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
August 5, 2016
1972 back-cover blurb
I bought a used copy of Maurice Lévy's Lovecraft ou du fantastique (Paris 1972) at the Fantastika 2016 scifi con, and now I'm picking my way through it with the aid of a dictionary. S.T. Joshi has published an English translation, Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (…
August 1, 2016
Excavation finished, team scattered. Now for three weeks' vacation!
This Walter Jon Williams story has two Andean pan pipe bands and a Californian figure swimming troupe that all operate as secret intelligence agents.
Interesting jetsam around the shores of the island today. The flip-flop was…
July 30, 2016
Detectorist John Kvanli is the chairman of Rygene detektorklubb and one of Norway's most prominent proponents of collaboration between amateurs and professionals in field archaeology. Of course he has a tattoo! It's an Urnes brooch from c. AD 1100, in the final exquisite Christian style of…
July 28, 2016
Why?
I wonder what motivates people to start companies that make or provide boring stuff. What causes a person to devote decades of their life to an organisation that manufactures soap or installs archive shelving? It doesn't surprise me that people take boring jobs: everybody needs a job and…
July 26, 2016
Our second week at Skällvik Castle proved a continued small-finds bonanza, and we also documented some pretty interesting stratigraphy.
More of everything in Building IV. In addition to more coins of Magnus Eriksson, dice and stoneware drinking vessels, we also found a lot of points for crossbow…
July 21, 2016
Stoner dude got kicked out of our Christian abstainer hostel for eating our food and waddling around baked out of his noggin. And we found half of the bikini.
A good thing about never having been in particularly great physical shape is that you don't really notice becoming middle-aged.
Stoner dude…
July 18, 2016
The famous royal castle of Stegeborg sits on its island like a cork in the bottleneck of the Slätbaken inlet (see map here). This waterway leads straight to Söderköping, a major Medieval town, and to the mouth of River Storån which would allow an invader to penetrate far into Östergötland Province'…
July 13, 2016
Stegeborg Castle seen from our hostel.
Had dinner in Ryd shopping centre outside Linköping. My falafel came covered in this shocking purplish pink sauce. I said, "Oh my, what sauce is this!?" Replied the waiter, "It's pink sauce". (Turned out to be the standard white garlic sauce with colouring…
July 8, 2016
We spent Thursday afternoon backfilling. As I write this, only trench G remains open, and the guys there expect to finish soon. Here's some highlights of what we've learned during our second week at Birgittas udde.
Trench A in the outer moat demonstrated that the moat had a wide flat bottom, was…
July 4, 2016
This is the time of year when our yard becomes an extra room in our house. Where a man might sit around butt naked except for a straw hat, reading. I mean he really could. If he wanted to. You'll notice I'm not appending a selfie.
Anybody into Ariel Pink? Seems to be a true original. His 2014 song…
July 2, 2016
Ulvåsa in Ekebyborna is a manor near Motala with two known major Medieval elite settlement sites. Excavations in 2002 proved that the unfortified Gamlegården site was established before AD 1100. The fortified Birgittas udde site has seen no archaeological fieldwork since 1924, when the main…
June 27, 2016
René Lund Klee's tattoo
In our series of metal detectorist tattoos, where people put pictures of their best finds on themselves -- usually on their detector arms -- we now pay a visit to René Lund Klee. His tattoo depicts an Urnes brooch that he found on the Danish island of Lolland. The…
June 23, 2016
Jan Mortensen's tattoo
Another metal detectorist tattoo! This time it's Jan Mortensen who has decorated the arm with which he brandishes the detector. The object is a 10th century trefoil brooch that Jan found in Holbæk municipality, northern Zealand. Hugo Tattoo in Holbæk did the needlework.…
June 22, 2016
As I blogged about in late May, a recent find from Blekinge has cast light on an enigmatic oval mount that my team collected in Östergötland in 2007. We can now say fairly confidently that the object type belongs to the 19th century. And yesterday Karin Tetteris of the Swedish Army Museum came…
June 20, 2016
Nyckelviken's folly
Dropping off Jrette at sailing camp for her 2nd summer. Just like her brother in '09. Just like me in '86.
Heard new interviews with Andy Weir and Larry Niven on Planetary Radio. I love the Internet!
Kelley Johnston on self-defense training for daughters: "I'd rather bail you…
June 16, 2016
Toby Martin 2015, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England
Back around Christmas I reviewed the first three chapters of Toby Martin's big book about Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches. Those are the technical chapters dealing with typology and chronology, and I loved them. They are rock solid.…
June 14, 2016
There's a scifi convention in my home municipality near Stockholm this weekend: Fantastika 2016. I'm giving a talk on my Medieval castles project, and I'm also on a boardgame recommendations panel. Below is the list I'm bringing: it's a selection of my favourites with an emphasis on the period 2010…
June 13, 2016
Like Romanticism, Post-Modernism is a poorly defined term that means different things in different contexts. But in academe, pomo can pretty much be equated with relativism. This term also means several different things, but all of them apply to pomo.
The relativism that makes me hostile to pomo is…
June 11, 2016
One of the synths on Gentle Giant's "The Boys In The Band" sounds like mp3 glitches.
Very soon my commuter train will enter a many-years-long period of refurbishment chaos. It's going to be a hassle. But I just feel excited about it. Something new along some of the most well-trodden and least…
June 8, 2016
Basia Bulat
Here's some good tunes written and sung by women that I've come across recently.
Broen – Boy (2015)
Basia Bulat – Fool (2016)
Feist – Mushaboom (2004)
Florence and the Machine – Dog Days Are Over (2008)
Imogen Heap – Hide And Seek (2005)
Julia Holter – Betsy On The Roof (2015)
Lucius…
June 7, 2016
I've linked before to Christina Fredengren's ground-breaking paper in Fornvännen 2015:3 about human and animal remains found in wet contexts in Uppland province (the area around Uppsala). The study's empirical base is solid and eye-opening. I don't find find the theoretical superstructure that the…
June 6, 2016
This writer knows what glass cutters are for but doesn't know what they look like. She's having somebody behead plastic dolls with one.
You know suits of armour? Almost all are Early Modern LARPing costumes for festive tournaments. Not Medieval, not used in battle.
Not having any teaching gig this…
June 4, 2016
Myself, Ethan Aines and Mats G. Eriksson are proud to present our report on last year’s fieldwork at Stensö Castle, Östra Husby parish, Östergötland. Lots of goodies there, and with an added meaty report on the bones by Rudolf Gustavsson! It was a very fruitful two weeks at the site, during which…
May 28, 2016
In April of 2007 I directed a week of metal detecting at sites in Östergötland where there was a potential for an elite presence in the period AD 400-1000. These investigations were part of a project that I published in my 2011 book Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats.
One site that proved a dud for…
May 23, 2016
Doesn't this picture of Västra Eneby church's body storage shed in winter put you in a festive mood? Party. Party. Par. Taaaay.
My selective breeding programme for a future master race is producing good results. Jrette just beat her entire class (admittedly, a class selected for musical ability…
May 17, 2016
Last Saturday I attended a rare event: a Swedish metal detector rally. At their worst, in some countries these are like pick-your-own strawberry plantations: pay to loot. But Swedish heritage law is uniquely restrictive around metal detectors, and Swedish daylight detectorists oppose looting, so…
May 12, 2016
Unpleasant discovery. I've known for a long time that looking at the age of people who get lectureships in Scandy archaeology, the third quartile is at 46. In other words, 75% of all the jobs are given to people aged 46 or less. But now I've looked at the contents of the fourth quartile. And it…
May 9, 2016
Spent two happy days at the LinCon 2016 gaming convention in Linköping. 1500 gaming geeks of all ages from newborn to dotage, and with a very good gender balance. The only age/gender demographic that was visibly missing was old women. But brown and black people were sadly almost entirely absent. My…
May 4, 2016
Myself, Ethan Aines and Mats G. Eriksson are proud to present our report on last year's fieldwork at Landsjö Castle, Kimstad parish, Östergötland. Lots of goodies there! Construction on the castle seems to have begun between 1250 and 1275, and the site was abandoned halfway through an extension …
May 3, 2016
Happy archaeo-dad pastime: Jrette helped me enter the humongous tables of stats on rock art from Mats Malmer's 1981 book into a computer spreadsheet, and we checked his sums, finding them all to be correct.
Funny how common it is even for educated people to believe that the Vikings would send their…