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 1, 2014My wife and I were congratulating ourselves on how nicely we (unlike others) had cleaned up after our fireworks last night. Then we realised that actually, most of the contents of those fireworks packages we didn't clean up at all. We used rockets to shoot the stuff into the sky, later to land randomly on roofs, in trees and in people's yards where we will never even try to retrieve them.
Gravity is highly recommended! And the coolest thing is that it isn't a scifi movie. It's a contemporary disaster movie about NASA astronauts with a strong female lead.
The Queen should give an MBE to a male…
aardvarchaeology | January 23, 2014We interrupt this transmission for a puerile message from Medieval Bergen. It was found carved with runes on a stick at the Hanseatic docks.ion silkifuþ a mek en guþormr fuþcllæikir ræist mik en : ion fuþkula ræþr m(e)k (N B434)
“John Silkencunt owns me and Guttorm Cuntlicker carved me and John Cuntball reads me”
Philologists are not certain as to whether fuþkula, “cuntball”, means clitoris, or a well-padded mons veneris, or “cunt cavern”. All the three mentioned men are historical figures known from other sources, but apparently they are usually referred to there as John Silk, Guttorm Licker…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2014Here's what I wrote in 2009 about weekend fun.The way I like to lead my life is basically Epicurean: "Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear as well as absence of bodily pain through knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of our desires." I live for fun. But I try to emphasise the social side of my modest pleasures: I like to have fun together with people I love, not at the expense of others. Call it the Golden Rule.
Now, my work is largely fun, but still I distinguish between work-…
aardvarchaeology | January 8, 2014Pär Svensson of Kurtz, himself a rock guitarist with unbelievably eclectic musical tastes, pops in with a guest entry.Hello Cleveland!
Martin asked me to review the debut album of his brother's death metal outfit (as he put it), citing general unfamiliarity with the genre as a reason. Arguably he's also lacking somewhat in the objectivity department. Or, he hated the record and wanted someone else to bring the hatchet down. Maybe I'm a pawn being pushed in some family power struggle or blood feud. Give this job to Clemenza.
But I digress. At hand is Remnants of Forgotten Horrors by Stockholm…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2014I'm doing the final library work for my Bronze Age book. When working on a big research project, I always find it a little difficult to calibrate the most economical way to schedule my reading. Of course, I have to know early on what's in the literature on the subject I'm working with. But I also like to start writing early. And I'd rather not put too much time into re-reading stuff after I've figured out how it's relevant to my theme. I read some of it before I start writing, most of it while I'm writing, often at the computer, and then I inevitably save some of it until I'm almost done…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2014 Dan Josefsson: Enlightener of the Year 2013
The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2013.
The Enlightener of the Year award is given to Dan Josefsson for his book Mannen som slutade ljuga, "The Man Who Stopped Lying", and his documentary film Kvinnan bakom Thomas Quick, "The Woman Behind Thomas Quick". Both describe the outlandish Freudian cult around psychoanalyst Margit Norell and how her ideas about repressed memory therapy caused an incarcerated junkie to confess over thirty murders and become convicted for eight despite a complete lack of forensic evidence. He has…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2014I wonder if Chuck Berry likes death metal.
Windows 8 is amazingly bad. It's so complicated and sluggish that it has to display a progress bar when you delete or move a file locally.
Interesting ethno-political misunderstanding, all my fault. Chinese Swedish dude says he doesn't like the traditional Swedish Christmas buffet. I agree with him, so I comment briefly that he should check if the restaurant has some good Chinese food instead. An on-looker interprets my comment to mean "Why don't you just go back to China if you hate our traditional culture so much".
Student shows me the design he's…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2013Here are my best reads in English during 2013. It was a really good year for quality, though I didn't read very much: 41 books, twelve of which were e-books. The latter number was boosted by the Humble E-Book Bundle that I bought at Junior's recommendation (sadly no longer up for sale). Find me at Goodreads!
Pirate Cinema. Cory Doctorow 2012. A fun, engaging and optimistic piece of polemic fiction, slightly preachy in parts, about the social and artistic consequences of intellectual property law.
Old Man's War. John Scalzi 2005. Energetic co-ed military sf.
Stiff. The Curious Lives of Human…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2013Here are the ten boardgames I played more than twice during 2013.
Keltis (2008, travel version, very handy) *
For Sale (1997)
7 Wonders (2010)
Cave Troll (2002) *
Galaxy Trucker (2007) *
King of Tokyo (2011) *
Kingdom Builder (2011) *
Telestrations (2009)
Fluxx (1997) *
Tikal (1999)*
These are mostly short games that you can play repeatedly in one evening. Only Galaxy Trucker, Tikal and maybe Kingdom Builder are longer. All are highly recommended! Except Fluxx, which is just weird. I played it under duress at the Blåhammaren mountain hiker's resort.
I played 74 different boardgames in 2013,…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2013I've been blogging for a bit more than eight years now, and today Aard turns seven. Traffic for late 2013 is ~600 daily readers, pretty low compared to the most recent peak at 1000 in early 2012. This is probably because of my lower posting frequency and because the URLs of individual older blog entries changed when ScienceBlogs migrated to WordPress last year. The lower posting frequency, in its turn, is largely due to Facebook, where stuff that might have made short blog entries in 2007 ends up now. Some of the Facebook bits show up here afterwards as Pieces of My Mind.
As to Sb in general…
aardvarchaeology | December 23, 2013I love listening to podcasts during housework, commuting and travelling. I use the Podkicker app on my Android phone. Some of my current favourites are put out by the old media: NPR, CBC and BBC. But here are five faves without old-media ties.
The Drabblecast. ”Strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners”, with the inimitable master of the form, Norm Sherman.
Planetary Radio. All the weekly space news you need, and interviews with the scientists and engineers who make that news.
Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff. Role playing games, speculative fiction, history, spy thrillers,…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2013Skalk 2013:6 (December) has a nice piece about shell middens and Mesolithic oyster cooking, recalling a few points I made back on my first blog. You can't open a fresh oyster without a steel knife. But if you heat the oyster even just slightly, it opens. I was also interested to learn about a harbour in a volcano crater off Iceland's coast, containing the wreck of a Dutch trading ship that foundered there in 1659. And they've found another 8th century jewellery grave at the classic cemetery of Nørre Sandegård on Bornholm, with three of the domed oval brooches I wrote a big paper about in the…
aardvarchaeology | December 19, 2013The Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslersämbetet) has evaluated our basic university programmes in a long series of subjects. The results for archaeology were published yesterday, based on the status 2012. There were 21 BA (3 yrs), Mag.Phil. (4 yrs) and MA (5 yrs) programmes at the country's archaeology departments. The median grade they've received is "high quality", which translates to a pass here. Let's look at the eleven programmes that flunked or passed with distinction.
Gothenburg. Mag.phil. in Mediterranean archaeology. Very high quality.
Gothenburg. BA in…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2013Here's what I did to replace Windows 8 (boo) with Linux Mint (yay) on a 2013 Asus ultrabook with the problematic UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware, using an external DVD drive linked to the machine with a USB cable.
Download Linux Mint and burn a bootable DVD.
Disable Windows Fast Startup (in Windows' Control Panel).
Reboot machine while pressing F2, to get into BIOS setup.
Under the Security menu, disable Secure Boot Control.
Under the Boot menu, disable Fast Boot.
Under the Boot menu, enable Launch CSM – if you can. (I couldn't at first. This menu option was visible but…
aardvarchaeology | December 12, 2013Fornvännen 2013:1, last spring's issue, is now on-line in its entirety on Open Access.
Joy Boutrup et al. on openwork braids of silk and metal thread that decorated 15th century elite fashion garments.
Påvel Nicklasson on zoologist and archaeological trailblazer Sven Nilsson's travels in England and France in 1836.
Nils Harnesk on High Medieval log canoes from a farming frontier site in Norrbotten.
Soon-to-be-Doctor Ny Björn Gustafsson on Viking Period bronze and silver craft sites on Gotland (in English).
Mats G. Larsson on geophys in the Meadow of Mora where Medieval Swedish royal elections…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2013When I was a kid around 1980 me and my buddies used to play in small tracts of woodland around where we lived. There we sometimes found woods porn, Sw. skogsporr: damp and fragmented pornographic magazines. We learned quite a lot from them that stood us in good stead later in life.
Back then, before porn went digital, woods porn was ubiquitous. Woodland deposition in fact seems to have been a major culturally sanctioned way to get rid of unwanted porn. It's easy to imagine scenarios that would have given rise to the custom: you need to (use and?) get rid of something discreetly, you can't…
aardvarchaeology | December 9, 2013I read something annoying; always a good impetus for a blog entry. The offender this time is Nick Saunders of the University of Bristol, writing in Current World Archaeology #62 (Dec/Jan, available on Academia.edu). And the theme is what he calls ”the birth of Modern Conflict Archaeology”. This birth, he explains, began with a 1998 grant of his to study World War 1 trench art, stuff that soldiers made during and after the war. He has since gone on to do fieldwork on the ”Italian Front” along the border between Italy and Slovenia.
Battlefield archaeology is a long-established field of research…
aardvarchaeology | December 7, 2013I'm confused by this political science paper I'm editing. The guy wants to find a middle way for the EU between two kinds of authoritarianism: technocracy and populism.
I understand the first word to mean ”rule by academic experts who don't care what the voters say”, and the second to mean ”rule by uneducated clowns who will do whatever gets them votes”. This doesn't seem to apply to Sweden, where both our elected representatives and the voters typically have middling education, or in a worldwide perspective, an enormously high general level of education.
There are hardly any PhDs in Swedish…
aardvarchaeology | December 6, 2013Ikea’s typhoon rescue relief outguns China’s. Nope. Not surprised that their government does not care much. China Ends One-Child Policy.“Viking-age” ‘gold men’ unearthed in Sweden”. Actually, a bit older than the Vikings...When the workload grows too huge, I recommend a solution found in Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids. The pyramid engineer creates a time loop so different temporal versions of him can work in parallel. Literally “an army of me”.The Welsh language must be perfect for writing sagas about ancient heroes battling it out.Creepy White Guys and Asian Women” *shudders in disgust*Chinese…