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
April 16, 2009
Högby near Mjölby in Ãstergötland is a magical place because of a serious lack of historical sensitivity. In 1876 (which is really late as these things go in Sweden) the locals demolished their little 12th century church and built a new bigger one a mile to the south. This meant that the parish…
April 15, 2009
Today is my tenth anniversary as one of the academic archaeology journal Fornvännen's editors. While I was an undergrad my teacher Bo Petré encouraged me to subscribe from 1991 on, and I started contributing to the journal in 1994. That first contribution became a life-changer for me. It was my…
April 13, 2009
There is a genre of complaints that I usually find a little silly: the Starbucks breakdown, which occurs when somebody's offered too many options. But now I've run into the problem myself. Yoghurt diversification.
I buy most of our milk & yoghurt to save my wife some carrying. And the damn…
April 12, 2009
29 October: Sunny autumn morning among the sailing boats hibernating along Pålnäsvägen.
21 December: The dark spot marks where our feet and the wheels of our office chair have damaged the flooring over 7½ years at the home desk on Lakegatan.
9 January: Skating on Lake Lundsjön.
6 April:…
April 11, 2009
13 September: Samuel and Ludvig play the piano at Ludvig's aunt's house in Viggbyholm.
12 October: Playing Pandemic at a gaming convention in Gröndal.
21 October: A mechanical excavator is delivered to my dad's property to start work on the new sauna.
21 October: Seminar about Open Access at…
April 10, 2009
The sixty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Quiche Moraine. 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 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
April 8, 2009
Björn in Helsingborg wrote me with a few questions regarding archaeology as a career.
Where did you study, for how long, what exactly?
University of Stockholm. Three years crammed into two years at 150% speed, that is, a BA / fil.kand. Four terms of Scandinavian archaeology, one term of history,…
April 7, 2009
I have previously noted that 10% of the applicants get money for humanities research from the Swedish Research Council, 6% of applicants get general research positions at the University of Linköping, and 4% get jobs at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Today I've learned that less than…
April 6, 2009
I've been working as a consulting editor for the Royal Academy of Letters for almost a decade, most of that time from home. But since 2006 I've had an office at Academy headquarters in a quiet part of Stockholm. This is very good for alleviating the isolation of a non-affiliated scholar. But the…
April 3, 2009
I'm almost done with the report from my excavations at Sättuna in Kaga last September. Here's an excerpt.
Finds and radiocarbon dates allow us to identify five phases on-site, two of them corresponding to the dates of the metal detector finds that occasioned the excavations.
Late Mesolithic:…
April 2, 2009
Not far from my home, in the woods down by the tracks, are the foundations of an abandoned railroad man's homestead. Its name, Vinterbrinken ("Winter Slope"), survives in a nearby street name, though few know that anymore.
The house was built by the railroad company in the 1890s and was torn down,…
April 1, 2009
Who is responsible for a package? The sender or the volunteer messenger who carries it? Do they perhaps have a joint responsibility? This issue has led to quite a number of arguments between me and my wife over the years, and we still haven't resolved it.
Here's the deal. Let's say that Jenny's in…
March 31, 2009
Signs of spring so far around where I live, apart from the obvious sunshine and disappearance of the snow & ice:
Crocus
Snowdrop
Scilla
Blackbird singing at sundown (ah!)
Magpies brawling
March 30, 2009
We recently installed an air source heat pump to heat our house. If you heat yours with electricity from the grid, and if the structure isn't divided into many small rooms, then a heat pump will cut your power consumption so dramatically that the whole $2500 installation pays for itself in two…
March 28, 2009
As chronicled here before, some forward-thinking colleagues of mine in the Swedish heritage business are embracing the social web and launching cutting-edge apps and projects. This is impressive not least because they are all working for state bodies founded in the 17th century. Just the other day…
March 27, 2009
Spring's finally reached Stockholm! To celebrate, here's a song by one of the city's finest folk singers, Stefan Sundström, off of his 1992 album Happy Hour Viser, "Happy Hour Songs". I translate:
Spring Samba
By Stefan Sundström
One morning when he awoke spring was already here
He was bleary,…
March 26, 2009
The Mama Mia movie has revitalised interest in Swedish 70s pop giants ABBA. The other day I heard 10-y-o Junior's school choir perform "As Good As New". 5-y-o Juniorette and her pals at daycare sing garbled versions of all the hits, such as "Oo-nay-boo" ("Voulez-Vous").
I grew up with ABBA and I'm…
March 25, 2009
The sixty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub. 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 6 May. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are…
March 25, 2009
I suddenly remember a few times when I was mean to girls when I was fourteen. I feel really bad thinking about it now. Being mean and bullying was particularly ugly for one such as myself who had just barely reached the end of his years as an object of bullying. But I see a pattern there that wasn'…
March 24, 2009
Denmark has an excellent system in place to enable and govern a responsible and constructive metal detector hobby. While the UK's ploughsoil heritage is largely being trashed by nighthawks (despite the valuable efforts of the Portable Antiquities Scheme) and Sweden's is left to corrode untouched…
March 23, 2009
We've all had the same realisation: sooner or later somebody just has to make a series of several thousand short films of themselves smoking various tobacco pipes and listening to tango music, and put them all on YouTube. Well, fret no more: it's been done. And don't tell me this isn't an art…
March 21, 2009
It looks like chocolate fudge cake. It tastes like compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. It is basically compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. You have it at Easter, cold, with cream and sugar. It is a Finnish thing. It is very strange.
It is memma. You will grow to like it.
March 20, 2009
Last September I directed two weeks of excavations at Sättuna in Kaga, an amazing metal detector site I've been working at since 2006. I was hoping to find building foundations from a late-6th century aristocratic manor indicated by the metalwork. But I couldn't get permission to dig the most…
March 19, 2009
On a whim, I've grown one of my infrequent beards, and it's starting to itch. The beard hairs are hard and bristly, and the mustache feels like having the skeleton of a herring glued to my upper lip. Kissing and snuggling my loved ones isn't at all as nice a usual, since the 'stache makes contact…
March 18, 2009
The Swedish Heritage Board (or, more specifically, my friends Lars and Johan who work there), has begun putting historical photographs whose copyright has expired onto Flickr Commons. Well done! Check it out!
The Board is a lot like the Museum of National Antiquities: even though some of its…
March 18, 2009
Since a bit more than a year, Fornvännen's first 100 years (1906-2005) have been freely available and searchable on-line. It's a quarterly multi-language research journal mainly about Scandinavian archaeology and Medieval art, and I'm proud to be its managing editor. Now we've gone one step…
March 18, 2009
My buddy Mathias is planning an interesting course at the University of Gothenburg for this autumn: "The IT Society's Vulnerabilites". I translate:
The goal of the course is to improve understanding of the vulnerability inherent in the central role information technology plays in society. The…
March 17, 2009
The sixty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the The Swedish Osteological Society's Blog. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology from a bony point of view!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 22 April. All…
March 16, 2009
A bit of museum silliness with thanks to Dear Reader Kenny.
As mentioned before, my dear Museum of National Antiquities has not escaped the weird influence of post-modernist museology. In its excellent on-line catalogue, which I cannot recommend highly enough, we find object number -100:559: an…
March 15, 2009
Current Archaeology, "the UK's best selling archaeology magazine", has kindly given me a complimentary subscription. I recently received my first issue, #228 (March '09), and I found it an enjoyable read.
Best of all, I liked James Barrett's and Adam Slater's piece on their recent fieldwork at the…