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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Friday night, I made tacos and chocolate chip cookies with my kids. Saturday, I attended the Imagicon 2 speculative fiction conference, chairing a panel on time travel and forming part of a panel on legal aspects of interstellar empires without faster-than-light travel. I also talked to loads of…
Dr. Isis made the 10,000th comment here on Aard earlier today! Flatteringly, she said that I had made half the women on the Internet lose their shit. I simply know not my own strength.
It took two years and almost ten months to get to 10,000. As her prize, I hereby offer to call the good doctor…
The entry about the Fake Advertising Mom provoked a reaction I didn't see coming. I said that pregnancy and nursing changes a woman's body in plainly visible ways and that the fake moms in ads usually show no such signs, in addition to being too young to be realistic mothers of the children they're…
The 78th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Paddy, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
The carnival needs hosts. The next open slot is on 4 November. Drop me a line!
Autumn is starting to get nasty in Sweden, and immediately the Fake Advertising Mom pops up on billboards and in magazines. Sometimes she's even part of a Fake Advertising Family.
Here's what I mean. I don't claim 100% accuracy, but I believe I can usually tell on sight whether a woman has given…
Last night somebody googled the phrase "martin rundqvist republikan" and ended up here on my blog. Note the K: this person probably didn't wonder if I'd vote for Sarah Palin. They wondered what I think about the Swedish constitution, which provides the country with a decorative king. Outside the…
I lost the battle against the wasp nest: no matter how many workers I vacuumed, it still hung on. And now our house is full of groggy young queen wasps. It seems that the last thing a wasp nest does before shutting down for good is discharge a bunch of queens who will hibernate and then start new…
I'll be at the ImagiCon 2 speculative fiction convention in the burbs of Stockholm on Saturday the 17th. I'm chairing a panel discussion on time travel and paradoxes at 15:00, and I'm on a panel about interstellar law at 21:00. Any Aard readers there, please make yourselves known!
[More blog…
I took Friday off from work and drove with my friend Anders to Avesta, an industrial town in Dalecarlia, where our friend Pär and his lovely wife, both teachers, have recently settled. We spent the afternoon and evening walking in the sunshine, admiring their house, eating like kings, listening…
Small mounds consisting of burnt stone are a signature feature of Bronze Age settlement sites along the coasts of southern Sweden. They were the subject of my first academic publication in 1994, though I'd hardly even seen one, let alone dug one. This I have finally begun remedying today, when I…
The seventy-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Place Odyssey. 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 hosting. The next…
Most rune stones are written with the late 16-character futhark and date from the 11th century when the Scandies had largely been Christianised. Their inscriptions tend to be formulaic: "Joe erected the stone after Jim his father who was a very good man". But by that time, runic writing was…
I forgot to mention the variety show on Saturday night. It was headlined by comedian Robin Ince (you may have seen his MAGIC MAN DUNNIT clip) and offered a lot of funny and musical and skeptical and cynical acts of high standard. I was particularly impressed by high-brow rapper Baba Brinkman. Not…
I'm at The Amazing Meeting London, an Old World instance of the skeptical conferences organised by the James Randi Educational Foundation. (Or more correctly, I am waiting for breakfast at my threadbare Bayswater hotel, where I sleep in a basement closet.) I came to London Friday night and started…
I've been called in to help my friend Arne, retired art historian, whack a manuscript into shape. So the other day I drove down to the manor on Vikbolandet and spent 24 enjoyable hours there, writing and chatting and walking in the park.
It's always bittersweet to return to sites you've dug. I guess I'm particularly susceptible to this nostalgia since I tend to feel it very shortly after moving on from anything or any place. And since I usually only dig during the sunny season I remember my old excavations as summer country.
Two…
My friend Eddie the pagan goldsmith has inadvertently discovered an unusual way to acquire a clean mink skeleton. Here's what you do.
Set some crayfish traps in a lake.
A mink will break into one of the traps to get at the crayfish, get stuck and drown.
When retrieving your traps with their catch…
11-y-o Junior bought his first own album last Saturday: Mika's The Boy Who Knew Too Much. (My own first was Depeche Mode's Some Great Reward, bought at age 12 in '84 or '85). It's an excellent record once you've gotten used to Mika's queeny (and Queenish) style of singing: catchy studio pop. And…
In 1995 a gold hoard was found at Vittene in Norra Björke parish, Västergötland. Its contents had been amassed over two centuries, and it was committed to the earth in the 3rd century AD. A fine book on the find and subsequent settlement excavations has recently been published and is available…
The seventy-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. 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 hosting. The next vacant…
I type this in the hotel lobby while waiting for the train just across the street that will take me to Brussels. The conference closed at 13, I had sandwiches with my colleagues and then set out again for the countryside south of town to grab me a geocache. On the Mergel ridge I saw a motte (an…
Sculpture fragment from the Cathedral of St. Lambert in Liège.
Today's bus excursion took us up the river Maas/Meuse into Wallonia, Belgium's Francophone part, where our first stop was Liège. The city looks pretty crummy, I'm afraid, with a lot of dilapidated and dirty buildings. The ironworks…
Yesterday's paper sessions offered eleven presentations. I almost fell asleep several times. This was not mainly because four of the papers were in German and French which I have a hard time understanding when spoken quickly. The main reason was that few of my colleagues know how to perform an…
A funny intermezzo caught me Saturday on the train from Brussels to Liège. Across the aisle, two young pretty lesbian couples were seated. And they spent most of the ride necking furiously. I suppose that as a het male I might have been expected to feel some kind of perturbation or arousal at the…
Uppsala, at the roadside by the castle, Friday 18th at noon. Its unblinking eye was very clear.
I like to travel light. My luggage for a five-day conference stay in the Netherlands barely fills a small back pack. Apart from what I wear and carry in my pockets, I've got:
Netbook computer + charger
Smartphone charger
Camera + charger + transfer cable. The travel camera is pretty small, but its…
Follow-up: in July last year I wrote about a giant vertebra that had been found in a lake in northern Sweden at 210 meters above sea level. The find spot hasn't been near the sea since the end of the latest ice age. This meant that the bone might be very old.
But already in October there was news…
Musical styles can have really weird names. There's sauce music (salsa), meringue music (merengue), juvenile delinquent music (punk), record collection music (disco), LSD warehouse music (acid house), popular music (pop), you name it. But some of the most intensely loved musical styles have names…