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
August 28, 2010
Back in February I posted snippets of an opinion piece I'd been asked to write about the current state and future prospects of Swedish archaeology. Now the thing has appeared on-line in Antiquity (behind a pay wall, but see below), though the journal's autumn issue has not reached subscribers on…
August 27, 2010
I've spent three days with my son's class at Ãngsholmen summer camp where the 12-y-os got a chance to reaquaint themselves after the summer and do some fun stuff together. My job, like that of the other three parents who came along, was basically crowd control and security. The camp is on a small U…
August 27, 2010
The 100th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run here at Aard on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to me, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
August 25, 2010
Dear Reader, do you come across a lot of ancient blubber concrete in the course of a normal day? I got some exciting news from Mattias Pettersson Tuesday morning regarding his and Roger Wikell's Mesolithic sites in the Tyresta nature reserve. As Aard's regulars know, Tyresta is a former archipelago…
August 23, 2010
Reports Swedish Broadcasting, Dagens Eko:
When two school girls in the 13-16 years age bracket found a lost key ring for their school's teacher break room, they had an idea. They bought simple audio surveillance equipment in a tech store, waited until everyone went home, and installed the bugging…
August 22, 2010
Sunset seen to the NW from the birthday party
Made huntun (wonton) with my wife & kids, "good to eat and fun to make", as the song about cookies that Junior likes goes.
Watched The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus with wife & son. It's a mid-quality Terry Gilliam film, better than the…
August 21, 2010
I put together a mix CD today for Simon who's celebrating his 60th birthday. He's the husband of a colleague of mine, and all I really know about him is that he's English, he's a semi-pro musician and he likes Keith Jarrett, Juan Gilberto, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan and Hermeto Pascoal. So I thought…
August 19, 2010
The ninety-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
August 19, 2010
For everybody who's in a Lovecraftian mood after that podcast, here's a ghoulish news item. Reports Emma Persson Hennig in Sydsvenskan, and I translate:
Staffanstorp municipality. A woman placing flowers on a grave at BrÃ¥garp churchyard suddenly sunk into it when the earth collapsed. One of her…
August 18, 2010
My friends Petra Ossowski Larsson and Lars-Ãke Larsson have synchronised and analysed large chunks of the Belfast dendrochronological data (that were made publically available by court order), and published them on their web site in standard dendro file formats.
August 16, 2010
When was the last time you read H.P. Lovecraft's 1921 story "The Outsider"? Have you ever? Let me tell you, it's a rare dark pleasure.
Written when Lovecraft was 31, the story is one of the high points of his early work when the influences of Poe and Dunsany were still strongly in evidence. It is…
August 16, 2010
The 99th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at A Very Remote Period Indeed on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Julien, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 15 September. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo…
August 14, 2010
I used to play a lot of computer games, and 12-y-o Junior loves them. His gaming experience is of course different from mine back in the day, not only because the games look much better now, but also because of on-line interactivity. There are a couple of developments that surprise me a great deal…
August 13, 2010
The Public Library of Science publishes a number of peer-reviewed Open Access research journals, most of which specialise in some specific field within the natural sciences. But PLoS ONE has a much wider remit within the sciences. When it first opened a few years ago, I looked for archaeology in…
August 11, 2010
There's ScienceBlogs and recently we got Scientopia. And now I discover Field of Science, another good science blogging community, which has apparently been up for a year and a half though I've managed to miss it. Check it out!
August 11, 2010
In the podcast liner notes to his new album (starting at 14:21), George Hrab talks to Milton Mermikidis for a space about how neither of them does any heavier drugs than caffeine. I realised that in close to five years of blogging, I've never talked specifically about my own drug abstinence, though…
August 10, 2010
Shortly after my buddy Jeff Medkeff died in 2008, a joint book review of ours was published in Skeptic Magazine. Here we criticised a book by Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, two aeronautics engineers, where they claimed that a 7th century BC cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia described an asteroid…
August 9, 2010
And here's star philologist and religion scholar Ola Wikander with a guest lesson in Akkadian.
The word of the day is nuḫatimmu. It means "a cook" in Akkadian (or sometimes "a baker"). Maybe something to interest Gordon Ramsay? And wouldn't it be great if there was an Akkadian version of the TV…
August 5, 2010
I met this nice guy at the gaming convention this last weekend. Anders Larsson is a talented artist and graphic designer who works in paint and pixels. Check out his site!
August 4, 2010
The ninety-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Prancing Papio. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
The next vacant hosting slot is on 15 September. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. It's a good…
August 4, 2010
Fornvännen's winter issue (2009:4) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out!
Anna-Sara Noge looks at burnt mounds, Bronze Age heaps of fire-cracked stone, with bones in them, just like I once did for my first academic paper. But unlike me she has actual…
August 3, 2010
I've found out about the spooky cartoon show my daughter watches that I wondered about, the one where one character looks just like Riff-raff in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's Die Schule der kleinen Vampire / School for Vampires, a co-production among Germany, Italy and Luxemburg. The Riff-…
August 2, 2010
There's a new science blogging network, Scientopia, it's full of ex-SciBlings and other good bloggers, and it has no ads! Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science is there, as is Grrlscientist, Krys also of Anthro in Practice, the Voltage Gate, Drugmonkey, Christina Pikas, Mark of Good…
August 2, 2010
Swedish author, dramatist, director, comedian etc. Hans Alfredson once said that the brain is an organ with which we think (tänker) that we think. The Swedish word used here does not mean "believe": it means "cogitate". So, since my teens I've read this as a lovely materialist aphorism about how…
August 1, 2010
The 98th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at The Prancing Papio on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Ray, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 15 September. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop…
July 31, 2010
I spent Friday and Saturday with Junior at a small gaming convention in Katrineholm, a town two hours' drive from my home. (I stayed nearby in May of last year with my wife.) With less than 100 participants, not all of whom were there at the same time, it was a friendly and welcoming con where it…
July 29, 2010
In the early 15th century, Imperial Chinese mariners under the eunuch admiral Zheng He made great voyages of discovery in enormous ships. Then the Hongxi Emperor decided that what they had found on far shores was underwhelming, the whole fleet was scuppered and the Chinese paid no further attention…
July 26, 2010
I got the Aldiko e-book reader for my Android phone the other day - for free over the net. It came with two apparently random free books in epub format: H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Sun Tzu's Art of War. And whenever I like I can get more books for free over the net from within the e-reader…