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
November 21, 2009
Dear Reader, usually the deal here on Aard is that I tell you what to think and you reply, zombielike, "Yes... Master... Kill... Kill...". But today, let's turn the tables. I'm going to ask a question about a simple scientific-culinary matter that has baffled me for decades. And I hope someone out…
November 18, 2009
My 6-y-o daughter usually sleeps really solidly over in her room and is not easily woken by sounds she's accustomed to. But this morning she told me over breakfast, "Dad, you and Mom made the weirdest noises last night and woke me. First Mom kind of whined and sounded as if she was gonna sneeze.…
November 16, 2009
I'm enjoying one of my infrequent laptop days, that is, days during which it actually makes sense for me to tote such a device around. I type these words from the Konradsberg campus of the University of Stockholm. Konradsberg is a name that resonates in my city's history, because it used to be one…
November 16, 2009
Dan Simmons published a wonderful, galaxy-spanning, mind-blowing sf novel in 1989: Hyperion. Then he followed it up with three more novels of which I have read two. They're OK, but not as good as the first book.
Science fiction is of course stories where fabulous things happen and are explained by…
November 16, 2009
On Tuesday 17 November 17:30 I'm giving a talk as part of Mathias Klang's information security course at the University of Gothenburg. The theme is "Ãrtusendenas glömska: arkivsäkring i det riktigt lÃ¥nga perspektivet", which may hint to the intelligent reader that I'll be speaking in Swedish. I…
November 14, 2009
Hear me, Ubuntu-using brothers and sisters! Never use the on-line upgrade option to switch to a newer version of the operating system! In little more than two years, it has trashed my setup twice, once killing the machine outright, and the last time (yesterday) making it impossible to boot from the…
November 13, 2009
So you're a metal detectorist and you find a silver figurine at storied Lejre in Denmark. It depicts a person sitting in a high seat whose posts end in two wolves' heads. And on either arm rest sits a raven. The style is typical for about AD 900. So when you hand the thing over to the site manager…
November 12, 2009
Aard enjoys complimentary subscriptions to a number of popular archaeology magazines from which I learn a lot before passing them on to the Fisksätra public library. Here are my favourite stories from three recent issues that have crossed my current-reading shelf.
Current Archaeology 234, Sept.…
November 11, 2009
One of the best friends I made during my decade in the Tolkien Society is Florence Vilén; poet, novelist, connoisseuse of art and letters. She recently published a volume of poetry, Purpurpränt. Dikter med rim och reson. And earlier tonight when she visited us she threw out one of the…
November 10, 2009
We know quite a bit more now about the archaeology of Sättuna in Kaga parish, Ãstergötland, than we did before me and my homies started fieldwork there in April of 2006. My blog readers have had news of the site as it appeared, pretty much in real time. But now it's time to put up a new signpost…
November 9, 2009
In addition to the archive reports on my two seasons of fieldwork at the Late Medieval and Early Modern harbour of Djurhamn, I have now published a paper that discusses and interprets the results. It's in a symposium volume from the Royal Academy of Letters, edited by my friend Katarina Schoerner…
November 6, 2009
The seventy-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology.net. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Colleen at Middle Savagery. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me…
November 6, 2009
I've been publishing stuff in Fornvännen since 1994. But making a vanity search in the journal's on-line version, I found that I am not the first Rund??ist in Fornvännen's history. My family name was mentioned once in those pages before I showed up.
In 1935, Bengt Hildebrand published a…
November 4, 2009
My family and I just came home from our local vÃ¥rdcentral, the public medical centre, where we've taken our shots for epidemic H1N1/09 swine flu. It cost us nothing and we waited for only about 15 minutes. We got something called Pandemix, which appears to be Pandemrix mixed with another vaccine.…
November 3, 2009
Finland has a lot of cairns, usually sitting on hill tops near the sea. Unlike a mound, the cairn consists only of stones, and so it lets rain water percolate through. This messes up the contents of the cairn. Bones and burial goods are rarely preserved, and it seems that the ancient Finns didn't…
November 2, 2009
Runologist James E. Knirk has published a report on the recently found Hogganvik rune stone. His transliteration is
[?]kelbaþewas:s(t)^ainaR:aaasrpkf
aarpaa:inanana(l/b/w)oR
eknaudigastiR
ekerafaR
His translation is
Skelba-þewaR's ["Shaking-servant's"] stone. (Alphabet magic: aaasrpkf aarpaa). ?…
November 1, 2009
If I had to take a paper newspaper, then I would like Dagens Nyheter's news section, Svenska Dagbladet's arts & entertainment section, no sports section and no business section. SvD is a conservative rag and some of its political columnists are really distasteful, but DN never gets anywhere…
October 31, 2009
I'm posting this from a Helsinki basement café after a day's excursion by bus and boat in the countryside west of town. We mainly looked at cairns of various form, date and function, including a group of very fine large mountaintop ones of the typical Bronze Age variety.
Toward the end of the…
October 30, 2009
The jaw-drop moment of the conference came for me when osteologist Lise Harvig off-handedly showed us pictures of what she is doing. She's a PhD student with Niels Lynnerup at the Dept of Forensic Medicine at Copenhagen. Remember the crumbling Neolithic amber bead hoard that the Danes ran through a…
October 29, 2009
Helsinki isn't far from Stockholm. It took me a bit more than four hours from home to my hotel here, and I could have shaved more than an hour off of that if I had taken the bullet train to the airport and a cab to the hotel instead of going by bus.
I'm at the 11th Nordic Bronze Age symposium,…
October 29, 2009
Ed Yong's excellent post about fruit-bat fellatio received some even better, eye-opening comments from one Russell and Frog:
Russell: "Tan is falling into the fallacy that animals have sex for the purpose of procreation. Or of writing as if. Those bats are having sex because they're horny, and the…
October 28, 2009
Here's a confusing press release from the University of Gothenburg. Researcher Jonas Warringer is trying to find ways to slow the rate of genetic adaptation in certain microbes down to keep them from evolving resistance to antibiotics. But look at this (and I translate):
Slowed-down evolution can…
October 27, 2009
A very prominent German Wikipedian, Meisterkoch ("Master Chef"), doesn't like bloggers much. In a recent opinion piece he manages to insult all the world's blogging scientists in one fell swoop.
"At best, blogs are run by second-rate scientists; typically, however, just by unemployed people. ... In…
October 27, 2009
I've been on the instant messaging service ICQ daily since 1997. Last week, though, my entry in some database apparently got screwed up, so my password no longer works and I can't get the retrieval mechanism to send me a new one. Looking through my contact list I then realised that I hardly ever…
October 25, 2009
October drizzle can be quite photogenic in my part of the world. Here's a view from the bridge to Fisksätra holme. (I just discovered Pixlr, an excellent free on-line image editor that runs in your browser.)
October 23, 2009
Next week, 29-31 October, I'll be in Helsinki for the Nordic Bronze Age symposium. The organisers have been kind enough to ask me to chair one of the sessions, but I'd love to meet up with some Aard readers too. Drop me a line!
October 22, 2009
True to the rules of Open Access publishing, the April issue of Fornvännen has come on-line in all its full-text glory less than six months after paper publication.
Katharina Hammarstrand Dehman reports on the kind of hardcore wetland archaeology you can get to do when somebody wants to dig a…
October 21, 2009
The other day Dr. Isis made comment no 10,000 here on Aard. Lucky it wasn't one of the hate commenters that swarmed the blog around that time! Because the prize I decided on for commenter 10^4 was a song, and it could have become awkward. Now, If you want to hear me do a Queen song, head on over…
October 21, 2009
The seventy-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for…
October 19, 2009
The Swedish Research Council just released the list of researchers who are getting funding this year. The following archaeological projects are on the list.
Ingela Bergman: Trade, trade routes and Sami settlements -- socio-economic networks in northern Sweden AD 1000-1500.
Gunilla Eriksson:…