Martin Rundkvist
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.
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Posts by this author
I don't know what "the winter of 1473" means. January and February? November and December?
Just got home from a sunny bike ride that was also incidentally my least successful geocaching expedition ever. I was in Hammarby Sjöstad, a recently built and densely populated urban area. The only way a…
Dungeon map by Tim Hartin (paratime.ca)
The original roleplaying game, 1974's Dungeons & Dragons, set the template for a hugely popular genre that persists to this day as RPGs, boardgames (such as Descent) and video games (such as World of Warcraft). The core activity in these games is to…
I'm writing an interdisciplinary book about lifestyles at Medieval strongholds in Östergötland province, Sweden. The central chapter "Activities and roles" is currently 8,900 words. Here are the section headers.
Agriculture at arm's length
Baking bread
Brewing
Animal husbandry and the eating of…
Supported by a grant from the King Gustavus Adolphus VI Foundation For Swedish Culture, osteologist Lena Nilsson has analysed the bones we collected during excavations last year at two Medieval strongholds. Two weeks with 19 fieldworkers at Birgittas udde produced only 0.4 kg of…
Archaeological sites in Lake Vättern off Huskvarna
The latest inland ice was 3 km thick and its weight left a big dent in Scandinavia. Since deglaciation (which is, on the geological time scale, a current event) the dent has been straightening out. This causes land uplift. But just outside the…
Contraceptives really changed society radically. Prior to them literature is full of references to people being too poor to get married. Because getting married was the same thing as having children.
I'm disappointed with streaming movie services. I thought they were like music services, where it'…
Edmund de Waal at Artipelag
It's been a fun weekend! Here's what I did.
Watched Jrette's dance show, snappy and lively!
Inspired by Kate Feluś's fine recent book Secret Life of the Georgian Garden, I made syllabub (whipped cream with lemon juice & rind, wine, sugar and a dash of grand…
Movie: Little Big Man. Tragicomedy about the Old West and the fate of the Native Americans. Grade: OK.
Submitted my tax returns. Always super easy, which is one of the benefits of having a low income and few assets.
I've researched my ancestry fully four generations back and found no madman,…
There is no year zero in the common era. 1 BC is followed by AD 1. This is because Dionysius Exiguus worked around AD 500, long before the Indian concept of mathematical zero reached European scholars via the Arabs.
I don't quite understand why the guy in Springsteen's "The River" is so super sad…
"If I blow my top -- will you let it go to your head?" W.F. Gibbons
Hit jackpot on the car radio riding with Jrette and her buddy today. First some Tuvan throat singing. Then a fat version of the Marseillaise with orchestra, choir and a solo soprano who sounded like Piaf. It's important that…
I like this illustration. Note the spirals in the woman's hair, repeated in the clouds. Also the hint of post-nookie intimacy suggested by this being *breakfast* tea.
Been helping Jrette study French for a test. Love making up absurd sentences for her to translate. "On my right is Charlemagne.…
14 months of no teaching gigs and several bad professional disappointments have brought me down a bit. So I checked my calendar for things to look forward to in the coming months.
April. War games exhibition at the Army Museum. Katana sword exhibition at the Royal Armoury. Fieldwork at a promising…
In the foreground, a characteristic Swedish archaeological site of the 20th century: the abandoned municipal ski slope. Its construction, use and abandonment all post-date the still-in-use 1913 building in the background.
"Qualitative research" seems largely to mean "anecdotal material with no…
A great thing about a cross-country skiing holiday is that you don't feel any obligation to make good use of the ski-lift money you've paid. Because you haven't.
Gene drives. Amazing, potentially scary piece of science news. Insert code to actively edit the next generation's genome into the…
Inspired by Karin Bojs's and Peter Sjölund's recent book Svenskarna och deras fäder, I've looked into my ancestry by means both genetic and genealogical. Here's a few highlights.
Like most Stockholmers, I'm of mixed rural Swedish stock. My great grandpa's generation contains 16 people born mainly…
Couldn't quite catch a word in an old Blur song. Turned out to be "jumbojet" with the stress placed on the wrong syllable. JumBOjet. Grötrimslyriker, as we say in Swedish.
The Swedish Anti-Theft Association offers tags for keyrings. You put the tag on your keyring and pay an annual fee, and then…
Nalin Pekgul: "Us Muslim immigrants used to invite Jehovah's Witnesses to practise our Swedish".
Movie: Sweden, Heaven and Hell. Hilariously over the top Italian exploitation mockumentary about late-60s Sweden that manages to tell volumes about Italy instead. Narration similar to the closing voice…
Aard regular Phil often expresses worry about the effects of immigration. This has reached the point where I've decided to collect a few points to explain why I am not worried. Phil recently even claimed that when I say I'm not worried, I create more support for anti-immigration movements. This…
A buddy & colleague of mine took this picture in an Eslöv pizza place, commenting drily that it's a fine example of how the cultural heritage can be used. We've got Thor's hammer, we've got two cartoon Vikings, we've got Swedish flags, and note the three yellow crowns on a blue background: the…
Veneer inlay, Ewald Dahlskog, Stockholm's China Theatre.
Me and Cecilia von Heijne have just submitted our paper on the coins from Skällvik Castle to a numismatic journal. Yay!
Current Swedish Archaeology has just published my enthusiastic review of Cecilia Ljung's doctoral thesis on 11th…
Stockholm municipality's high school authority is running an ad on Fb saying "Do not enrol your kid in the science programme. Consider vocational programmes instead. Like the cook programme." Wtf?!
Ads for wristwatches. Guys, I have a mobile phone, OK?
I'm going to assume for the next few years…
A year ago I took a look at the surrounding landscape here at Sb, investigating which of the blogs were active – defined as which ones had seen an entry during the month up to 19 Jan '16. Now I've looked at the month up to 24 Jan '17. The result isn't great. Four blogs have gone quiet and three…
The Opportunity rover landed on Mars thirteen Earth calendar years ago today, and it still works fine after driving ~44 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…
Fornvännen 2016:2 is now on-line on Open Access.
Ola George reports on a Migration Period chamber grave excavated at Björkå in Överlännäs parish, Ångermanland.
Peter Persson surveys chamber graves in all of Västernorrland county.
Ny Björn Gustafsson on radiocarbon-dated beeswax and metalworking on…
I just wrote a long drinking song in Swedish for the Stockholm Tolkien Society's 5 x 9th anniversary. The first line translates to "Thranduil in Mirkwood imports beverages".
Like most archaeologists I use Academia.edu to share my work, but I have a somnolent placeholder account on ResearchGate as…
We built a snow entity. I shall miss Cousin E.
Waiting to blow
The introductions to academic paper anthologies often consist of descriptions of the contents. I never read them. That information is in the title to each contribution. Pointless.
H.G. Wells became public domain on 1 January…
The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2016.
The Enlightener of the Year award is given to the science desk at Dagens Nyheter, a major newspaper. Science editor Maria Gunther and medicine reporter Amina Mansoor have made medicine and other science accessible in an initiated yet…
Here are the nine boardgames that I played more than thrice during 2016. The year’s total was 87 different games.
Keltis (2008, travel version, very handy, and Cousin E loves its mathiness)
Sechs nimmt / Category 5 (1994)
Deception: Murder in Hong Kong (2014, like Clue + Werewolf) *
Heimlich…
The Detective: Jonathan L. Howard's second book about Johannes Cabal, the necromancer.
Here are my best reads in English during 2016. My total was 42 books and 13 of them were e-books. Find me at Goodreads!
Dear Reader, what were your best reads of the year?
The Detective. (Johannes Cabal #2.)…
If you're a bricklayer with unusually high qualifications, being unemployed is frustrating. But very few customers in the construction business make any kind of public promise to always employ the most qualified bricklayer. Now imagine that they did. Imagine that it were illegal for builders to…