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.
aardvarchaeology
Posts by this author
October 7, 2010
The Indian Express reports that according to Dr. Gautam Sengupta, director general of the Archaeological Survey of India, "it is time for us to rethink our own ideas and concepts of archaeological analysis in order to combat the worldwide crisis in the discipline". Disturbing words from a very…
October 6, 2010
Thanks to Pär for the tip-off. OM's singer/bassist used to be a member of the legendary doom band Sleep.
October 4, 2010
Yesterday's walk in the woods near Drevinge garnered us the following:
Shaggy ink cap, Fjällig bläcksvamp, Coprinus comatus
Terracotta hedgehog, Rödgul taggsvamp, Hydnum rufescens
Shingled hedgehog, Fjällig taggsvamp, Sarcodon imbricatus
Common puffball, VÃ¥rtig röksvamp, Lycoperdon perlatum…
October 3, 2010
A buddy and namesake of mine has a father who is a literature scholar. He wrote his thesis on absurdist drama, Beckett and Ionesco, that sort of thing. This influenced his son's vocabulary. Once about 1970, when the scholar was out on a walk with his little boy in a stroller, they passed a large…
October 1, 2010
I once produced a small shell midden in my kitchen. Just now I made a small clearance cairn in the garden. My wife has ordered a peony bush from Gansu in China via a plant dealer in Turku, Finland, and I picked it up at a trucking firm the other day. Now it fell upon me to dig the hole and plant…
September 29, 2010
Here's something new in burial archaeology!
In 2008 a cremation burial of the Pre-Roman Iron Age was excavated at Skrea backe near Falkenberg in Halland province. It's unusually rich for its time, being housed in a continental iron-and-bronze cauldron and containing three knives, an awl and 5.3…
September 28, 2010
I've felt largely like an outsider since I was a kid, but these days I rarely experience the full force of it except when I visit a news agent's and confront the glossy magazines. They carry hundreds of titles. And at a pinch I can maybe find one or two that might interest me mildly.
I don't…
September 27, 2010
Watched most of the 1984 animated Miyazaki feature film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind on DVD. Like others of his I've seen before, it's visually stunning and has a pretty pointless story.
Sat outdoors and read, probably for the last time this year barring trips south.
Went to a friend's…
September 25, 2010
September unexpectedly turned warm and sunny. I'm a little under the weather and so can't do anything very energetic. But reading a review copy of a new geology book for the blog in my yard, in the sun, with my dressing gown down around my midriff isn't too bad.
Photo by Junior.
September 23, 2010
Immediately after the Swedish election the SD anti-immigration party made a major proclamation advocating policies copied from 1930s Germany - pertaining to the public funding of the arts.
Since the end of the war, the driver of a car is no longer known as an Autoführer, "car driver" in German. He…
September 20, 2010
Sweden held a general election yesterday, and it did not go the way myself and other lefties would have liked. Parliament has 349 seats, and 175 is thus a majority. Before the election, the various right-wing and centrist parties held 178 seats. Now they hold 192. But the conservative voters have…
September 19, 2010
Here's a funny find. My buddy Tobias Bondesson sent me these pics of a gneiss or granite object he's found, measuring 30 by 28 mm in diameter and 20 mm high. The find spot is near Lee church in northern Jutland (the current stone structure there goes back to shortly after AD 1100), and the metal…
September 16, 2010
I'll be travelling a lot in October and November and giving some talks. Aard readers in the afflicted cities, drop me a line and maybe we can meet up!
16-18 Oct, TAM London.
29-31 Oct, Oslo, Kritisk Masse: speaking about Thor Heyerdahl and other Scandy pseudoarchaeologists.
4 Nov, Uppsala:…
September 16, 2010
A week ago, the Swedish Research Council's expert panel for the investigation of suspected science fraud delivered its findings regarding Suchitra Holgersson, professor of transplantation biology in the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg. The panel finds Holgersson, who joined the…
September 15, 2010
The Four Stone Hearth blog carnival lives on without a hitch thanks to Afarensis, its new editor!
The one hundred and first instalment is on-line at Sapien Games. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Let me remind you, though, that "sapiens" is not a plural.
September 15, 2010
I'm giving a talk at the Stockholm County Museum in Sickla, Saturday at two o'clock, as part of a day seminar. The subject will be my on-going research into Bronze Age sacrificial sites, where I collaborate with the museum on fieldwork. Aard readers are welcome: just tell the organisers that I'm…
September 13, 2010
J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his three main books in the order their contents happen in his fantasy world. But they weren't published in that order. Young Tolkien writes the various component works of The Silmarillion, middle-aged Tolkien writes and publishes The Hobbit, old Tolkien writes and publishes…
September 13, 2010
We interrupt this transmission for a piece of Christian chronology. Did you know that the Epistles of Saint Paul are the oldest writings in the New Testament? Did you know that Mark, the oldest of the Gospels, was written just about the time of Paul's execution in AD 64/65? Though Mark had worked…
September 10, 2010
Apples in Stereo mastermind Robert Schneider demonstrates his latest technical combo: a vintage 80s synthesizer hooked up to a recently released EEG game controller, which allows him to change the pitch of the synth's output with his thoughts.
I particularly like the non-glitzy surroundings. The…
September 9, 2010
Through my reading I was reminded of two Scandinavian early-12th century queens whose careers are pretty amazing. Though originally probably unrelated, they became kin by marriage in several ways.
~1085. Margareta Ingesdotter born, daughter of King Inge I of Sweden. (Birth year unrecorded.)
~1100.…
September 8, 2010
At my wife's suggestion, I quit work 1½ hour early today and cycled with her and the kids into the woods to pick mushrooms. Lovely sunny afternoon, and I can report that the hills between Lakes Lundsjön and Trehörningen are rich in boletes right now. Here are the species we got:
King bolete,…
September 7, 2010
To my horror, Ystads Allehanda reports that Wladyslaw Duczko has joined Nils-Axel Mörner on a project to excavate the famous Ales stenar stone ship.
Why does this pain me? Because while (as I have reported here before) geologist Mörner and his collaborator homeopath Bob G. Lind are Swedish…
September 5, 2010
Had breakfast guests: a beautifully pregnant old friend and our old boss/buddy came at ten and I cooked us all a full English. Everybody who's into the Gustavian / Georgian era and reads Scandy, read Kristina Ekero Eriksson's new popular biography of Märta Helena Reenstierna, the Lady of Ãrsta!…
September 3, 2010
There's a parliamentary election in Sweden on the 19th, and everybody's hoping that the country's little right-wing populist party won't get over the 4% threshold needed to grab any seats. The "Swedish Democrat" party mainly offers a We Hate Foreigners ticket, with some Law & Order and Respect…
September 3, 2010
[More about archaeology, metaldetecting; arkeologi, metallsökare, Uppsala.]
The view from my second investigation area. The great barrows were erected about AD 600.
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday metal-detecting for my buddy John Ljungkvist on some of the most storied soil in Sweden: Old Uppsala.…
September 2, 2010
Archaeological chronology aims to answer the question "When did this or that event happen?". This question can usually be re-phrased as "When was this or that thing made?", where the thing under study may be anything from a bead up to the Great Wall of China.
Most dating evidence is based upon…
September 1, 2010
Grötkräkla, "porridge sceptre"
The Four Stone Hearth blog carnival first opened its gaudy tent flap almost four years ago, in October 2006. Since then, 50 blogs have hosted it, 32 of which are still active. The record for most 4SH hostings is shared by Afarensis and Remote Central, both of which…
August 31, 2010
My debate piece in Antiquity has proved popular (many people have asked me to send it over, and now I've received the journal's permission to place the paper on-line for free in PDF format) and controversial (several have offered criticism in comments here). Mainly replies seem inspired by the two…
August 30, 2010
The centre piece of St. Mary's square/park in Stockholm is a brass sculpture group in a fountain, sculpted by Anders Wissler and put in place in 1903. It depicts the god Thor at the moment when he's fished the Midgard serpent up to the ocean surface and prepares to whack it in the head with his…
August 29, 2010
[More about sex,, humour; sex, humor.]
One of the perks of keeping a well-visited blog is that you get to spy on people using search engines. Extreme Tracking keeps a list for me of the latest search terms which have led people to Aard. It turns out that they're always largely porn surfers. My…