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
March 12, 2009
Here's a little archaeological riddle I've been thinking about. From about 1350 to 1700, three-legged brass cooking pots were common in Sweden. When metal detecting in ploughsoil, you often find bits of them. They're easily found as the fragments tend to be large and heavy: they make the detector…
March 11, 2009
My wife and I watched the 2004 biopic Kinsey last night, about ground-breaking sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Good movie, good acting, interesting theme. And there's an added perk for fans of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. To the extent that the Kinsey movie has a villain, it's Alfred Kinsey's colleague…
March 10, 2009
Dear Reader Derek asks,
Perhaps you can help me out here. For years I've been confused as to whether "Goths", "Geats", and "Jutes" are the same people with different spellings, related people with different spellings, or different people with coincidentally-similar names. Also, where "derek" (or "…
March 9, 2009
How the mighty have fallen. I used to do all my plans and maps in a hard-core CAD program using a digitising tablet, but then WinXP came along and my mid-90s software would no longer run. For years now I've been tracing maps onto translucent film with a pencil, scanning them and editing them in…
March 8, 2009
It's time for a blogmeet! On Monday 9 March at 17:30 I want to see you guys at Akkurat on Hornsgatan 18 in Stockholm. This place offers an awe-inspiring selection of rare ales and malt whiskeys, and serves great mussels. Please make your intention to be there known in a comment!
Chances are you'll…
March 7, 2009
ARKHAM, MA--Arguing that students should return to the fundamentals taught in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon in order to develop the skills they need to be driven to the very edge of sanity, Arkham school board member Charles West continued to advance his pro-madness agenda at the…
March 6, 2009
Eight years ago I sold half an apartment to my former wife and found myself, for the first time, with a sum of money to invest. I did what conventional wisdom recommended at the time: stuck all the money into a mutual fund. I chose an "ethical" one, that doesn't invest in the arms trade etc., but I…
March 6, 2009
When I give talks about Internet subcultures I like to say that I could devote the entire talk to on-line forums for retired Spanish-speaking transvestites. That's how niched groups a global communication network makes possible.
Myself, I'm on a Swedish site for skeptics, a US site for science…
March 5, 2009
The 2008 Open Laboratory anthology collecting last year's best science blogging is now available on paper and for download. I'm not featured this year, but I was one of the judges, and I can tell you there's some great stuff in there. Jennifer Rohn of Mind the Gap put it all together. Buy one for…
March 2, 2009
The sixty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at the Moore Group Blog. 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 25 March. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are…
March 2, 2009
Computers are built to preserve information, not to be creative, and certainly not to be random. Therefore it is a problem to get a really random number into a computer when you need one. A common source, looking at the hundredth of seconds in the computer's clock, is not all that good as it leads…
February 28, 2009
Skiing Break was action packed for the kids. Monday museum, Tuesday playland, Wednesday skiing with grampa, Thursday swimming, Friday museum & puppet theatre and a museum-organised LAN party for the 10-y-o.
Yesterday's museum was the Public Transport Museum which shares an entrance and a…
February 25, 2009
From my buddy Jonas Nordin, retiring head editor of Sweden's main historical journal, a well-argued paper about the problems of applying bibliometric assessments and Open Access practices in the humanities.
Historisk tidskrift, present and future
Reflections on readers' reactions, bibliometrics and…
February 24, 2009
I never thought I'd be writing about Iron Age political geography at a place called Andy's Playland.
It's Skiing Break, and because of preparations for our recent move my wife and I never got round to booking accommodations up north as we often have in recent years. This week, instead we take turns…
February 23, 2009
Now and then I blog about abandoned tree houses. But of course, real large houses are even more fascinating in their extended boundary state between dwelling and archaeological site (as I wrote about in January '06).
I recently read a new book (in Swedish) about abandoned houses: Svenska ödehus,…
February 20, 2009
Back in 2006 I gave Silver, the then latest album from Philadelphia folk rockers Maggi, Pierce and E.J., a rave review. Since then the band has put out a collection of covers, a documentary DVD, a side-project duo album, and last fall a new trio album mainly of original songs. I just bought it,…
February 19, 2009
The BBC's global tech news show Digital Planet reports from Belém in Brazil on a rootsy version of the new business model that's likely to supersede the traditional music industry. It's musical sneakernet.
Since the invention of sound recording, musicians (and to an even greater extent, record…
February 18, 2009
Looking for a good book? Here are my best reads in English of 2008.
Will in the World. How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. Stephen Greenblatt 2004. The great man in his historical context.
Casino Royale. Ian Fleming 1953. Finely written about the greatest secret agent of them all.
The Enquiries of…
February 17, 2009
With thanks to Dear Reader Shelley, here's a 1969 French cover version of the Muppets' famed song: "Mais non, mais non", as written and sung by Henri Salvador.
February 16, 2009
My favourite stories in Archaeology Magazine's spring issue:
J.T. Milanich on the practicalities, and the unforeseen hassle, of re-burying a collection of Native American skeletons he excavated in the 1980s before his recent retirement.
E.A. Powell on some fake "Atlantean" ruins built into a Dubai…
February 14, 2009
Imagine that you're ten years old, you've got a cageful of gerbils and your weekly allowance is just big enough to feed five of them. If one of the females pops out a brood of pups, you're in trouble. You can either try to weedle a bigger allowance out of your parents, try to give gerbils away,…
February 13, 2009
Bohuslän province on the west coast of Sweden is known internationally for its many and varied Bronze Age rock art sites. But its archaeology is rich regardless of what period you look at. My maternal great-granddad's people came from Tanum and Kville parishes, so I'm sort of a Bohuslän aborigine…
February 12, 2009
A central theme in post-modernist archaeology of the more science-friendly, not radically relativist kind for the past 20 years has been the study of the after-life of monuments, or "the past in the past". Archaeologists are of course keenly interested in the archaeological record, and I think…
February 11, 2009
To celebrate Charles Darwin's bicentennial, Dear Reader, let me tell you about a less well-known way in which his great idea was misunderstood or misappropriated. You may have heard of social Darwinism and eugenics. The former took Darwin's description of long-term biological change and applied it…
February 10, 2009
The sixtieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Middle Savagery. 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 11 March. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
February 10, 2009
The University of Helsinki has something called a Collegium for Advanced Studies, whose aims are:
to enhance scholarly excellence within humanities and social sciences;
to endorse dialogue between different academic orientations;
to provide an innovative environment for concentrated study;
to…
February 9, 2009
The Stockholm County Museum has just put my report on last summer's fieldwork at Djurhamn on-line (in Swedish). As you may remember, I blogged about it at the time (here, here and here). The results were actually a bit of a let-down after the sword I found in '07.
February 9, 2009
On Saturday night I attended a talk by bright young philology and religion studies comet Ola Wikander. In 2003, at age 22, he published a Swedish translation of the Baal cycle and other Canaanite mythological matter for the lay reader. In the five years since then, he's done the Enuma Elish, the…
February 7, 2009
Standing in line to board the jet to Sweden yesterday, I read over a woman's shoulder in Times Higher Education that ERIH, the European Reference Index for the Humanities, is scrapping its A-B-C-nil grading system (previously discussed here in October). It's come under heavy fire because of the…
February 6, 2009
Chester library has two thematic fiction sections that I've never seen at Swedish libraries. One offers historical fiction. The other, also quite large, is all mystery novels set in the distant past -- labelled "Past Crimes".