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
January 24, 2010
Had a lot of fun this weekend:
Went skating twice, once with each of my kids.
Went skiing with my wife.
Got beaten at Pitch Car four times by my kids.
Took the kids to a birthday party for a charming friend of mine, populated largely by former physics engineers who are now programmers.
Took my son…
January 22, 2010
Apparently the Lejre excavators still haven't realised that the lovely silver miniature they found depicts an aristocratic woman who can't be Odin, regardless of who may be the owner of the throne she sits on. A Danish news site contacted me today and asked me about the issue. Here's what I said (…
January 21, 2010
I'm reading the recently published 50-year anniversary volume of "UV", the excavations department within the Swedish National Heritage Board. I worked my first fieldwork season for one of their regional units back in 1992. The book's an interesting read as UV is the single organisation that has…
January 20, 2010
We rarely buy bread. Instead I bake. Tonight's production involved a 5-day sour dough and a bag of roasted sunflower seeds. Pretty good, though I overestimated the amount of salt on the seeds and overcompensated. The sour dough was just for flavour: I can't wait for a proper lactobacillum…
January 19, 2010
Writes Dear Reader Bruce Paulson of Gillett, Wisconsin:
Your article the other day about rutabagas whet my appetite so on Friday I went to the local grocery store with a friend who was staying for supper. I unloaded three of them at the checkout counter where a teenage clerk started to examine…
January 18, 2010
Here's what I did for fun this past weekend.
Watched Avatar.
Had a dim sum dinner.
Chucked out the Christmas tree, lopped off the branches and kept the trunk to bring to my dad's place for firewood. (This doesn't sound like fun? Well, my life consists of fun, work and chores, and anything related…
January 16, 2010
[More blog entries about movies, avatar, tolkien, gaiahypothesis; film, avatar, tolkien, gaiahypotesen.]
Today my mind was blown by James Cameron's sf film Avatar in full-colour 3D. Some spoilers follow.
Tolkien created the ents, the tree-shepherds, out of his sense that trees are so large yet so…
January 14, 2010
Härnevi vicarage, Uppland. Large collection of bronzes, c. 600 BC. Packed into a belt box, wrapped in a leather garment and deposited in wetland. Found in 1902 during drainage digging.
In my work, I really prefer writing over reading, and in order to profit as much as possible from my reading…
January 13, 2010
The eighty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the A Primate of Modern Aspect. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Julien at A Very Remote Period Indeed. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are…
January 12, 2010
The Open Laboratory is an annual anthology of blog writings on science started by Bora over at A Blog Around the Clock. I was very proud to get pieces selected for the 2006 and 2007 volumes, and then I was miffed to not make the cut for the 2008 one. But now I'm proud again, because my blog entry "…
January 11, 2010
I just had to swap two hours of daytime work for two hours of evening free time and get out on Lake Lundsjön with my skis. It's amazing, seeing the cliffs where we sim and sun bathe in the summers, but from an otherwise unreachable vantage point two meters above the water's surface!
January 10, 2010
The 84th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the A Primate of Modern Aspect on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Modern Primate, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. It's a great way to get some traffic and visibility in the anthro/…
January 8, 2010
I support labour unions. Worker solidarity is the only way to keep wages above the barest subsistence level when you're working for an employer who wishes to maximise profit. I haven't been a union member myself for many years, though. The reason is that there is nothing a union can do for me. On…
January 7, 2010
Not everyone knows what's inside a golf ball. I do. Or I thought I did.
When I was a kid a friend of mine taught me how to open golf balls. You need a hacksaw (Sw. bÃ¥gfil) and preferably a vise (Sw. skruvstycke). It's impossible to open them with a knife or wire cutters - you're guaranteed to…
January 6, 2010
I hardly ever read books in French and I hardly ever read books by Nobel laureates. In the first case, my grasp of the language is shaky and I have no good entry point into French literature: I don't know what to try. I think the last French-language book I tried reading was Les Trois Mousquetaires…
January 5, 2010
Everybody knows that English has borrowed the words ombudsman and smorgasbord from Swedish. But did you know that rutabaga is another Swedish loan? And that it was borrowed from a rural Swedish dialect, not standard Swedish?
"Rutabaga" is an American word for the kind of turnip known to Englishmen…
January 4, 2010
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars six Earth calendar years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and both still work fine! Sadly, though, Spirit has been stuck on the edge…
January 2, 2010
My old Tolkien Society buddy Indûr and his wife rents an extra room in their apartment building. It looks like it used to be the caretaker's office. Now it's a gaming room.
January 1, 2010
Frost on rowan trees in Fisksätra at sun-up on New Year's Day. (Note the blackbird.)
[More blog entries about photography, trees; foto, träd, nacka.]
January 1, 2010
I found this sign at the Slussen commuter train station the other day.
December 31, 2009
Today I did something that, had I been a truly rational consumer, I would have done 20 years ago.
Fisksätra has two grocery stores. One is a big chain store and the other is a typical turkbutik, a mom'n'pop store run by immigrants from the Near East. Whenever possible, I have favoured the little…
December 31, 2009
My brother-in-law Peter Köhler is not only a very nice guy, but also a successful artist. He regularly exhibits his work at Magnus Karlsson's gallery, one of Stockholm's most prestigious venues. Peter's next show there is scheduled for 9 Jan. through 7 Feb. and is titled "Black Magic".
"A study…
December 30, 2009
The eighty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the Primate Diaries. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to the keeper of A Primate of Modern Aspect. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
December 30, 2009
After six or seven weeks of Windows, I've finally gotten Ubuntu linux to run again. My installation crashed when I tried to upgrade on-line to the most recent version, Karmic. And then I couldn't boot Karmic from a USB stick. I thought the copy on the stick had gone corrupt. Yesterday Tor lent me a…
December 30, 2009
I suddenly came to think of my first character in a role-playing game. His name was Gildor, he was an elf and a "fighter" -- I suppose he must have been a soldier actually -- and he came to a sad end. I knew him only briefly.
From age twelve to twenty-five I was an avid role-player. Indeed, the…
December 29, 2009
The Swedish Skeptic Society's annual awards for 2009 were announced yesterday.
Professor emeritus of ecological zoology Staffan Ulfstrand receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... for his engrossing and pedagogical books about evolution [such as Savannah Lives: Animal Life and the Human…
December 29, 2009
I recently celebrated four years as a blogger. But disregarding what I was doing before I joined Sb, today marks Aard's third anniversary! It's one of the older active blogs on the site: of the 55 that joined at various times in 2006, less than 39 see timely updates today.
I'm still having fun and…
December 28, 2009
The blog entry I had been thinking about and repeatedly forgetting about came back to me. Turns out those story beginnings never went far because I had been thinking about situations where I probably wouldn't survive for long. I've had this scary scenario playing in my head, while awake, for quite…
December 27, 2009
The 83rd Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at the Primate Diaries on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Eric, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. It's a great way to get some traffic and visibility in the anthro/archaeo bloggyspheroid…
December 26, 2009
I've had this decent idea for a post popping up in my mind twice and then dropping out of it before I had a chance to write myself a note. It's something about fragments, about beginnings of stories stacked onto each other like a collage. Or so I seem to remember. Maybe it will come back to me.
So…