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
September 29, 2008
I was contacted on Yahoo Messenger today by a chatbot named Alexandra Buford. She greeted me in a foreign language, so I thought it polite to reply likewise.
Alexandra: yhneb martinrund
Martin: yhneb
Alexandra: Hi martinrund. it's Alexandra.
Martin: yhneb
Alexandra: u dont know me Kelly -- gave me…
September 27, 2008
For decades, Stockholm has been the turf of photocopy artist Renate Bauer. She paints too, but her main mode of expression is hand-written prose-poetic screeds covering every square centimeter of the paper. These she photocopies and fixes with sticky tape to notice boards, bus stops and other…
September 26, 2008
Here's another whine about academic employment in Scandy archaeology.
Yesterday my PhD diploma turned five years old. This means that I have now, at age 36, ascended to heights where I am automatically considered over-qualified (or simply failed) for a forskarassistent entry-level assistant…
September 26, 2008
There is a discussion going on at Wikipedia regarding certain facets of the on-line encyclopedia's controversial notability policy. At heart, it's about where the line should be drawn between notable subjects (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and non-notable ones (Shitty Arnie, my wife's cat), articles about…
September 25, 2008
Ammunition is extremely easy to find with a metal detector. Cartridges are large chunks of brass, which would make them obtrusive even if they were just spheres. But they are in fact sheet-metal cylinders closed at one end, which means that whatever orientation they have in the ground, there is…
September 24, 2008
We finished digging today. Tomorrow I'll take a few more charcoal samples and return the tools to the units that lent them to me. The dig closes eight days earlier than planned.
A week and a half of digging has identified the following phases on site, none of which were known to us beforehand:…
September 24, 2008
The fiftieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Yann Klimentidis' Weblog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about Belqas, a town in the north-western corner of the Dakahlia Governorate, Egypt.
Belqas comprises in its jurisdictions the well known resort of Gamasa. Belqas is also known…
September 22, 2008
Everybody with an interest in anthropology and archaeology -- it's time to contribute good new blog entries to next week's Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. You needn't have written them yourself: if you've found something worth reading recently, submit it to Yann at the Yann Klimentidis Weblog.
September 22, 2008
Early experiments with tinned food led to a number of lead-poisoning cases, particularly among people who had nothing but tins to eat. Recent work by Norwegian researchers Ulf Aasebø and Kjell Kjær has documented yet another case, the hitherto mysterious deaths of seventeen seal hunters on…
September 21, 2008
Sättuna excavation team member Peter Forrester is a big fan of Finnish folk metallers Finntroll. The other day he played me a funny untitled bonus track from the group's 2007 album Ur jordens djup ("Out of the depths of the Earth"). The song sits at the end of the album's closing track "Kvä…
September 20, 2008
I take a childish pleasure from the fact that Shanghai International Airport is named Poo Dong -- snigger, snigger. Now, reading about tea, I find my scatological spot tickled further by the Poobong Tea Company in Calcutta. Poo bong. Stick that in yer pipe and smoke it! Makes me want to strike the…
September 20, 2008
My son just played me a song he can't get out of his head, "Still Alive". It's the closing-credits music of the 2007 computer game Portal, sung by a heavily vocoded Ellen McLain. As it turns out, the song was written by science fiction pop songster Jonathan Coulton, whose excellent love songs…
September 19, 2008
My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be to mobilise all this funding and personnel and find nothing at all. We're certainly not there.
The…
September 17, 2008
We finished machining away the ploughsoil today, and I reckon we've uncovered about 800 square meters. I have a permit for 1200 sqm, but I stopped here. The landowner doesn't want us to expand in the most interesting direction where we have more cool metal-detector finds. And the directions that…
September 16, 2008
Adele and Laura joined us last night, and so we were thirteen people digging at Sättuna today plus Niklas the excavator virtuoso. We continued to strip away ploughsoil, uncovering lots and lots of dark splotches underneath, and the team sectioned and sieved about 25 such sunken features visible in…
September 15, 2008
I've just sat down in a comfy chair on the top floor of our luxurious excavation headquarters at Tolefors. Phew! I am very happy after a first day of excavations at Sättuna where every little bit has fallen into place as planned. (Hope I don't hit a frickin' elk when I go to pick up stragglers an…
September 14, 2008
With kudos to Mattias who sent me the link, here are Stephen Lynch & Mark Teich performing a fine song about being a 14-y-o D&D-playing young man. To those of our readers who currently fit that description, let me say that just a few years from now you will no longer have the least…
September 13, 2008
For the past ten years, I've lived with my family in rented apartments in a 1970s housing estate that covers the erstwhile infields of the poor tenant farm of Fisksätra. Yesterday, my wife and I signed a contract to buy a 114 sqm house on one of the surrounding hills, BÃ¥thöjden, "Boat Hill"!…
September 12, 2008
The Journal of the North Atlantic is a new on-line archaeology and environmental-history journal published in Maine. You can apply for a login and read it for free until the end of the year. So far, they have three papers up, and they offer some really cool stuff. One is an apparently nature-…
September 11, 2008
The forty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology, and all intended to recreate the lost 1921 short drama film The Great Day!
Cast
Arthur Bourchier - Sir John Borstwick
Mary Palfrey - Lady Borstwick
Marjorie Hume - Clara Borstwick
Bertram…
September 11, 2008
I recently read this year's Hugo-winning novel, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. (Getting it sent to my local branch library from Malmö cost me one euro!) It's a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternative present where Israel was squashed by irate Arab neighbours in 1948 and…
September 10, 2008
20 years ago, radiocarbon dating was transformed by the widespread adoption of AMS analysis, accelerator mass spectroscopy. Willard Libby's original scintillation-counting method demanded large sample sizes and a lot of time per sample. The sample size meant that many interesting things couldn't be…
September 9, 2008
We interrupt this broadcast to explain something to everybody who has ever used the expression "a homo sapien". Sapiens is not a plural. It is an adjective ending in an S, just like erectus, afarensis and neanderthalensis. (It means "wise".) You would never say "a homo erectu", right? Don't try to…
September 8, 2008
The 1640 coin I found the other day came to light at an opportune moment. For some time, my wife and I had planned a trip to Falun for the weekend just passed, and that's where the coin is from.
The great copper mine of Falun was an important part of Sweden's economic backbone during the country's…
September 5, 2008
To compensate for our inadequacies, us boy archaeologists like to search for large phallic objects and measure them. The most extreme case I've heard of was a couple of colleagues who went looking for the crash site of a mismanoeuvred 14-meter V2 rocket. In my case it's the 16th-century Djurhamn…
September 5, 2008
Swedish has a number of subtleties designed to keep furriners from learning the language of glory and heroes™. A famous one is the genders of our nouns, where almost every one is either of our two neutral genders -- apparently haphazardly selected. Another one is certain non-trivial uses of the…
September 4, 2008
For historical reasons having nothing to do with engineering or rationality, Swedish nuclear power plants dump a lot of warm cooling water into the sea. In a revealing blog entry, Paddy K offers an estimate of just how much energy that cooling water contains.
It's one third of the energy produced…
September 4, 2008
Yesterday I did two hours of metal-detecting at a manor in Boo parish whose documentary evidence starts in the 13th century. Ancient monuments in the vicinity take it on down at least to the 10th. There are some nice 16th century small finds from the manor grounds, and my visit was intended to…
September 3, 2008
A memory.
A lot of Swedish middle-class kids get sent to confirmation camp when they're 14. It's basically a crash course in Christianity and ends with first communion. My brother went through his course and then refused the wafer & wine. This actually endeared him to the priest, as it showed…
September 2, 2008
Lately I've been listening to the following albums:
Apples in Stereo -- New Magnetic Wonder (2007)
Delays -- Faded Seaside Glamour (2004)
Funkadelic -- Funkadelic (1970)
MGMT -- Oracular Spectacular (2007)
Motorpsycho -- Let Them Eat Cake (2000)
Sleep -- Jerusalem (1999)
And podcasts:
Digital…