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
May 23, 2010
The 93rd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at The Prancing Papio on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Raymond, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 23 June. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop…
May 23, 2010
Chore in order to achieve future fun: my wife called in a stump grinder a few days ago and had the remains of a thuja in one of our planting beds disintegrated. I emptied the crater of wood chips (harrisian single-context fieldwork methodology, you know) and she planted a magnolia on the edge.…
May 20, 2010
Wednesday was another day guest-digging at one of Mattias Pettersson & Roger Wikell's sites in the Tyresta woods, this one in the huge denuded area of the great forest fire. Otherworldly scenery! It's the unusually high site discussed here three years ago by Mattias. And since we're dealing…
May 20, 2010
The Sb Overlordz have reinstated the Ask a ScienceBlogger feature. Now, Dear Reader, you already ask me a lot of questions in comments here on Aard. But to give your archaeology questions (and possible my replies) a bit more exposure, you might post your question as a comment on the blog entry…
May 19, 2010
The increasing number of podcasts I subscribe to has tended to crowd music out a bit from my earbuds in recent months. But I do have some good albums to recommend. Here's what's on my smartphone right now.
Fleet Foxes. Fleet Foxes. 2008. Folky guitars and complex vocal harmonies.
Heavy Blinkers.…
May 18, 2010
Roger Wikell, Kenneth Ihrestam and Sven-Gunnar Broström during a recent documentation session with oblique lighting in Småland. Photograph by Emelie Svenman.
Many important categories of archaeological site are never discovered by academic archaeologists. In the case of wetland sacrifices, it's…
May 17, 2010
Archaeology Magazine's May/June issue (63:3) has a good long feature by Jarrett A. Lobell & Samir S. Patel on North European bog bodies including some new finds: Lower Saxony in 2000, the Hebrides in 2001 (you may have heard about the weird re-interred bog bodies found under a Bronze Age house…
May 15, 2010
My two days with Junior at the LinCon gaming convention in Linköping turned out even better than I'd hoped for. I had lots of fun myself, and as a geek dad I was extra happy that Junior took to the whole thing with such gusto. On Thursday evening, for instance, he was play-testing a convoluted…
May 14, 2010
The ninety-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sorting Out Science. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Raymond at The Prancing Papio. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer…
May 13, 2010
Facebook has turned up security a notch and effectively locked me out when I'm on the road.
I have hundreds of Fb contacts that I don't actually know and wouldn't recognise if I met them in the street. Mention their names to me and they ring no bell. This is partly because of this blog, partly…
May 13, 2010
Yesterday I did another hour with my metal detector in the disused potato patch where I found a 17th century coin in September 2008. No luck really this time: the only coin I found dates from 1973 and the rest of the stuff wasn't much older than that. But I did make one unusual find: a nickel-…
May 12, 2010
Get this. Perennial provocateur artist Lars Vilks lectures about free speech at the University of Uppsala just an hour's ride from my home -- and is attacked by audience members chanting about Islam!
It's time for a re-run of my own likeness of Mohammed from February '06.
This is a picture I just…
May 12, 2010
Escape Pod episode #235 has been sitting on my smartphone since January because of its beautiful writing and archaeological theme. Jay Lake's 2009 story "On the Human Plan" is told in a gentleman-rogue style reminiscent of Leiber and Vance, and is set in a far future Dying Earth environment with…
May 11, 2010
Last year part of my daughter's schoolyard was landscaped and fitted with new entertainments. The landscapers also built a stone circle right next to her classroom. (I attended that school myself in 1982-85. The building in the background was the council dentistry clinic where I was fitted with…
May 10, 2010
Rock art in southern Scandinavia generally dates from the Bronze Age and depicts boats, long war canoes with lots of oarsmen. Here are some recently found ship panels at Casimirsborg in northern Småland, the new big dot on the country's rock-art map.
Although rock art is some of the most…
May 9, 2010
I've been staying away from Twitter for fear that it would eat my life. But I guess I have at least to try it. So, Dear Reader, feel free to follow my tweets! And tell me who I should follow. Ideally, I want people who tweet something really witty like every second day and who shut up when they…
May 9, 2010
The 92nd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Sorting Out Science on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Sam, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is already on 9 June. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field,…
May 7, 2010
Information is easier to move than matter. A good way to travel between the stars would be if you had a matter scanner at one end, an instant information transmitter, and a matter assembler at the other end. Then you could fax yourself across the galaxy. James Patrick Kelly's award-winning 1995…
May 7, 2010
The dams in River EskilstunaÃ¥n at Hyndevad regulate the water level in Lake Hjälmaren. Around 1880 when they were built, and the lake lowered, the river bed was temporarily laid dry. A major prehistoric sacrificial site was discovered, and luckily geologist Otto Gumaelius was there to document…
May 5, 2010
The local cub scouts had asked me to accompany them on a forest walk to give them some culture and history. And so I guided them in the evening sun to the singing of blackbirds along the wooded southern shore of the Baggensstäket narrows. History is thick there.
Early and Late Modern sea-lane…
May 4, 2010
The full text of Fornvännen's October issue, 2009:3, has come on-line thanks to our excellent cyber cowgirl Gun Larsson.
Joakim Goldhahn (the guy heading the project where they found the sun chariot carving last week) shows that one of the carved slabs at Kivik, in Sweden's most famous Bronze…
May 3, 2010
Tom Christensen, who heads excavations at storied Lejre on Zealand, Denmark, has a paper about the lovely Lejre figurine in ROMU 2009 (full text on-line) and another one in the new issue of Skalk. Here he offers some well-chosen comparative material and presents his arguments for the figurine's…
May 2, 2010
A springtime walk along River Nyköpingsån from Täckhammar bridge to Lake Långhalsen.
[More blog entries about beavers, photography, rivers; bävrar, foto, floder, Nyköping.]
May 2, 2010
It is of course a major issue of public discourse these days that the Catholic church has long systematically covered up child rape in the interests of the organisation's public image. But to my knowledge, nobody has attempted to justify the rapes with reference to Catholic religious doctrine. The…
May 1, 2010
Bronze Age Scandinavians believed that the sun was pulled across the sky in a chariot by a horse. They built models depicting this out of cast bronze. A well-preserved one has been found at Trundholm on Zealand, and fragments remain of one from TÃ¥gaborg in Scania. They also depicted the motif on…
April 30, 2010
Discreetly hidden under the northern side of the eastern bridgehead of rural Täckhammar bridge is a spray-painted mural. I found it while checking for geocaches. It depicts an evil-looking male face accompanied by a really funny piece of Satanist prose poetry.
"Dark vengeance of cryptic slaughter…
April 29, 2010
Who knew that it would be so much pure childish fun if someone with decent Photoshop skills put a collection of silly hats on Carolus XVI Gustavus? There's even rumoured to be an unedited picture there, but I certainly can't identify it.
April 29, 2010
The ninety-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sexy Archaeology. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! And keep those hands where I can see them, OK?
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Sam at Sorting Out Science. All bloggers with an interest…
April 29, 2010
In front, a boulder upon which I found cupmarks. Behind, a Bronze Age burnt mound consisting of fire-cracked stones.
In order to study the landscape situation of something you need to know precisely where it is. This poses a problem when it comes to Bronze Age sacrificial finds, because they are…
April 27, 2010
Spent the day metal-detecting a lovely high-profile site in Uppland for a colleague. It's turf-covered and a popular haunt of campers and picnic parties. My next detector is definitely going to be one that can differentiate between aluminium and precious metals. I hate aluminium. I took up 111…