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
April 8, 2014
This 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…
April 2, 2014
Swedish 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…
March 29, 2014
As 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…
March 28, 2014
I 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…
March 21, 2014
Current 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…
March 19, 2014
I 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…
March 17, 2014
How 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…
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…
March 10, 2014
Guldgubbar 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…
March 3, 2014
The 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…
March 1, 2014
Started 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…
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.…
February 18, 2014
Listened 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…
February 13, 2014
I'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…
February 10, 2014
Fornvännen 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…
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."
February 6, 2014
The 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…
February 5, 2014
Rare 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…
February 4, 2014
I'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,…
February 3, 2014
It’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…
February 1, 2014
My 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…
January 23, 2014
We 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…
January 20, 2014
Here'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…
January 8, 2014
Pär 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…
January 3, 2014
I'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…
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…
January 1, 2014
I 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…
December 31, 2013
Here 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…
December 30, 2013
Here 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…