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
May 18, 2009
Here's me and my skeptical homies outside the Vasa museum last Wednesday: Manuel Paz-y-Mino from Peru and Massimo Polidoro from Italy.
May 17, 2009
The 67th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at Sorting Out Science on Wednesday. Get your submissions to Sam before Tuesday evening. Anything anthro or archaeo goes! And hey, hey, hey -- have you considered wearing a bone through your nose?
May 16, 2009
Moving into a house has conferred a number of unforeseen advantages. The first one I discovered was that I now have a continuing relationship with the sky again, something I really only had before during my scant two years in student housing during my late teens. I see the stars and moon in the…
May 15, 2009
I just started investigating publishing options for my book manuscript and got my first rejection letter. That is, I apparently hadn't described the book very well, and the publisher rejected a manuscript I'm not in fact writing.
Said I, "The book's about elite settlements in late-1st Millennium…
May 13, 2009
From my Australian friend Ian I got a good book, Inga Clendinnen's 2003 Dancing with Strangers. It's an account of one of world history's most absurd situations.
Imagine a tropical continent inhabited exclusively by fisher-hunter-gatherers at a low population density for tens of thousands of years…
May 11, 2009
Italian skeptical star Massimo Polidoro is on a lecture tour of northern Europe. He spoke in the Netherlands last Friday, and here's the remaining schedule:
Mon 11 May. Gothenburg, Sweden.
Tue 12 May. Stockholm, Sweden.
Wed 13 May. Uppsala, Sweden.
Fri 15 May. Tallinn, Estonia.
Sat 16 May. Tartu,…
May 9, 2009
On 30 April I asked, "Dear Reader, how old was your parent with the same sex as you when they had their first kid? How old were you when you had your first kid? Is the length of your education significantly different from that of the parent in question?" As of 7 May, I had 20 responses that…
May 8, 2009
Anglophones find it really funny that one of Sweden's oldest towns is named Sick Tuna -- spelled Sigtuna. However, -tuna has nothing to do with fish, being instead a cognate of Eng. town and Ge. Zaun. It has something to do with enclosed areas. As a reply to a question from my friend Per Vikstrand…
May 7, 2009
The readers of popular archaeology magazines have a much more international and escapist view of the subject than most professionals. Indeed, in the popular perception, one of archaeology's defining characteristics is that its practitioners travel to exotic locales on a regular basis. In fact,…
May 6, 2009
I've filed the Sättuna excavation report with the State Board of National Antiquities, the County Archaeologist's office and the County Museum. And I've put it on-line at archive.org. Check it out if you're into the Late Mesolithic! We didn't get much data on the 6th century elite settlement.
May 6, 2009
It's been more than two years since the last time I hosted the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. Now it's my turn again with number 66!
Our first submission is a piece from Anne of the Spittoon blog about a recently published ginormous study of the population genetics of modern Africans. Africa is…
May 5, 2009
Lately I've been listening a lot to Damn!'s fourth album, Let's Zoom In, that was released last year. Damn! is an unfortunately namned soul/funk octet from Malmö in southern Sweden, mostly known as a backing band for rapper Timbuktu. Excellent stuff, among the best music the country has to offer…
May 5, 2009
I intentionally stay away from Twitter. Too many internet-related things already fracture my concentration and keep me from reading books. I go only so far as to update my Facebook status a few times a week.
But for those of you who have made Twitter part of your lives, or would like to try it,…
May 5, 2009
Spent the day metal detecting for Thomas Englund at the battlefield of Baggensstäket, anno 1719 (as blogged about before: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4). This was my third time there, and the first time I've helped on the northern half of the area across the water from where I live. Thomas found musket and…
May 4, 2009
My buddy from the Swedish Skeptics, author Peter Olausson, reports on a recent visit to the Ekehagen prehistoric reenactment centre in Västergötland.
Ekehagen Prehistoric Village
By Peter Olausson
In Ãsarp near Falköping, in a landscape littered with passage tombs, you'll find Ekehagen. Founded…
May 3, 2009
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field.
We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in Sweden since 1939. Here's the entertainments I've enjoyed.
Went with wife & kids to the…
April 30, 2009
My dad had me (his firstborn) when he was 28. I had my first kid when I was 26. I'm a second-generation university graduate, first generation PhD.
Dear Reader, how old was your parent with the same sex as you when they had their first kid? How old were you when you had your first kid? Is the length…
April 30, 2009
I'm trying out a new side-bar widget from PostRank. It's intended to grab browsing readers and send them on from wherever they enter the blog to other posts that have recently proved popular. Whaddayathink?
April 29, 2009
A recent press release from the University of Lund includes a confusing contradiction. Summarising Dr. Geraldine Thiere's recent doctoral dissertation, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning in Created Agricultural Wetlands, the release claims that on one hand natural wetlands are not more…
April 28, 2009
Printed newspaper are crap. The news in them is old, you still get entire multipage sections that you don't want, they use up trees and gasoline, they crowd your mailbox and you have to dispose of them after reading them. And they cost money! News should be read on-line, preferably with an RSS…
April 28, 2009
Here's a fun project. Maja Bäckvall and Jannie Teinler with friends are visiting rune stones mainly in Uppland province, posing for photographs along with the stones and publishing them on a dedicated web site. So far they've done 121 rune stones!
April 27, 2009
The May issue of Current Archaeology (#230) has an interesting piece about warfare in the British Neolithic. The UK has a lot of battle-dead inhumations. There's even Neolithic battlefield archaeology of sorts at hillforts that have been besieged by archers and thus are full of flint arrowheads to…
April 25, 2009
Yesterday I inadvertently offended the Sb Overlords in an interesting way. Since I came on board 2½ years ago we've had a series of handlers or "community managers" who have all been competent, charming women. Punning a little, I have fondly called them my Ovarylords. To my knowledge this has not…
April 23, 2009
As a scholar working in an abstruse subject I live a life largely divorced from what concerns most people. We have no newspaper subscription. I really don't have much of a clue. But I am aware of the poor state of the world economy. Now, how has it affected me so far?
The only effect of the…
April 22, 2009
Skepticality, one of my favourite podcasts, just put its 100th show on-line! Swoopy and Derek have been going strong now for four whole years! Always good for in-depth science-friendly interviews.
April 22, 2009
The sixty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Primate of Modern Aspect. 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 already on 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the…
April 21, 2009
As often mentioned here, I am no fan of post-modernist hyper-relativism. This is the idea that scientific truth is impossible and that all our ideas about the world are "socially constructed", that is, that people negotiate agreements about what the world is like and thus determine what is real.…
April 20, 2009
Neal Stephenson's 90s science fiction novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are unforgettable, but his 2003-2004 suite of historical novels failed to pull me in. So when I learned that his 2008 effort Anathem is a science fiction story, I was very happy.
This is a 900-page brick of a book, told in…
April 18, 2009
I really enjoyed my work yesterday. The forenoon saw me in the stores of the Museum of National Antiquities looking through Otto Frödin's uncatalogued finds from the "SverkersgÃ¥rden" site near Alvastra monastery. Not only did I find all the elusive 1st Millennium stuff that's mentioned in the…
April 16, 2009
Yesterday the Swedish National Agency for Higher Education released an evaluation of the archaeology programs offered at eight of the country's universities and colleges.
The most dramatic finding was that three of the eight offer programs of dubious quality that will be subjected to in-depth…