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
June 23, 2010
Friendly correspondent Peter Woods is working with chapes or ferrules, that is, metal mounts from the ends of knife sheaths or sword scabbards. He has sent me lovely images of these things in the hope that Aard's readers might be able to suggest parallels. Neither of the finds has any solid…
June 22, 2010
Using the @johndoe method to communicate over Twitter is a really stupid way to use the medium. Aren''t people aware that all their followers receive those tweets just as if they were normal ones? And aren't they aware that many of their followers will thus receive only half of a usually pretty…
June 22, 2010
For me, the main drawback of switching to an Android phone was not having a physical keyboard any more. Typing on the touch screen keyboard is infuriatingly slow and error-prone, even if you use the word-suggestion feature. (It isn't very smart, offering word suggestions not in order of how…
June 21, 2010
Summer temp journalists are here again. Today, Swedish Broadcasting's radio news ran a really silly piece about invasive species. It made two main points: a new foreign species of plant or animal is discovered every month in Sweden, and some of them are poisonous. It's basically a case of…
June 19, 2010
There's not much detail available yet about the event, but I for one have written an Oslo trip onto my schedule for the last weekend in October. See you there!
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[More blog entries about skepticism,…
June 18, 2010
The 95th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Afarensis on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to the hominid, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already on 7 July. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field,…
June 18, 2010
A thought about normal sexual behaviour. "Normal", in the statistical sense, has nothing to do with "healthy" or "morally sound". It simply means "the most common range of values in a variable". Now, across all of child-bearing age humanity, what is the normal attitude to getting sexually…
June 17, 2010
One of the most beloved novels in the Swedish language is Frans G. Bengtsson's Viking story Röde Orm (1941), transl. Red Orm / The Long Ships (1943). And one of the most beloved scenes in the novel are the Yuletide celebrations at the court of King Harold Bluetooth at Jelling in Jutland toward…
June 15, 2010
I spent Tuesday in the charming company of James Randi and his assistant, journalist Brandon Thorp. Myself and P.J. RÃ¥smark had taken it upon ourselves to act as native guides and gophers for Randi during his days in Stockholm at the invitation of the Swedish Skeptics. So in the morning we went…
June 14, 2010
Popped down to Lund over the day to teach a class on new media reach-out in archaeology. I showed the students a presentation and spoke for about 2 x 45 minutes. Spending only four hours in town, I had little time to do anything else, though I passed the venue of James Randi's upcoming lecture,…
June 11, 2010
Back in August of 2006 I wrote about an absurd plan to relocate the Israeli embassy in Stockholm temporarily to vacant office space in the Museum of National Antiquities. This plan became reality. But the Israelis are having trouble with the building they're headed for on a more permanent basis,…
June 10, 2010
From '05 to '09 my main research project concerned the Late Iron Age elite in Ãstergötland, one of historical Sweden's core provinces. It's Beowulf country, Beowulf centuries, Beowulf people: the resulting book manuscript is titled Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats. Elite Settlements and Political…
June 9, 2010
The ninety-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology in Practice. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
The next vacant hosting slot is already on 23 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. It's…
June 9, 2010
So Ikea sells this bathrobe called "Njuta". It's a verb, meaning "experience (intense) pleasure", and it's usually reserved for pretty powerful kinds of pleasure such as good food, good music, good sex. And Junior's robe size here is Small to Medium, which goes some way towards explaining why the…
June 8, 2010
James Randi -- magician, escapist, author and skeptic extraordinaire -- will give three lectures in Sweden next week under the auspices of the Swedish Skeptics Society. Everyone is welcome: entry fee 50 kronor. Be there before the doors open! Among my duties is the task of buying homeopathic…
June 7, 2010
Universities in many European and Asian countries offer an upgrade to your PhD that turns the owner into a "habilitated doctor", that is, someone who is allowed to teach PhD students. In Sweden, the recipient of the upgrade is called a docent, which is funny because "docent" means "museum guide" in…
June 6, 2010
The 94th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Anthropology in Practice on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Krystal, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already on 23 June. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/…
June 5, 2010
I'm reading a collection of my favourite music critic's journalism, Strage Text. Fredrik Strage and I were born the same year and both grew up loving Depeche Mode and Swedish role-playing games. He has a hilarious way of taking things that sound really cool in English and expressing them in Swedish…
June 4, 2010
The Pukberget sacrifical cave, Uppland
I recently submitted my contribution to the proceedings volume from the 11th Nordic Bronze Age Symposium. Here's the manuscript and here's the abstract:
Gods of High Places and Deep Romantic Chasms
Introductory remarks to a study of the landscape situation of…
June 3, 2010
What's the most dangerous find an archaeologist can make? Some fear anthrax spores in sealed burial caskets. Others the asbestos used to temper certain types of North Scandinavian pottery. But German construction workers are on a whole other level than us. They regularly find Allied bombs from WW2…
June 3, 2010
Universitetsläraren, the journal of the Swedish Association of University Teachers, has an article about blogging scientists in issue 2010:9 on the occasion of an upcoming PhD thesis in Lund about the subject. Scienceblogs.com is mentioned and Ãsa of Ting & Tankar is interviewed.
Blogging…
June 2, 2010
In February of 2007 I wrote about a giant sinkhole that had opened in Guatemala City. "The pit was emitting foul odors, loud noises and tremors, and a rush of water could be heard from its depths." These sinkholes are the same kind of geological feature as similar to the cenotes into which the…
May 31, 2010
When a family migrates, the members who pick up the local lingo first and best are generally the children, and they soon become little interpreters. My wife wrote letters to the Swedish authorities for her Chinese dad from the time she was 11. And when time rolled around for the biannual talk with…
May 28, 2010
The bedrock under our neighbourhood contains small amounts of uranium. It's an unstable chemical element that is subject to radioactive decay. The amounts are small and it wouldn't be a problem but for the fact that one of the decay products is a gas at room temperature - a radioactive gas, radon.…
May 27, 2010
In an an artist's CV, you'll read what museums own pieces of their work and what galleries have shown their exhibitions. A field archaeologist keeps no such list, but we sure keep track in our heads of when our finds get exhibited. Because to any scholar who wants to communicate with the public,…
May 26, 2010
The ninety-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Prancing Papio. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Krys at Anthropology in Practice. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
May 25, 2010
The National Heritage Board of Sweden has released a beta version of a location-aware heritage-data browser for Android. The name is Kringla Mobil, and it talks to the central mash-up database that collates information from museums and organisations all over the country. My Visby buddies Lars and…
May 24, 2010
I'm writing a paper for the conference volume of the Helsinki meeting I attended back in October. Here's an excerpt from the manuscript.
In April and May of 2010 I visited nine sacrificial sites in Uppland and Södermanland provinces, selecting them by the criteria that I had to be able to…