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 10, 2015 Detail of Signe Persson-Melin's & Anders B Liljefors's facade decoration on the Natur & Kultur publishing house in Stockholm.
Found the secret passage between the humanities building and the library. Now I can go eat lunch without braving the elements.
I flew to Umeå today along the contrail left by the aircraft when going south earlier in the morning. Contrails are really pretty up close. Once I saw two parallel ones, really thick and marshmallowy, glowing pink in the sunrise.
LinkedIn informs me that very few people have looked at my profile recently, and that one of those who…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2015Today I proof-read the annual index for Fornvännen, the archaeology journal I co-edit. And I took the opportunity to look at our gender stats for full-length papers. There are 16 of these in this year's four issues. Only 31% have female first authors. An additional 31% have a male first author and at least one female author. So women are involved as authors in 62% of this year's full-length papers. That seems reasonably fair since several papers have only one author, so it would be impossible for each gender to be involved in all of them.
But you might wonder what a female author does to the…
aardvarchaeology | November 30, 2015 Irish trad session at Wirström's pub in Stockholm's Old Town
One of the most annoying and amateurish things a graphic designer can do, in my experience, is to insert hard hyphens.
I make a policy of keeping conservative and libertarian people in my Facebook feed and not muting them even though I don't agree with them. But lately I've had to add a subclause: I'm only keeping the smarter, better-reasoning ones. Because really, it's just unproductive for everyone if I allow my image of my political opponents to get skewed by the stupidest and angriest members of their camp.
A lot of people…
aardvarchaeology | November 25, 2015A buddy of mine tagged me on Facebook to post a good song every day for a week. Here's what I came up with.
2000s. Robert Plant's (once of Led Zep) beautiful 2002 cover of ”Song To The Siren”. The original was first performed by Tim Buckley (Jeff's dad) in 1968. Pay attention to the lyrics by Larry Beckett. Plant butchers them slightly, singing “unfold” for the actual “enfold”, and obscuring the fact that the lyrics are a dialogue between the poet and the Siren. She's an unpredictable yes-then-no-then-yes woman who leaves poor 20-y-o Beckett “a foolish ship … broken lovelorn on your rocks”.…
aardvarchaeology | November 23, 2015It's been a busy movie-going month for me with the Monsters of Film festival, where I saw six films, and now the Stockholm International Film Festival where I've seen eight. Last year I saw ten films at the latter festival, and I enjoyed most of them, but overall I liked this year's crop even better. All but two get my special recommendation:
As I Open My Eyes. A late-teen girl discovers love and experiences political repression while singing in a band in pre-revolution Tunis -- five years ago.
Dope. By happenstance three geeky straightlaced ghetto kids find themselves in possession of a…
aardvarchaeology | November 20, 2015 Soon people will be living on the site of Lännbo school that some kids torched in 2006.
Oh, will you look at that? Ten weeks into the term I find the staff lunch room with microwave ovens and free tea. Typical academic precariat long-distance commuter.
Last year I started to let the students suggest questions for the exam. The more I think about this idea the more I like its ramifications.
Free editorial advice: before you as much as touch the copy editing, check over and edit the images. Because those are the bits that will delay your whole product if you need the authors to get stuff…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2015 Hans, Jan and Urban learning Istanbul.
This past weekend saw my sixth annual boardgaming retreat: 43 hours in good company at our usual small Nyköping hotel, all meals included. My buddy Oscar organises everything. There were a bit more than 20 of us this year after a few late cancellations, mainly guys in our 30s and 40s. After Sunday lunch I left early and drove to Norrköping where I gave a talk about my recent excavations to 50 keen members the Friends of the Town Museum association, just like after the 2010 retreat.
I played thirteen sessions of nine different games in Nyköping. To…
aardvarchaeology | November 13, 2015A little archaeological conundrum found its solution this morning. At an excavation in Motala in the early 00s, colleagues of mine found a cupped piece of hard, greyish brown material with a distinctly patterned inside. They interpreted it as a piece of a lost-wax casting mould and suggested in a 2004 publication that it was for a Viking Period tortoise brooch. I've never seen the find live, but I could tell from the pictures that the pattern was certainly not from the Viking Period. I wrote in my 2011 book about the area (p. 119), “the object in question has a shape and a geometrical…
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2015In countries with a big metal detector hobby, the stereotypical participant is an anorak-wearing, rural, poorly educated, underemployed male. I don't know how true this cliché image is. But apart from the anorak, it's certainly an accurate description of the core voter demographic behind the rise of racist right-wing populist parties. These people have trouble finding jobs, and they have trouble seeing through the racist propaganda that tells them they would have jobs and girlfriends if it weren't for the bloody furriners.
I'm known as a detectorist-friendly archaeologist. I've made many…
aardvarchaeology | November 10, 2015 The Saltsjöbaden Co-Ed celebrates 100 years with an open house. I've been here only once since graduation a quarter of a century ago.
I just saw toilet roll draped over a tree for the first time since 1977 when I lived in Connecticut. Hallowe'en has recently been imported into Swedish culture. It's brought the tricks with it. Is somebody going to cover my dad's car in shaving foam again?
Lack of sunlight is a cause of vitamin D deficiency. It is also a cause of seasonal depression. Now I'm seeing vitamin D touted as a folk remedy against seasonal depression. This is like trying to clear…
aardvarchaeology | November 2, 2015 Turbo Kid -- see this movie!
Encouraged by my first film festival last year, I've signed up for two this year. This past week it's been the genre festival Monsters of Film, which leans towards horror but has a lot of other stuff too (but very few monster flicks, actually). I saw 5½ films in five days. Two get my special recommendation:
Turbo Kid. Fun over-the-top 80s superhero-comics nostalgia in a post-apocalyptic wasteland with BMX-riding road warriors.
Remake, Remix, Rip-off. Documentary about popular low budget Turkish movie-making in the 50s to the 90s. Voluminous interviews intercut…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2015 Birger Jarlsgatan 11, Stockholm
Nice ad here on my blog for once. It does have a pretty woman in it, but she's not a white Russian mail-order girlfriend. She's a black potential student on the course "Swedish for programmers".
Movie: Taikon. Documentary about Swedish novelist and Roma activist Katarina Taikon. Grade: Pass With Distinction.
The guy who installed the wiring for our new kitchen appliances wasn't forced on us by some dictatorial decree. He was an elect rician.
Dad brag: guess whose kid teaches HTML pro bono to disadvantaged 11-y-os in his spare time!
Dropped off this year's…
aardvarchaeology | October 28, 2015 The new version of a slab from the Kivik cairn.
Fornvännen 2015:1 is now on-line on Open Access.
Sven Sandström on fake Paleolithic art in France.
Andreas Toreld and Tommy Andersson on sensational new discoveries on the carved slabs of the Kivik burial cairn. They've been endlessly discussed for over 200 years, and now the whole game just changes.
Birgit Maixner on a new Late 1st Millennium elite site at Missingen/Åkeberg in Norway.
Inger Jans et al. on the last users of runes in the unbroken tradition from the Iron Age on – around 1910!
Anders Söderberg on one of these lovely little finds…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2015 Satanic Men At Work in Umeå. (Actually, there's condensation on the other side of the sign, and the sun is boiling it off.)
Me: "subject". Autocorrect: "Sibbertoft".
Hey everyone who names your daughters "Chatarina"! I just want you to know that you're stamping your kid with this big label that says "From A Home With No Language Skills". It's like naming her brother "Piliph".
Huh? There's an online service named Plurk. I have no idea what it does but it sounds extremely funny in Swedish. Plurk plurk!
Whenever I see a schnauzer dog I wish I could give its face a buzz cut.
Android. The…
aardvarchaeology | October 14, 2015Sweden’s largest and oldest contract archaeology organisation with five units spread across the country is known as ”UV”. This is an old in-house abbreviation that means either uppdragsverksamheten or undersökningsverksamheten, “the contract section” or “the investigation section”. After more than half a century as part of the National Heritage Board, UV was recently severed from that organisation and grafted onto the Swedish History Museum’s org chart. The reason for this change is that the National Heritage Board is responsible for evaluating the quality of Swedish contract archaeology, and…
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2015In the past couple of months Sweden has started to receive large numbers of refugees from Syria, Iraq and a few other war-torn Middle-eastern countries. The ones who claim the right of political asylum are adequately cared for by the immigration authorities. But many don't claim that right. They may have more or less accurate information about other countries that offer better chances, so when they get off the train at Stockholm Central Station, they're basically tourists in the eyes of the law. And the municipality hasn't been able to care for them. Instead a major volunteer movement has…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2015 I'm a closeted boardgamer.
Is the gents' loo in the new Stonehenge visitors' centre fitted with Aubrey holes?
Heh. Here's a nice piece of home-made Scandy English: "the people living in the castles would spend their days doing chores, quarrelling, sleeping and eating". The author probably means that castle dwellers would often "quarrel" with attacking troops.
The Kings of Leon have a very odd singer. I can't decide if he's interesting or just bad.
Borrowed one of the more recent Pratchetts that I haven't read yet. Realised that it's about a quarter-century old.
Twitter just suggested that…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2015Google Play Music's randomiser has recently served me up with two songs about extremely talkative girlfriends. In the Spongetones' "My Girl Maryanne" the singer finds the woman's chattiness adorable. In Gap Dream's "Immediate Life Sentence" he finds it annoying and concludes the song "I don't need to get laid that bad, I'll just stay home and get high".
The crappy one of Sweden's two big pop-sci monthlies has been using freebie trinkets in its marketing for at least 30 years now. They sent me the alarm clock I used in high school. Now they're trying to entice me to subscribe with a little…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2015Reading a good book, Charles' Nicholl's The Reckoning. The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992, 2nd expanded ed. 2002), about the 16th century playwright. It's a bit overloaded with asides and covers far more characters and factions than anyone can keep track of without extensive note-taking. But quite intriguing withal. I find it fascinating how rich and detailed the written sources for this era are.
"Christopher Marlowe ... is remembered as a poet, 'the Muse's darling', and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy …
It is not a pretty view of the…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2015 Registering the bones from this summer's fieldwork at Landsjö.
Getting rid of excess stuff. Azerbaijani dude with a huge beautiful beard showed up on his wife's orders and collected both bike baby seats, the rolling baby stool, the dinner table lamp and the microwave oven. *happy*
My wife's workout app is giving her orders. It sounds like a very, very strange satnav.
User interface fail: our new microwave oven has not only start/stop buttons, but also on/off buttons that control whether the start/stop buttons are responsive or not.
Oh great, LinkedIn. You tried to find a job for me and…