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
February 5, 2009
The Pillar of Eliseg, being the remains of an inscribed 9th century cross, sitting on a barrow of probable Early Bronze Age date.
I spent Tuesday and Wednesday with Howard and his students on field trips into north-east Wales and back across the border into Cheshire and Shropshire. I got to see…
February 2, 2009
Greetings from Chester, founded in AD 79, whither I'm come to accept a position as Visiting Research Fellow with the university's archaeology department. Inclement weather delayed my flight, but the taxi driver who took me into town was a clement man and we had a nice chat. I have located my friend…
February 2, 2009
My first wife had a cat named Cassandra, and she had a litter of three kittens. One was grey, black and white, and we called him Batman. Two were ginger, and I don't remember what we called them, but the neighbour who took one of them in called him Sophus. He grew up to become a fine tomcat and a…
January 30, 2009
The fifty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. 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…
January 30, 2009
I entered into organised skepticism because of anti-science tendencies in academe. Though a member of the Swedish Skeptics since 1997 and co-editor of the society's journal since 2002, I've never been much of a skeptical activist outside academic archaeology. I've written articles and a few letters…
January 28, 2009
Fornvännen -- Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research has had a number of different cover designs over the past century and the colour of the stock has varied. Starting with the first issue for 1966, it has had a beige rusticated cover. Starting with the current issue, 2008:4, it suddenly has a…
January 28, 2009
Since getting a smartphone, I never use my iPod anymore. (I handed it down to Junior who is now getting a psychedelic musical education. He's into the Marbles.) But the switch of course led to a huge drop in the ease of use. Here are the steps I have to go through to get my phone to play my mp3s in…
January 26, 2009
Next week I'm going to Chester in England to visit the archaeology department there and accept a position as Visiting Research Fellow. I'll be in town from 2 to 6 February. Any Dear Readers in that neck of the woods who'd like to meet up?
January 26, 2009
Happy Chinese New Year, everybody! Today is the first day of the year of the Ox according to the farmers' calendar.
The Rundkvist family is heavily secularised, to the extent that I have let slip almost all Western observances and have very vague ideas about the Chinese ones. So, to learn what…
January 25, 2009
Being a married man and a father of small children, I am very rarely alone in the workday evenings or weekends. Indeed, in the past five or or six years, my capacity for sustained self-entertainment (yeah, yeah, OK; "nudge, nudge") has atrophied to the point where I no longer know what to do when…
January 24, 2009
My lovely Chinese wife came to Sweden with her family at age seven and grew up here. This has given her an unusual level of bicultural competence. I like to quip, lewdly, that she's a dual boot machine with two operating systems and the most awesome hardware, man. She's like this typical bright…
January 23, 2009
A few years ago my friend David the Psychonaut gave me an mp3 file with the greatest song, "Jan Pehechan-Ho" by Mohammed Rafi. And now another friend, Tanya the Cosmopolite, links to the song's over-the top Bollywood dance number, straight from the 1965 film Gumnaam. Awesome! (As per standard…
January 22, 2009
As we welcome the Obama administration into its first period, everyone at Sb is eager to see it restore science to its rightful place in US policy making and political culture. Now, from an archaeologist's point of view, there is one area of US law where science is sorely lacking. And in this case…
January 21, 2009
Back in August I blogged about a manuscript where a scholar appealed to Thomas Kuhn's old theory of paradigm shifts in order to evade criticism of their work. At the time I couldn't give the real details as I had received the manuscript in my capacity as journal editor.
I've said before that I…
January 20, 2009
Bronze candlesticks, early 15th century, made in Germany or Flanders. Top: Rute parish, Gotland. Height c. 18 cm. Photograph by R. Hejdström. Below right: Fragment from Tåby parish, Östergötland. Photograph by M.R.
Back in November I checked out the enigmatic Tåby figurine and blogged about it.…
January 19, 2009
My experiments with the wifi installation in our house and the excellent Bredbandskollen TPTEST bandwidth tester (mainly for machines in Sweden) has taught me a few interesting things about wifi.
Your operating system may report the quality of the connection in percent or columns or somesuch.…
January 18, 2009
Thanks to a good metal detectorist and a swift response by British Museum archaeologists, all English Iron Age aficionados can now enjoy and study a hoard of 824 indigenous gold stater coins, buried in AD 15 or shortly thereafter. The hoard was in a plain pottery vessel, buried in a rectilinear…
January 17, 2009
Listening to podcasts and reading blogs I've come across a new dialectal quirk of US English. I don't like it. It's ugly.
In standard English worldwide, people will tell you how much or little there is of something, how few or many of them. "I can't get enough of her". "I put too much of my savings…
January 16, 2009
After a bit less than a month's wait our new house is finally on-line! The winter of our off-line discontent dissolvèd made glorious broadband summer. So far only at 11 Mbps when we were promised at least 12, but the ADSL modem isn't currently on the first phone socket, so I hope to eventually be…
January 15, 2009
Today's the eighth birthday of that excellent open on-line encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Let's all celebrate by going there and contributing some information! Even if it's your first time -- it's easy.
January 15, 2009
The fifty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Moneduloides. 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 28 January, two weeks from now 11 February. All bloggers with an…
January 14, 2009
When I was offered a review copy of the new documentary film 10 Yards Fantasy Football, I replied, "No use sending that to a guy with no interest either in real nor imaginary football. But please do send me your award-winning 2006 Segway documentary road movie, 10 MPH Seattle to Boston!". Film…
January 13, 2009
It's been over half a year since the last de-lurk. Aard currently has over 150 returning visitors daily (out of about 730 uniques). Since not everyone checks in every day, this translates to several hundred -- possibly a thousand -- regulars who read the blog at least once a week. So, everybody,…
January 13, 2009
If by a "steady job" you mean one that is contracted to last until retirement, then I have had only one in my life so far. In 2002, Roger Blidmo gave me a steady job with his contract archaeology unit Arkeologikonsult. I left it after only a few months as my dig was done and written up, as the unit…
January 12, 2009
I have just spent a week nursing my family through an onset of the flu. High fever. Bucketfuls of snotty bog roll. Headaches. Stomach aches. Rattling coughs. Shoving innumerable paracetamol suppositories where the sun don't shine. But I was unscathed myself. Dear Reader, come autumn, do what I did…
January 9, 2009
ScienceBlogs.com, including Aard, has received left-wing newspaper The Nation's seal of approval and been listed as one of its recommended web sites in a book that's just out. To my Swedish readers, this isn't likely to mean much, as left-wing US politics is what our conservatives advocate: such as…
January 8, 2009
Daniel of Neuroanthropology has made an excellent roundup of last year's best anthro blogging. Check it out!
January 7, 2009
Having moved recently to a house wired only with telephone copper, my family and I are now into our fourth week without an internet connection. It's a really frustrating way to learn just how dependent we've become on the net.
For one thing, we don't own a printed telephone directory, and our only…
January 6, 2009
After my November talk at the County Museum in Linköping I was kindly presented with a copy of the third edition of Inga Wallenquists's book Ãstgötamat, "Ãstergötland Food". It's a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book combining recipes from the past three centuries with bits of regional…
January 5, 2009
Back in July I panned the History Channel's documentary on the peopling of North America, Journey to 10,000 BC. Their publicist then sent me a recent re-issue of a 2005 film about adventurous archaeologists, The Real Tomb Hunters -- Snakes, Curses and Booby Traps. Here are my impressions of that…