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
November 27, 2010
I'm angry and confused. Death has never hit this close to home with me before. Anders was one of my best friends, a frequent guest at my table. I knew him for over 20 years. And now he's dead at 45, apparently of a heart attack. I'm stunned and full of disbelief.
By profession an engineer and a…
November 27, 2010
Any Dear Readers in Birmingham? I'm going to be there from Monday to Wednesday for a Viking studies workshop. Email me your cell phone numbaz and maybe we can meet up!
November 26, 2010
A Gambian moment.
We're in an extremely dilapidated taxi that has stalled at the roadside, just a stone's throw from Tanji village's main taxi hub. Before getting into the car, my wife and I had to haggle for ten minutes with the drivers assembled there under the dull gaze of the village idiot. And…
November 24, 2010
Re-run from 25 December 2005 (no, Swedes pay no attention to Christmas Day, preferring to get worked up about Christmas Eve).
In Skive, Denmark, there's a pond dug to accommodate a plywood Viking ship that was never set afloat.
My friend Rud Kjems tells the story in local-history annual…
November 22, 2010
Re-run from 22 December 2005.
The Viking Period was a funny time, only three centuries long, leaving a huge footprint in terms of ideas and archaeology. Speakers of Scandinavian languages lived mainly in the fertile southern third of Scandinavia, most of them being subsistence farmers. The…
November 19, 2010
It's re-run week! I've gone back to my first month of blogging and found some good stuff. Here's a piece from 20 December 2005.
Lately I've been washing a lot of ruined building materials, debris from a house fire 2000 years ago.
Me, my friend Howard and his students excavated a Viking Period…
November 17, 2010
My dad is building a guest house and an octagonal two-story sauna on the steep scarp from his house down to the sea. Things suddenly got very hurried, and I was called in as a building hand to help get the roof onto the sauna before winter. So in addition to a lot of travel, lately I have learned…
November 14, 2010
I spent most of the weekend at a gaming retreat organised by my buddy Oscar. It was like a small exclusive gaming convention. Oscar found a small B&B outfit in Gnesta, a small town an hour's drive from Stockholm, and negotiated a deal with them. 18 people, two nights' board, two excellent…
November 9, 2010
As mentioned here recently, the Nazis didn't like Modernism, pessimism or decadent urban themes in art. So in 1937 they sanitised German art museums, removing stuff they didn't like. Between 1937 and 1941, a selection of the censored work formed a travelling exhibition under the title Entartete…
November 8, 2010
On Sunday 14 November at 1400 hrs I'm giving a talk on the aristocracy of the 1st millennium AD at the Town Museum of Norrköping, Holmbrogränd.
On Monday 15 November I'm speaking at a seminar in Gothenburg about social media and scientific and political communication. My talk will be some time…
November 6, 2010
Last week I rode some planes: Stockholm - Brussels - East Midlands Airport - Brussels - Stockholm - Oslo - Stockholm. Two of the engines involved were kind of fun because of their small size. The movements of EU bureaucrats has created a market for short plane hops anchored in Brussels, and so the…
November 4, 2010
Lately I've been thinking and giving some talks about Scandinavian pseudoarchaeological writers, that is, people who publish books on the past with unsubstantiated claims to scientific credibility. The beyond all comparison most famous of them is the Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002).
Heyerdahl…
November 2, 2010
Two days ago I talked about four Scandy writers of pseudoarchaeological books at the Kritisk masse conference in Oslo: Bob G Lind, Lennart Möller, Erling Haagensen and Thor Heyerdahl. Despite being largely composed of Norwegians, the audience seemed unperturbed by my unflattering views of…
October 29, 2010
Compared to the Swedish system, academic recruitment is extremely swift in the UK. In Scandyland, it's typically 7 months from the application deadline to the rejection letter, mainly because of slow external referees. The worst I've seen was 14 months. But in the UK, it's all done in a matter of…
October 28, 2010
One of my pet peeves in academic prose of the more pretentious kind is the double-false conditional statement. Here's one that I've made up.
"If the adoption of bronze casting can be seen as a sign of increasing preoccupation with eschatology, then it follows that we must be continually vigilant…
October 27, 2010
Sweden's traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people's minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into prehistory, and so they don't respect the country's cities much, these generally being much later…
October 26, 2010
Interested in archaeological stratigraphy? In 3D fieldwork methodology? Then come to Jönköping in southern Sweden for the VIIIth Nordic Stratigraphy Conference, 25-26 February 2011.
The theme of the conference is Modern Times - New Epochs & New Roads over Familiar Ground. Main sessions will…
October 25, 2010
Fornvännen's spring issue (2010:1) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out!
Michael Neiss analyses the intricate animal interlace on a weird new 8th century decorative mount. It looks like it might be Scandinavia's earliest book-cover fitting! Did it adorn the…
October 22, 2010
Last night I attended Junior's school concert in the church of St. Catherine in Stockholm. Here are some of the lyrics sung by the 13-14-year-olds in front of the altar.
Because the world is round it turns me on
Because the wind is high it blows my mind
"Because", Lennon & McCartney
And
Night…
October 21, 2010
My brother's black metal outfit has just released its first EP, Arcane Secrets. Check out Astrophobos for some furious yet epic tunes with lyrics inspired by H.P. Lovecraft! And tell me how you like the record!
Spotify - Myspace - iTunes
Question to the Dear Reader: how do you go about getting…
October 19, 2010
Asked by her teacher to write five things she's good at, and to illustrate them, 7-y-o Juniorette just produced this.
The speech bubble reads "Yes I win". Then "I'm good at writing running putting my hand up eating candy and not liking liquorice."
Next term she's scheduled to chair the student…
October 17, 2010
I type this during the last act of TAM London, Alan Moore, who is being gnomic in a basso north English working-class accent. Interesting character, a little perversely irrational ("I worship a 2nd century snake goddess") while leaving no doubt that he's keen as a whip.
The day began with a talk by…
October 16, 2010
Unusual to use an off-line computer. The wifi in the Hilton London Metropole is ridiculously expensive, so I use the complimentary service in the lecture hall and have none in my room.
I wonder if it really makes business sense to make people pay separately for the wifi instead of sharing the cost…
October 14, 2010
One of the perks of keeping Aard is free magazine subscriptions. I make it worthwhile for the publishers by writing these "Recent Archaeomags" entries, which may look a little strange since it's the New Media reporting on stories in the Old Media. But I concentrate on stories that interest me, and…
October 13, 2010
Good news for Swedish metal detectorists! And for us Iron Age scholars who want the finds, the sites and the free expert labour these amateurs are eager to provide us. And also for any small-finds nerd who would like to have a labour market (who? me?), communicating with the detectorists and…
October 12, 2010
In his fine new book Vanished Ocean, geologist Dorrik Stow uses the biography of one of our planet's vanished oceans to teach the reader a wide range of veeery long-term perspectives on geological history. The ocean that geologists call the Tethys came into being when the Pangaea supercontinent…
October 11, 2010
I got an ambiguous greeting from Norm Sherman when I bought his latest CD (2 for $10!). He is messing with my mind.
October 10, 2010
Recently I wrote about some policies advocated by the Swedish anti-immigration party (SD) regarding public funding of the arts. I remarked that the party's suggestions show that their members do not have much education regarding the arts or public debates in the field during the past decades. "They…
October 9, 2010
Sensible. Tell me "sensible" and I'll reply "shoes". Sensible shoes is what your butch 60ish aunt and her partner wear when vacationing in Paris. Although my Ireland-based colleague Stuart Rathbone and I share a great many opinions, I don't think it's a good idea to call for sensible archaeology.…