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
June 17, 2009
The sixty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Wanna Be An Anthropologist. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 29 July 12 August. All bloggers with an interest in the…
June 17, 2009
I'm proud to announce that Fornvännen, Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research, is now up to speed on the Open Access side. Our excellent librarian and information jockey Gun Larsson has just put the third and fourth issues for last year on-line. Fornvännen appears on-line for free with a six-…
June 15, 2009
The 70th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Wanna Be An Anthropologist on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Paul. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
June 15, 2009
Everybody knows that energy is good for you and calories are bad for you. What newagers, health nuts and alties seem to be completely ignorant of is that both words originate in physics and that they refer to the same thing.
Energy "is a scalar physical quantity that describes the amount of work…
June 14, 2009
Attended the Where Is the Action rock festival with my wife, heard a lot of good music, much of it new to me. Details here and here.
Shopped for presents and spent an hour having cake and reading, all in the charming company of soon-6-y-o Juniorette. She: Donald Duck; me: SprÃ¥ktidningen.…
June 13, 2009
[More blog entries about wheretheactionis, rockfestival, Sweden, duffy, magicnumbers, jennywilson, elperrodelmar, musik, rock, pop; musik, rock, pop, rockfestival, wheretheactionis, duffy, jennywilson, magicnumbers, elperrodelmar.]
Second day of a rainy festival. This time I had the best of…
June 12, 2009
[More blog entries about wheretheactionis, rockfestival, Sweden, pixies, seasicksteve, missli, musik, rock, pop; musik, rock, pop, rockfestival, wheretheactionis, pixies, missli, seasicksteve.]
I spent yesterday afternoon and evening at a rock festival out near the university. I arrived early…
June 12, 2009
A month ago news of a wreck found in Sweden's largest lake, Vänern, made the rounds of international media. The story gained traction by an early mention of Viking ships and weapons found alongside the wreck.
Finder Roland Peterson from the Väner Museum now explains that though the ship-building…
June 11, 2009
Dear Reader CCBC disagrees with me regarding cultural evolution. Here's my thinking, briefly.
Cultures are different from each other and change over time.
New cultural traits seldom arise for well-thought-out adaptive reasons: most are just made up capriciously.
Not all cultural traits are…
June 10, 2009
Here are some excellent albums I've been listening to lately on my trusty smartphone. If you're into power pop, alternative rock, US folk and psychedelia, then check them out!
Brendan Benson. Alternative to Love. 2005.
Grand Duchy. Petits Fours. 2009. It's Frank Black and his wife Violet Clark!…
June 10, 2009
A seminar in Stockholm tomorrow will treat the question, "What are the most important unanswered questions in the humanities and social sciences?". In my opinion, the most important ones are "How can peace, prosperity and democracy be established in countries where they are lacking?". And historian…
June 9, 2009
Why are we here? Why do we live? What is the meaning of life? These questions are poorly phrased as neither "why" nor "meaning" has a distinct definition.
To begin with "why", it can refer either to the cause of something happening or the purpose for which something was done by an agent. Causality…
June 8, 2009
Kai and Anneli recently gave us a very welcome present: a cast of a lion mask from the Peerless Palace in Stockholm. North European Baroque is such a weird and lovely style. The wreck of the Vasa is a prime example, and there's a lot of it on the facades of houses in the Old Town too.
The Peerless…
June 7, 2009
The way I like to lead my life is basically Epicurean: "Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility and freedom from fear as well as absence of bodily pain through knowledge of the workings of the world and the limits of our…
June 4, 2009
The sixty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 29 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
June 3, 2009
Sweden's secularisation process has been going on for about a century, usually pretty quietly, with the anti-Christian polemics of philosopher Ingemar Hedenius marking a brief period of open conflict in the 1950s.
As is the case in most European countries, Sweden's university system was born in the…
June 2, 2009
From 1980, a television appearance by the brilliant Tom Lehrer, where he performs a song that never made it onto any of his records back in the day. (I hear it's on the CD re-issue, though.)
Via David Nessle.
June 1, 2009
Living in a country that hasn't seen war for two centuries, and never having done military service, I'm completely baffled by war rapes and the post-war rapes that have become part of the cultures of certain African countries. Particularly the high incidence of child rape going on e.g. in Liberia…
May 31, 2009
The 68th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Remote Central on Wednesday. Submit your best recent stuff to Tim before Tuesday evening. Anything anthro or archaeo goes!
May 29, 2009
A friendly Englishman who recently settled in southern Sweden wrote me to ask how a law-abiding metal detectorist should go about getting a permit to pursue their hobby in this country.
The first thing to understand is that the Swedish system makes it effectively impossible to metal detect on a…
May 28, 2009
Magnus Ljunggren has a lovely little piece about two Russian writers in today's Svenska Dagbladet.
1. In fiction, a man who doesn't exist. Yury Nikolaevich Tynyanov (1894-1943), a Latvian Jew, wrote the satirical novella Lieutenant Kijé (1927) about a non-existent military officer who gets entered…
May 27, 2009
I just got home from Alan Sokal's talk at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the outskirts of Stockholm. He was on the same stage where astronaut Christer Fuglesang spoke a year ago. The headline was "What is Science and Why Should We Care?".
Sokal's reply to his first question was, briefly,…
May 26, 2009
[More blog entries about health, ears, cold; hälsa, öron, förkylning.]
When she has a cold, my 5-y-o daughter often suffers temporary hearing loss. Her ears don't get infected, there's no pain or fever -- she just can't hear very well, sometimes for weeks. The reason is that the lining of her…
May 25, 2009
Geocaching is a fun nerdy outdoors hobby where you hide tupperware under boulders in the woods and publish their GPS coordinates on the web for other geeks to go look for the tupperware. Sometimes when you look for geocaches in public spaces such as parks, you get funny looks from passing non-…
May 24, 2009
A headline caught my eye: "Archaeology in the Struggle for Jerusalem". As usual when archaeology is used for political ends, it is actually subservient to written history in this case.
In the Bustan neighbourhood of the Silwan precinct in East Jerusalem, the municipality of Jerusalem has ordered…
May 23, 2009
Three of my favourite SciBlings -- Afarensis, John Wilkins of Evolving Thoughts and John Lynch of Stranger Fruit -- have left the Mothership to set out on their own. All had been with Sb since 2006, none explained quite why they left. Find them at their new sites:
Afarensis
John Lynch: A Simple…
May 21, 2009
A lesson in Swedish from the mall at Sickla.
Last = noun from the verb lasta, "to load".
In = in
Fart = noun from the verb fara, "to travel", cf. "wayfarer" and "fare thee well".
Load-in-travel. Delivery entrance.
May 20, 2009
The sixty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Sorting Out Science. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 15 July. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are…
May 20, 2009
On 16 April I wrote about an evaluation of archaeology programs offered at Swedish universities and colleges. Now Aard regular Ãsa reports at the Ting & Tankar blog on the results of in-depth evaluations of certain programs that were judged to be of iffy quality (source1, source2).
Three…
May 19, 2009
An issue that has followed me through my career is the fight against pretentious jargon and extreme epistemological relativism in the humanities. The latter is an old idea from the sociology of science which holds that scientific knowledge does not approximate truth about the world, but is instead…