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 | April 8, 2014This little guy is the new face of Old Uppsala. Most likely a religious amulet, being too small for a gaming piece, he showed up as a corroded lump in a cremation grave of the Late Vendel Period, early-8th century. The same grave also yielded a lovely millefiori glass bird gem, glass beads, and very unusually for its time, molten remains of silver objects. To my knowledge this is the richest female Vendel Period grave found to date at the old nucleus of Svealand, that is, the best candidate for the grave of an 8th century Queen of the Swedes.
Read more at the Old Uppsala project blog kept by…
aardvarchaeology | April 2, 2014Swedish Mail's money transfer numbers usually have eight digits. My mother's number has four. This is because the account was originally opened by her grandfather in 1925, shortly after the service started.
Kipling was quite conservative in many things, but still a recurrent theme in his short stories is a deep sympathy for women who have extra-marital affairs and children.
I've become a 2010s computer user. I catch myself expecting screens to be touch screens.
Would the scifi story mag Analog sell better if they renamed it Anal Log?
Certain countries have their own sexual acts. And it struck…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2014As detailed here before, a few Samsung laptop models have a firmware bug that makes them liable to becoming inert bricks if you install Linux. It's a one-way process. This happened to me when I bought an ultrabook from the Elgiganten big-box store last summer. Both Samsung and the store refused to reimburse me for the loss of my machine's use. At the suggestion of my home municipality's consumer advisor (konsumentrådgivare), I took the matter to Allmänna reklamationsnämnden, the National Board for Consumer Disputes (complaint no 2013-10081).
My main argument was that installing Linux is a…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2014I drove down to Norrköping Thursday morning to look at two small Medieval castle ruins for my new project. The one at Landsjö in Kimstad is difficult to reach because it's on a small island in a lake where nobody keeps a boat. So I had bought one of those big tractor-tyre things (that people tug after their motorboats) and a hand pump, and borrowed a kayak paddle from my dad. Turned out that the textile sheath that forms the floor of the ring I was sitting in was anything but watertight, so my bottom got soaked in 5°C lake water. No matter, I was thrilled to get out to the island, which is…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2014Current Archaeology #287 (February) has news of a roundhouse foundation that really caught my eye. English Iron Age roundhouses are usually visible simply as a circular ditch or a post circle. This house, at Broadbridge Heath in Sussex, had a foundation ditch shaped like a slightly open number 6: a spiral! I also enjoyed Nadia Durrani's eight-page feature on the historical archaeology of Early Modern London theatres and bear-baiting rings.
Chris Catling asks an interesting question regarding the ownership to land and to any ores under that land in the UK: these can and often do belong to…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2014I found an excellent argument in a recent paper by Svend Hansen,* clinching something in a particularly satisfying way.
Certain Bronze Age hoards in Northern Europe contain a lot of fragmented objects. But the pieces rarely add up to complete artefacts. In 2001 Stuart Needham argued that this may be due to a custom similar to that known e.g. from ancient Greece, where an animal was sacrificed and only certain parts that make poor eating were burnt as offerings to a god (a sleight of hand taught to humanity by Prometheus the trickster). Perhaps most scrap metal hoards from Northern Europe…
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2014How come we have any idea of the diameter of the Oort cloud? And how does it relate spatially to the Kuiper belt?
Ridiculous tiny Mac keyboard. No F keys, no delete key, tiny cursor movement keys.
Research is a pretty open-ended activity that demands a certain amount of creativity. Among the many advantages of my part-time editorial job are that I've got it almost entirely scripted, what I should do first is almost always clear and it demands no creativity whatsoever. Guaranteed productivity regardless of mood.
Jrette asks me why Småland province, "Little Land", is actually extremely large…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2014
The lyrics to Dusty Springfield's 1970 song ”Spooky” are slightly odd. They have a woman describing her relationship with a fickle, unreliable, flirtatious man. ”Love's kind of crazy with a spooky little boy like you”. She constantly finds him winking with his “little eye” at other women. “I get confused and I don't know where I stand / But then you smile and hold my hand.” On the other hand, she won't give him a straight answer when he tries to ask her out. For the time definitely, and largely to a 2014 audience as well I believe, the gender roles in the lyrics are confusing. This is…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2014Guldgubbar are tiny pieces of gold foil with (usually) embossed motifs. They most commonly depict single men, then embracing couples, then single women, all in fine clothing. They date from the Vendel Period (540-790) and seem to have been religious artefacts. Usually they are found in the remains of elite residences, concentrating in and around roof-bearing postholes in the main hall. They form this gold-poor period's continuation of the Migration Period's gold bractate pendants and other sumptuous goldwork.
Gold foil figures weren't necessarily made where they are found. They are eminently…
aardvarchaeology | March 3, 2014The Lion of Pireus is a large 4th century BC marble statue that was moved from Pireus, the port of Athens, to Venice in 1688. It is now at the city's Arsenal. The Lion has unmistakeable Swedish 11th century runic inscriptions which have been known to Scandinavian scholars since 1798/99. Clearly they have something to do with the Varangian Guard, Swedish soldiers in the employ of the Byzantine Emperor from the 980s onward. But due to poor preservation, the message carried by those runes has been believed lost.
There is a cast of the Lion at the Historical Museum in Stockholm, and I've often…
aardvarchaeology | March 1, 2014Started reading Jacobsen's Midt i en klunketid, laughed helplessly on first page. Da. klunketiden literally means "the time of big tassels" and refers to a furnishing style of the 1880s and 90s.
Dryden is hugely popular with badgers.
It never ceases to annoy me that when application reviewers explain why they don't think I should have a certain job, they point out intentional characteristics of my work. Yes, thank you, I know that's what my work is like. I think everybody should be doing what I do. I have spent 20 years telling you that I think the stuff you're missing from my work is…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2014
Only one of these books was given a title with the word "nudge" in it by people with a frame of reference similar to mine.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Thaler & Sunstein 2008.
Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge Nudge, Think Think! Gary L. Hardcastle et al. 2006.
Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who's Already There. Leonard Sweet 2010.
A Gentle Nudge in the Right Direction. Joss Conlon 2012.
Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism. Cass R. Sunstein 2014.
Delivering the Neural Nudge. Roger Parry 2014.
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2014Listened to this guy on In Our Time who had a particularly unattractive verbal tick that I've come across now and then. When other people get a question and need to think before replying, they will go "errr", "well" etc. This guy sighed in a pained and exasperated way every time. I guess this really meant "It pains me that I don't have a very good answer to that question, I wish I knew better." But it came off as "It pains me that you ask me these stupid questions, you silly twat."
Jrette asks her mother what the film Nymphomaniac is about. "It's about... a woman who is very fond of men."
For…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2014I've blogged before about the woebegone Solutrean hypothesis, and I'm happy to say that it is now dead.
The oldest well-characterised archaeological culture in America is the Clovis culture. Its main diagnostic type is a large knapped stone spearhead with a fluted base. The Solutrean hypothesis starts from a comparison with spearheads from the Solutrean culture in south-west Europe, noting that certain Solutrean points have an outline that is similar to that of Clovis points. Is the Clovis point a typological descendant on the Solutrean point? No, say most Palaeolithic scholars, because never…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2014Fornvännen 2013:2, last summer's issue, is now on-line in its entirety on Open Access.
My friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell on the Stockholm area's earliest post-glacial settlement site, covered here on Aard during fieldwork in 2010.
Tony Björk and Ylva Wickberg on an early-1st millennium linear monument related to a cemetery and a river ford in Scania.
Svante Fischer et al. on how mid-1st millennium sword fittings were re-used and deposited.
Magnus Green on a 17th century angel on the run from its job as embellishment on a nobleman's sarcophagus.
Olov Gibson on the unresolved…
aardvarchaeology | February 8, 2014
To help people understand that this is a coffee cup, we have decided to decorate it with instructive pictures of coffee cups.
As my buddy Marcus Widengren commented, "Now they only have to add the words 'This is not a coffee cup' and take Magritte to the next level."
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2014The list of misdemeanours that identifies an Open Access science journal as predatory and not bona fide is long. One of them is attempts on the part of the publisher and editors to manipulate the journal's citation index, for instance by demanding that authors cite earlier work published in the same journal. If many scholars cite papers in a given journal, then that journal's index improves -- even if the citing only goes on inside the covers of the journal itself.
When I first read about this criterion I was a little embarrassed, because I do that all the time when editing Fornvännen. I don'…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2014Rare religion sighting: we put up two charming Iraqi ladies for the night because of a friend's birthday party, and they turned out to be Mandaeans, Gnostic believers in John the Baptist as Messiah.
One of my best old friends calls me, grieving, and tells me his old roomie died this morning of cancer. Age 37, leaving a wife and two small kids. I'm glad I don't have to reconcile shit like this with any idea about a good lord directing things from behind the scenes. The universe isn't trying to please us or mess with us, it's just one big indifferent randomiser.
Last night I went to bed early…
aardvarchaeology | February 4, 2014I've started to assemble pictures and maps for my Bronze Age book. Almost all known objects from deposition sites in the Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren areas have already been illustrated elsewhere. But here's an exception: a socketed bronze axe found before 1963 in a bog at Eklunda in Bred parish, near Enköping, Uppland province. It's 3,000 years old, dating from Period IV, 1100-950/20 cal BC.
Axes like this were fitted onto hafts shaped like a V with one very short arm, and held in place by a string or strap through the little lug near the base – which is damaged in this case. The verdigris…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2014It’s time we had a de-lurk around this here blog! The last one was a year ago. If you keep returning to this blog but rarely or never comment, you are a lurker, Dear Reader, and a most welcome one too.
Please comment on this entry and tell us something about yourself – like where you are, what your biggest passion is, what you’d like to see more of on the blog. And if you are a long-time lurker who has de-lurked before, re-de-lurks are much encouraged!