriarchal repression, right? Well, check this out.
Dania Mahmudi is from my area, Fisksätra. She's 14 years old and wears a veil. Mahmudi has been practising karate for years. Two weeks ago she went with her club to the district championship, eager to compete. But the umpire disqualified her – for her veil's sake. It covered her throat, and karate competition rules state that the umpire needs to be able to watch for damage to each contestant's throat. OK, said her coach after a heated argument, so…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2014Pompeii situations, where daily life at a settlement has suddenly and catastrophically been terminated and the site has then been abandoned, are extremely rare and extremely informative. As has recently been discovered, the Sandby fortified settlement on the island of Öland offers a Pompeii situation from about AD 500. The settlement has been attacked, its inhabitants killed or abducted, and then the aggressors just closed the doors and never came back, leaving their victims and all their considerable wealth still inside the houses.
So far the Kalmar County Museum's excavations at Sandby have…
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2014I spent last weekend at the annual boardgaming retreat organised by my friend Oscar. This was my fifth retreat, and I enjoyed it greatly. Oscar negotiates a good off-season all-inclusive deal for 25 of us at a small rural hotel, and then we spend two days gaming and sharing meals. People bring huge numbers of boardgames, many quite new and exciting. The gender ratio is always heavily skewed towards the male side. Most participants are in their 30s or 40s.
This year I played uncommonly long games, all of which where good, all of which were new to me, and at all of which I got roundly beaten.…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2014No, Kim Stanley Robinson, when two groups of characters meet and tell each other what they've gone through recently under the reader's watchful eye, you shouldn't write that dialogue. Because the reader already knows.
Back when my father-in-law the engineer had just come to Sweden from China and worked as a waiter, he used to have a few hours off in the afternoon. One day he decided to relax with a movie, despite understanding neither the English dialogue nor the Swedish subtitles. He was confused and horrified by what he happened to see: Alien.
Feeling flush after my intense September bout…
aardvarchaeology | November 17, 2014Before this month I'd never attended a film festival in any concerted way. But I was inspired by Ken & Robin's podcast to do so, and got myself a membership card for the Stockholm Film Festival, 5–16 November. The festival's excellent web site made it easy for me to choose which viewings to attend. And I enjoyed myself! Teaching in Umeå and a boardgaming retreat in Nyköping took chunks out of the festival for me, but I still managed to see nine feature films and a programme of nine short films.
Three of the feature films have my particular recommendation:
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night…
aardvarchaeology | November 7, 2014I follow the decommissioning of Sweden's churches keenly for several reasons. I like churches, the older the better, but I don't like the Church much. And I take great interest in the West's ongoing secularisation process. Before, I've blogged about how Maglarp Church was torn down, about how Örja church was sold as housing and about the National Heritage Board's advice to congregations that decide to stop heating their churches.
Two upscale 1890s dissenter churches in the posh Östermalm precinct of Stockholm have been similarly de-sanctified in the past year.
A year ago, a real estate…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2014What are the best arguments to keep your home wifi password protected? I think it's a pain in the ass. My retired neighbour makes prophecies of doom involving child pornographers standing around with laptops outside my fence, distributing contraband files and leaving me to do the jail time.
I tell my students that the two most important pieces of information I'll be handing out, the ones they should remember after they've forgotten everything else from Scandy Archaeology 101, are these. 1. Agriculture starts in 3950 BC. 2. From that time and 5000 years on, most Scandies live in post-borne…
aardvarchaeology | October 24, 2014 Landsjö castle. State of knowledge after the 2014 excavations.
I'm giving a talk on Landsjö castle to the Kimstad Historical Society next week, and while preparing my presentation I made a sketch plan of this summer's discoveries regarding the plan. The ruin just barely breaks the turf, so we didn't know much about the castle's layout beforehand except that it had a 60-metre straight stretch of perimeter wall along the west side and that it cannot have been rectangular.
Our main architectural discoveries in two July weeks of digging and clearing brush were as follows.
1. A wall divides the…
aardvarchaeology | October 20, 2014Anders Winroth (born in 1965) is a Swedish historian who received his PhD from Columbia in 1996 and now holds an endowed professorship in history at Yale. He has written several books on the Viking Period for lay readers, the latest one of which I've been given to review.
The main contents of The Age of the Vikings is organised into eight chapters on:
Raiding and warfare
Emigration and overseas settlement
Ships in reality and mythology
Trade
The development of political leadership
Home life in Scandinavia and the roles of women
Religion
Arts and lettersAll eight are well written and…
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2014My whole housing development recently changed Internet Service Providers. We now have optical fibre from Ownit, offering hundreds of megabits per second. It works just fine. But there's a security issue and Ownit aren't taking it seriously.
All over Sweden, Ownit are deploying wifi routers that work out of the box. If you want to change any settings on your router (such as the name of the access point or the wifi password), you'll find a URL in the manual which brings up a set of admin menus. Same URL on all their routers. All over Sweden.
Actually, Ownit holds the password to the “admin”…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2014The Relentless Babblings of the Darkmire Soothsayer: "And then there shall come a day when things will be lost and people won't know where things really are and brothers will run away for absolutely no reason at all and fathers won't know where other fathers are or where they once were. And friends will walk about with strange things wrapped around themselves and things will happen on distant hills and parents will look for things and won't find them because of what their children had done the night before. And the sky will do strange and wonderful things that no one knows of and people will…
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2014I did a fun exercise with my Umeå archaeology freshmen Monday: a role-playing debate about the ethics of burial archaeology. The framework was a hearing at the Ministry of Culture regarding a planned revision of the Ancient Monuments Law.
I assigned randomised groups of up to 4 students roles as archaeologists, neopagans, the Swedish Church, a housing development firm, Satanists, Saami nationalists and recently arrived Syrian Orthodox Turks. Each group got a slip of paper telling them what their opinions were about burial archaeology, above-ground curation of human remains and reburial. I…
aardvarchaeology | October 1, 2014Did I just tell the students that "polysemic" refers to people who donate repeatedly to sperm banks? Surely not?
In mid-70s Dungeons & Dragons, players would often bring their characters from one dungeon master and gaming group to another, effectively skipping between worlds. Unheard of in Swedish 80s and 90s gaming.
Annoying: seeing that the next five end-notes in the book I'm reading are just brief citations with no interesting text, making a mental note of this, then forgetting and looking the following end-note up anyway. I wish end-notes would be consistently narrative text or …
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2014Fornvännen 2013:4 is now on-line on Open Access.
Ulf Ragnesten on an ornate late-1st millenium BC bronze chain belt from a cremation grave in a Gothenburg suburb.
Lars Larsson and Bengt Söderberg on recent excavations at the huge 1st millennium AD royal manor complex of Uppåkra, with in situ arson victims found among the building remains. (Just like what has more recently been found at Sandby fort on Öland!)
Pia Bengtsson Melin on recently found Romanesque mural fragments in Marka church in Västergötland.
Anders Högberg et al. on scientific characterisation of flint from Polish and South…
aardvarchaeology | September 22, 2014The Sweden Democrats (SD) is a racist populist party that got 13% of the vote in the recent Swedish parliamentary election. They got into Parliament four years ago at the expense of the Labour Party. This time around they more than doubled their support at the expense of the Conservative Party, who lost a precarious hold on government to Labour and the Greens.
The 87% of the country who didn't vote for the racists are asking how the fuck this could happen. A common and, to my mind, convincing explanation starts from the demography of the SD voters. Sweden has low unemployment, high general…
aardvarchaeology | September 15, 2014Why you should never get a tattoo: it's a fashion item that can never be upgraded. Imagine being forced to wear 1979 glasses all of your life from age 18 on.
So boring to proofread hyphenation.
Artists referenced in the sleeve notes to Goat's first album: 1. Dan Andersson, 2. Boubacar Traoré.
Jrette has excellent innate inscrutability skills. She tells me she's taken to ignoring boys who demand her attention or some of her Saturday candy. Oh boys and men of the 2020s and 30s, you will be sooo ignored.
Since 1991, we've sent 84 people into my copy of Dungeonquest. Only 31% have survived. This…
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2014"He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel gray, reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and initiative."
Edgar Rice Burroughs 1917, A Princess of Mars
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Frank N. Furter: "How forceful you are, Brad. Such a perfect specimen of manhood. So... dominant. You must be awfully proud of him, Janet. Do you have any tattoos, Brad?"
Richard O'Brien 1975, The…