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
December 24, 2009
I spent Wednesday evening wrapping presents and reading the latest popular archaeomags that have reached my mailbox. Pleasurable pursuits!
Current World Archaeology's Dec/Jan issue (#38) has a story on new interpretations of the inter-war excavation results at Dura-Europos in Syria. This is an…
December 23, 2009
A correspondent of mine who requests anonymity tells a sad tale of what Oligarch Russia does to its cultural heritage these days. Money talks!
... the scandalous case with the monuments of ancient St. Petersburg on the place of which the Government plans to build a big (400 m high) skyscraper of…
December 22, 2009
Last year my wife and I bought a house. Since then we have been tenants of Nacka municipality who owned the land the house sits on. It's a tiny plot, hardly larger than the house itself, and surrounded by communal land. But the interest on a mortgage loan is quite a bit less than the land rent, and…
December 21, 2009
The autumn-term closing ceremony in Swedish schools is traditionally held in a church. The country was solidly (if lukewarmly) Christian until quite recently, and Christmas is of course nominally a Christian holiday. But Muslim immigrants have become more numerous from the 80s on, the Swedish…
December 19, 2009
Before lunch yesterday I took a walk and listened to Planetary Radio. And I mused, as so often, that I am very lucky to be living and working on the inner margin of the Stockholm archipelago. The picture below is the view from my office window. (Sorry about the phone camera.)
December 18, 2009
The mines of Gladhammar near Västervik in SE Sweden were worked at least from the 16th century to the 19th century, producing iron, copper and cobalt. Now they pose a big environmental problem because of heavy metals leaching out of the spoil heaps into a nearby lake. A project is afoot to do…
December 17, 2009
I've listened to Escape Pod, the science fiction short-story podcast, for four years now. And lately I have become increasingly awed by one of the newer hosts, Norm Sherman. His writing is acerbic, his delivery is deadpan, the guy is just so cool and funny. On the most recent EP episode he played…
December 16, 2009
The eighty-second 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 Eric at the Primate Diaries. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
December 16, 2009
Today is my fourth birthday as a blogger! (Here's my first entry from 2005.) I see myself as the proprietor of and main contributor to a small daily paper on subjects that interest me. And I am enjoying myself! Trafficwise, the mean number of unique readers per day has been as follows.
2006: 157…
December 15, 2009
A new paper in the Norwegian journal Viking offers exciting news about two less-well-known ship burials from the Avaldsnes area in Rogaland on the country's west coast. Being poorly preserved, they have been difficult to date. Bonde & Stylegar now show with dendrochronology that these are the…
December 14, 2009
These are my obsolete portable music players. A post-1985 cassette player, a 2000 minidisc player and a 2002 iPod whose sole means of communication with the outside world is a firewire socket. In the 90s I didn't listen much to music while on the move. Since 2006 I use a smartphone as my mp3…
December 14, 2009
Tonight the Geminid meteor shower peaks. My wife and I were out last night and saw loads, about one big fat shooting star a minute. Don't miss the year's best meteor shower! It's because the Earth passes through the sandy exhaust trail of a comet. Tomorrow night will be good as well.
December 14, 2009
Part of the Swedish Christmas celebrations is that many people turn to traditional cooking. Yesterday my dad's wife & mine made sausages. They were really nice, way better than their limp and grey pre-cooking appearance suggested. But they were hardly traditional, containing mouflon and elk in…
December 13, 2009
A scary but pretty funny accident happened in central Stockholm the other day. A work crew was drilling for a geothermal heat pump when suddenly the drill went into an open subterranean cavity. There wasn't supposed to be one there according to the plans they had been given for the job. When they…
December 12, 2009
You know these contrived situations you're supposed to imagine yourself in prior to discussing some problem of ethics? I came across one in a recent Radiolab episode that reminded me of why I don't like thinking inside those boxes.
It's wartime. You're hiding in a cellar with your infant child and…
December 11, 2009
In mid-2008, UK science writer Simon Singh fell afoul of the weird and archaic English libel law. After he wrote in The Guardian that chiropractic lacks scientific support and that such treatments are bogus, the British Chiropractic Association sued him for libel. And in England, a libel case is…
December 10, 2009
Around this time of year, Swedes like to throw little brief daytime parties with mulled wine and ginger bread cookies. Usually they're on weekends, of course. In my mother's family there's been a tradition for decades of organising mulled-wine parties for the descendants of my maternal grandfather…
December 9, 2009
The July issue of Fornvännen has come on-line in all its free full-text glory less than six months after paper publication.
PÃ¥vel Nicklasson publishes his second paper on the forgotten early-19th century antiquarian, J.H. Wallman, and relays information about a Late Roman Period snake-head gold…
December 8, 2009
The on-line version of Antiquity's winter issue (#322) was published just the other day. Here are some highlights (links to abstracts, papers then hidden by a pay wall):
A pair of "ornamental trousers" found in an exceptionally well preserved 1st century BC grave in the Tarim basin in Xinjiang.…
December 4, 2009
The eighty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Spider Monkey Tales. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Krystal at Anthropology in Practice. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
December 4, 2009
[More blog entries about archaeology, history, uppsala, Sweden; arkeologi, historia, idéhistoria, Uppsala.]
Magnus Alkarp defended his PhD thesis in Uppsala on 21 November. I just read the book, and my opinion is that Alkarp definitely deserves his PhD. In fact, I believe that he probably deserves…
December 3, 2009
Names are one of the things that separate historical and archaeological thinking from each other. History is full of people of whom little is known beyond their names and perhaps a royal or ecclesiastical title, yet still they are considered to be historical personages. Meanwhile, a dead person…
December 2, 2009
[More blog entries about photography, frost; foto, frost.]
More pix below the fold!
December 1, 2009
AIDS was discovered in gay men and the virus is more easily transmitted through anal than vaginal intercourse. For this reason, gay men (defined as "men who have sex with men") have long been forbidden to donate blood in Sweden. Likewise, people who go to bed with a new hetero partner must wait…
November 30, 2009
The 81st Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Spider Monkey Tales tomorrow, Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to me or Michelle, 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/…
November 30, 2009
[More blog entries about Sweden, photography, manor; Närke, Askersund, foto, herrgård.]
I was headed for a lonely November weekend with wife & daughter abroad and son with his mom. So I rounded up three friends (though Paddy K was kept from coming along at the last minute by a big meltdown…
November 27, 2009
Current Archaeology's December issue offers one of the mag's signature feature write-ups of new books, this time The Complete Ice Age: how climate change shaped the world by Brian Fagan et al. Interesting stuff, where the following passage on the coming of our own species into Ice Age Europe struck…
November 26, 2009
Today's schedule was 5 hours on trains to Lund, 6 hours in Lund giving a talk, and 5 hours on trains home. In Lund I saw the outline of a very early church foundation picked out in the overlying street pavement near the Cathedral. And I was reminded of other archaeology I've seen thus outlined: the…
November 25, 2009
A few months ago I finished a book manuscript on elite settlement and political geography in Ãstergötland, one of Sweden's core provinces, in the period AD 375-1000. In countries that have experienced an infestation of Romans, this era is known as the Early Middle Ages. In Scandyland we call it…
November 24, 2009
In Helsinki a few weeks back I made the acquaintance of my charming colleague Wesa Perttola. Now he has made excellent distribution maps for my forthcoming Ãstergötland book. Above is the scatter of 9th and 10th century elite indicators (big black dots) against a background of 6th-8th century…