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
February 23, 2010
The Open Lab 2009 science blogging anthology has been published and is available as a paperback book and a PDF file. There's a piece of Aard in there among many fine contributions. Tell me what you think and what e-reader you're using if you buy the PDF!
February 22, 2010
Friday night I unexpectedly found myself looking at dinner all alone. So I quickly arranged for a visit with friends to a Jamaican restaurant (I had jerk chicken), and after our meal Swedepat beat me and Dr Sandy at Race for the Galaxy.
Saturday was mainly chores, but in the evening the Rundkvist…
February 22, 2010
The 87th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the 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 10 March. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/…
February 20, 2010
Yesterday the parents of a 17-y-o Malmö boy who suffers from autism lost a case in the Swedish court of appeal, Hovrätten. They had sued their insurance company for not recognising their claim for compensation. The parents blame the boy's condition on common vaccines, which would have entitled…
February 19, 2010
There was a lot more ice in the heat-pump box than I had thought, a 10 cm cake covering its floor, but getting rid of it proved easy. All I needed was a screwdriver and a small axe. The hot air gun wasn't much use.
I turned off the power feed, took the hood off the thing, removed the rotor and…
February 18, 2010
I got a great letter from Reggae Roger Wikell, which I publish in translation with the permission of Roger and Mattias Pettersson with the awesome metal hair. For context, note that these two scholar friends of mine are the area's foremost authorities on Mesolithic sites that have ended up on…
February 17, 2010
The non-profit Center for Desert Archaeology is located in Tucson, Arizona and publishes a fine magazine, Archaeology Southwest. These generous people contacted me one day out of the blue and offered me a complimentary subscription. On Monday issue 23:3 (summer '09) reached my mail box on snowy…
February 16, 2010
The respected Finnish archaeology annual Fennoscandia Archaeologica has gone on-line! Every single paper from 1984 to 2007 is now available for free on the web site of the Archaeological Society of Finland. It's a great resource for scholars. For instance, the volume for 2007 includes seven largely…
February 15, 2010
The somewhat elusive central thesis of M.C. Jenkins's new book Vampire Forensics is that original European vampire folklore was based upon misinterpretation of the slow decay that occurs when you bury a body deep. Particularly so during epidemics, when upon discovery an unusually well-preserved…
February 14, 2010
Had friends over to play some Abalone, Hell Rail and Balderdash. 11-y-o Junior often joins our board-game sessions these days.
Bought ski boots for Junior and went skiing with him and the Rundkvist ladies.
Watched Where the Wild Things Are. Nice visuals, but the movie unexpectedly turned out…
February 13, 2010
I'm studying sacrificial deposits made by people of a lo-tech culture in Sweden 3000 years ago, largely in wetlands. This was long before any word relevant to the area was written. The objects were mainly recovered during the decades to either side of 1900. Yesterday while trawling through back…
February 11, 2010
I've been asked to write an opinion piece about the future of Swedish archaeology for a high-visibility venue. This, as you can imagine, I enjoy doing a lot. Here's an excerpt from the piece as it's looking at the moment.
Swedish academic archaeology should continue its on-going voyage back…
February 10, 2010
The eighty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. 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…
February 10, 2010
It's de-lurking time again! If you're a regular Aard reader who never comments, or if you do comment but have an inkling that I may not know who you are, then please comment on this entry and tell us a few words about yourself. Also, questions and suggestions for blog entries are much appreciated.
February 10, 2010
This morning when I got my bike out of the yard to take Juniorette to school, I heard a loud clattering noise from the box-like outdoor part of our air source heat pump. At first I thought the ball bearing on the rotor had crapped out. But the guy who installed it explained over the phone that the…
February 8, 2010
Lately I've been listening to Canadian 90s/00s orchestral popsters the Heavy Blinkers. Here's a fine song off of their '02 album Better Weather, "I Used to Be a Design". I actually prefer this live version since its production is scaled down and Ruth Minnikin's vocals are heavily processed on the…
February 8, 2010
The 86th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the Testimony of the Spade on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Magnus, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The next open hosting slot is on 10 March. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo…
February 7, 2010
Took a walk and photographed two buildings for Wikipedia.
Went skiing on the golf course.
Had friends over, played a game of Scotland Yard and a game of Power Grid.
Painted three walls in the bedroom. This was sort of a chore, but not in fact boring, and having a nice-looking bedroom is fun. The…
February 5, 2010
Danes often have tripartite names, like famous Roman Iron Age scholar Ulla Lund Hansen or NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. And I've been wondering how these names are inherited. Specifically, which names get dropped and which ones get passed on to the kids. So I wrote my erudite…
February 3, 2010
Occasioned by a comment on my recent entry on the movie Avatar and the Gaia hypothesis, here's a re-run of a blog entry from March 2006.
As comments to a recent entry, I've had an interesting discussion about environmentalism with a friend. We both agree that biodiversity and ecological systems…
February 2, 2010
Four years ago (when I had only been blogging for a month) I asked my readers what kind of smartphone I should get. Nobody replied, but I got some advice elsewhence and bought a Qtek 9100. Then, two years ago, I asked the same question again and got lots of answers. In the end I bought a Samsung…
February 1, 2010
It's time for the annual Global Population Speak Out. We all know that in order not to crash the planet we need to consume less energy and raw materials and we need to emit less pollutants. But it doesn't seem to be generally known that nothing an affluent Westerner does can have anywhere near as…
January 31, 2010
Went skiing twice.
Went skating on Lake Källtorpssjön at the Hellas sporting centre under the watchful eye of the Nacka radio masts. There's a snow-ploughed circuit there, but it hadn't been ploughed recently so there was a lot of snow to contend with, plus ice cracks and a stiff cold wind, so…
January 29, 2010
Great flocks of fieldfares (Turdus pilaris, björktrast) are hanging around Boat Hill, feeding off the frozen parkland rowan berries instead of migrating. They're so ruffled up against the cold that they're hardly recognisable as the streamlined summer birds we're used to. Their cousins the…
January 28, 2010
As part of the reading course I've set myself on Bronze Age sacrificial finds, wetland archaeology and landscape studies, I'm reading a new book whose title translates as "Swedish bog cultivation. Agriculture, peat use and landscape change from 1750 to 2000". It's about various ways that Swedes…
January 27, 2010
The eighty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Magnus at Testimony of the Spade. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
January 27, 2010
The Web helps you check if your ideas are original. Recently I've come up with two puns that proved to be unoriginal but still surprisingly uncommon.
Ronald McDonald is the Lord of the Fries.
The famous fantasy role-playing game should always be referred to as Dung & Drag. It amazes me that I…
January 26, 2010
The 85th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the A Very Remote Period Indeed tomorrow, 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 10 March. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/…
January 25, 2010
I type these words in a seafood restaurant at the main square of Visby on the island of Gotland. I haven't been here for almost a decade. Today I had the rare pleasure of teaching undergrads. My old grad-school buddy Gunilla Runesson at Visby University College gave me four hours to talk about the…