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
March 25, 2010
Skalk's February issue was not up to the Danish pop-arch journal's usual excellent standard. I am always keen to read interesting news from Jelling and Lejre, the country's proto-historic centres. But in this case the editors have devoted 17 of the issue's 30 pages to articles about Harold…
March 24, 2010
While reading up on the subject, I'm writing the introductory remarks for a study of Bronze Age sacrificial sites. In January I put a couple of paragraphs up here about the possibly redundant distinction between retrievable hoards and irretrievable sacrifices. Here's some more, about ritual and…
March 23, 2010
I haven't been able to live-blog from the road since I got rid of the Qtek two years ago. But now I'm trying out my new Samsung Galaxy Spica, and it seems to work!
March 23, 2010
You know the bit in Khalil Gibran where he says that children are arrows and parents bows, not archers? The other day my kids recorded this rendition of the "Handy Manny" theme song, and then Junior edited it in Audacity. The same evening he played his first game of Agricola where he ended up…
March 22, 2010
Celebrated the 257th anniversary of the Academy of Letters wearing tails.
Had a fine sunshine brunch on Folly Hill with my wife. The place was heavily dominated by couples born in the 70s and sporting toddlers / babies / big bellies, all probably from the expensive waterfront housing area nearby.…
March 22, 2010
Web gems have been sent my way.
ASPEX, makers of scanning electron microscopes, offer to scan your sample for free and post the image on their site. Finally you can learn about the micro-structure of your tear-duct sleep gunk!
Pablo Zalama Torres makes lovely replicas of archaeological pottery.…
March 20, 2010
Some time around 20 March each year, my part-time employers in The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters celebrate the 1753 foundation of the Academy. This gives me a rare reason to dress in tails. And I now look forward to performing for the first time that ultimate ritual of 20th century masculinity,…
March 19, 2010
Cosmopolitan popster Mika is a great showman and tours with a great band. The audience at his gig in Stockholm last night was thoroughly charmed by the friendliness and musical mastery on offer. Mika traces his musical ancestry back to acts like the Beatles, Queen, Elton John and George Michael,…
March 18, 2010
The eighty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Ad hominin. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Greg Laden. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next…
March 17, 2010
How long ago was the time of Emperor Augustus? Most educated people, including professional historians and archaeologists, will reply "about 2000 years" if you ask them. But a considerable number of amateur dendrochronologists say "about 1800 years". And because of an unfortunate peculiarity in how…
March 16, 2010
Anyone who uses the Library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters more than briefly will soon discover that its staff has a thing for page 17. Every book in that excellent library carries a stamp of ownership on that page.
Last night I was reading Frans G. Bengtsson's 1947 essay collection För…
March 15, 2010
Last June a well-preserved mass grave was found near Weymouth in Dorset, southern England. It contained the skeletons of 51 decapitated young men and later-teen boys. At first the burial was dated through the inclusion of Roman-era potsherds. The pit itself had originally been a Roman quarry. But…
March 15, 2010
Sunday "... five men were indicted, some of them members of the Black Cobra criminal gang. They are suspected of involvement in cake theft from the Godbiten bakery in Ãstorp [pop. 8500] earlier this week. The cake was stolen from a truck on an industrial estate.
120 boxes containing among other…
March 15, 2010
Here's a question for all of you journal editors and editorial board members out there. Does every single manuscript that your journal receives get the same peer-review treatment? Is there no pre-screening before stuff gets sent to reviewers, where patently kooky or ignorant contributions are…
March 15, 2010
Had brunch and a walk in the sunshine with wife and sans kids, a rare pleasure. Strange to think that in just a few years' time they won't need us much anymore. I guess it's one tiny step at a time, setting us down gently. Anyway, it's only 15 years to the first grand-child if Junior repeats my…
March 14, 2010
Scandinavians generally speak pretty good English. But every now and then you come across reminders that they are still very far from being native speakers. Witness this pail of wall-paper glue that I bought earlier today.
Dear Swedish glue-maker, "hernia" means brock and is defined as "the…
March 14, 2010
The 88th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Ad Hominin on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Ciarán, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 12 May. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line…
March 12, 2010
Here's an interesting case. A woman took her baby to Danderyd church (where I once took first communion) and had the child baptised -- against the father's wishes, as it turned out. He isn't happy. And the priest admits that he should have checked with the dad but that he didn't.
Bo Larsson,…
March 11, 2010
I've written before about a recent whale vertebra that someone had dropped into a lake far from the sea in northern Sweden. This past summer, fishermen trawling off the country's southern coast caught two old whale bones, and they've turned out to belong to a grey whale, a species that's been…
March 10, 2010
A recurring theme here on Aard is my complaints about how useless certain kinds of higher education are if you want a job. For a change, let's take a look at what kind of degree is most likely to get you a job in Sweden over the coming decade. The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education has…
March 9, 2010
Christian fundamentalists like to believe that homosexuality is an illness that can -- and should -- be cured. The factual belief is contradicted by a solid scientific consensus, and the value judgement is widely considered to be a repressive holdover from the Bronze Age.
The makers of the French…
March 8, 2010
Last week was skiing break for my kids. I couldn't find anywhere good to stay in the mountains, so we didn't go off on holiday. Here's what we did for fun instead.
Dinner at the home of a Chinese friend. It was one of those no hablar parties that spouses in multi-ethnic marriages know all about.…
March 5, 2010
Spring has reputedly reached certain areas way south of where I still shovel snow daily, and with it comes Antiquity's spring issue. This is of course an intensely interesting journal, and not solely because the summer issue will feature that opinion piece of mine that I quoted from on the blog…
March 3, 2010
Human eyes and brains are still way, way better at image recognition than computers. There are many visual tasks that we do swiftly ourselves but that we can't yet get machines to do reliably at all. In January of '06 I blogged about the Stardust @ Home project where you can help identify…
March 2, 2010
Weatherwise, last weekend was thawing and misty and overcast, so I didn't feel like doing much outdoors. I finished reading Daryl Gregory's new novel (didn't do much for me) and started Douglas Adams's fifth Hitch-hiker book. When it appeared in 1992 I didn't bother with it since it seemed too much…
February 27, 2010
The Vichada river in Colombia is a tributary of the Orinoco. In 2004 part-time geologist Max Rocca discovered that it skirts South America's largest impact crater. It measures 50 km in diameter, nearly a third of the Chicxulub crater caused by the space rock that killed off the non-avian dinos.…
February 26, 2010
I'm happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his "technical work", which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many…
February 25, 2010
Being an atheist and a rationalist, I find most religious beliefs quite silly. But religious people vary hugely in their behaviour, and many do excellent deeds. Generally, I find it easier to respect the believer who lives by the core tenets of his faith, as all major religions have pretty…
February 24, 2010
The eighty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology in Practice. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Ciarán at Ad hominin. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer…