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
November 25, 2008
You know the Iggy & Stooges track "Penetration"? The one where Iggy sounds like he might be the penetratee rather than the penetrator? Now, I want you to imagine me singing that song, only with the word "affiliation" rather than "penetration".
For the second time, my friend and frequent…
November 24, 2008
I've been a science fiction fan since I was four. It started with TV shows like the original Star Trek, The Six Million Dollar Man, Batman (the shapeless tights 60s version) and Saturday morning superhero cartoons. One of my first visits to the movies was when my mom took me to see Star Wars in…
November 24, 2008
There are too many of us on Earth, our numbers keep growing, and we need to do something about it. Now, let's never lose sight of the reason we want to do something about it.
I'm not an ecological romantic. I don't think the planet would be better off without humanity. In fact, I think a planet…
November 22, 2008
I'm here to tell you there are lots of Christians who aren't anything like the preconceived notions you may have. We're not all into "turning the other cheek." We don't spend our days committing random acts of kindness for no credit. And although we believe that the moral precepts in the Book of…
November 21, 2008
Polish bishop asks archaeologists to find the unmarked grave of Nicolaus Copernicus under the floor of Frombork Cathedral. Archaeologists find a damaged burial including a jawless skull, and note that it's a male of the right age and with signature wounds visible on contemporary portraits of the…
November 20, 2008
The fifty-fourth 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 17 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome…
November 20, 2008
So you're the principal of an English-language high school in Stockholm, Sweden. And you decide to put some serious money into an advertising campaign in the city's subway. Now, you want to express what we in Sweden call att behärska engelska, "learning English really well".
And that's when the…
November 19, 2008
Here's a brand new and particularly fine piece of world-weary goth rock from prolific Uppsala decadents Kurtz. Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you "Sex Cult 10". And don't miss the band's RSS feed!
November 18, 2008
I correspond with a lot of people and my email program remembers them all. Every time I type in the first few letters of an address, Thunderbird suggests a list of people it thinks I might want to write to. The software of course knows nothing about what goes on in the world around it, and so…
November 15, 2008
Here's a grim thought about the environment.
There is no way of life for humans on Earth that is ecologically sustainable for a global population of more than a billion. Our per capita environmental footprint doesn't really matter at this stage.
If we retain our current population and return to a…
November 14, 2008
I accompanied my son's new class to the Stockholm Museum of Technology today. An investment -- it's good for me to get to know everybody, and it's good for Junior that everybody knows me as a present and available dad.
At the museum, just about the first thing I saw was the XO laptop, about which…
November 13, 2008
What came first, the chicken or the egg? Easy, you say, eggs were laid by other animals aeons before the first chicken saw the light of day.
But what came first, the first chicken egg or the first chicken? This boils down to whether a chicken egg is one laid by a chicken or one out of which a…
November 12, 2008
I'm at the first Swedish Wikipedia Academy conference in Lund. Yesterday I did a talk on inclusionism vs. deletionism (vs. mergism) on the online encyclopedia (text available on-line in Swedish). Above is my audience who asked a lot of questions and were nice & friendly. Most participants are…
November 12, 2008
Here's some characteristically excellent photography by my friend Lars of Arkland. He's recently moved to Visby on Gotland, a big old limestone slab in the Baltic Sea, where he's the Hauptnetzmeister of the National Heritage Board. The funny thing about the above picture is that it shows young…
November 11, 2008
Last Thursday I went to Norrköping and checked out the Town Museum's collection of prehistoric metalwork. Most of it is decontextualised, but I did manage to collect some useful data on the movements of my 1st Millennium aristocrats across Östergötland.
Among the things I handled was,…
November 8, 2008
I've taken out a couple of extremely laddish books from the library to read for fun. Seeing constant mentions of ninjas and pirates on the web, I became curious about the historical reality of these matters. So I've started on Stephen Turnbull's Warriors of Medieval Japan (2005) and I've got David…
November 7, 2008
[More blog entries about archaeology, astronomy, pseudoscience, skepticism, vondäniken; arkeologi, astronomi, pseudovetenskap, skepticism, vondäniken.]
In this guest entry, German SciBling Florian Freistetter of Astrodicticum Simplex offers a translation of his report from a recent lecture by a…
November 6, 2008
The fifty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeoporn. 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 3 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
November 5, 2008
When you've finished an archaeological excavation, you always produce an archive report describing the results. Most excavation units these days actually publish their reports in small print runs. If you're lucky enough to find something really interesting, you should also try to publish it in a…
November 4, 2008
Next week I'm scheduled to give talks in two venerable Swedish cathedral towns.
On Wednesday afternoon the 12th I'll speak at the Wikipedia Academy Conference in Lund under the heading "Inclusion/exclusion. How obscure subjects can you write about in Wikipedia?". I'm also gonna talk a little about…
November 3, 2008
A year ago I showed some pictures of particularly cool finds that Claes Pettersson and his team from Jönköping County Museum had made in 17th century urban layers near their offices. One of them was the above clay mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. Claes believes that it may have been…
November 2, 2008
Great images of my childhood are appearing on-line from an unexpected source. My dear Connecticut nanny Lynn Leavey is scanning choice pix from her time with us in Sweden in 1978-79.
Here's my India-goin', safety-match-pushin', ABBA-accountin' grampa Ingemar with a big fish and three small boys on…
November 1, 2008
The other day I took a look at how the European Science Foundation's ERIH project grades journals in Scandy archaeology. Dear Reader Ismene pointed me to a corresponding list put out by the NDS, "Norwegian Data Support for the Social Sciences". While ERIH recognises three impact grades plus…
October 31, 2008
Dear Reader Dveej asked me to write some more about the Purse Torment Tavern south of Stockholm. Its name is Pungpinan which is pretty funny, as pung doesn't just mean purse or pouch, but in modern Swedish more commonly scrotum. The name might thus be translated "Purse Torment" or "Pain in the…
October 30, 2008
Looking at a map of Stockholm's suburbs, you find a swarm of place names denoting housing areas. The housing is almost entirely 20th century. But many of the names go back a thousand years or more. Today they're all just suburbs. But not so long ago, all of these names were part of a hierarchical…
October 29, 2008
The European Science Foundation has a project called the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH).
... there are specifities [!] of Humanities research, that can make it difficult to assess and compare with other sciences. Also, it is not possible to accurately apply to the Humanities…
October 27, 2008
Carl Lipo at Evolution Beach has been kind enough to recommend Aard to his readers. He characterises me as "a big advocator for science based archaeology in the classic 'New Archaeology' sense". It's not the first time I've been called a New Archaeology guy, and I don't consider it unflattering,…
October 27, 2008
One or more boat burials have just been excavated on the Estonian island of Saaremaa! Rich weapon burials with multiple inhumations, provisionally dated to the 8th century (though I'm pretty sure they'll turn out to be 9th century). Check out the Salmepaat blog!
Via Kristin Ilves on the Swedish…
October 27, 2008
The fifty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all dedicated to the memory of Bertrade de Montfort!
The oft-married Count Fulk IV of Anjou was married to the mother of his son in 1089, when the lovely Bertrade caught his eye.…