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
May 25, 2008
The Phoenix Lander survived touch-down on Mars, has deployed its solar panels successfully and is transmitting pictures! Yay!
Here's the news feed where this baby's discoveries will be announced over the coming months.
May 24, 2008
Bengt Nordqvist has published a preliminary account in Offa of his amazing finds from the Finnestorp war booty site. Check it out (in German)! I hope to contribute to the Finnestorp project in some way or another in the future. For more about war booty finds, se an earlier post of mine.
Indirectly…
May 23, 2008
Ulf Bodin and his team at the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm have built a really, really sweet database and search interface for Hjalmar Stolpe's Birka graves. Between 1871 and 1895, Stolpe dug about 1100 graves in the cemeteries surrounding the Viking Period town of Birka on an…
May 22, 2008
I've posted a fine example of Ansiktsburk song lyrics before: listen to a song in a language you don't understand, and try to imagine that it is actually sung in your own language though with a funny accent. Then write down whatever words you can half make out. Thus the Swedish drinking song "…
May 21, 2008
Akusai of Action Skeptics has done something pretty ostentatious and very cool: he's written the latest Skeptics' Circle blog carnival entirely as a collection of dirty limericks!
"An Irishman living with Swedes
Speaks about bodily needs
Eat and drink well
So at sex you'll excel
But vitamins?…
May 21, 2008
The forty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about Nswazwi. It's a village in the Central District of Botswana, located close to the border with Zimbabwe. The village has primary and secondary schools and a clinic. The…
May 21, 2008
My talented on-line buddy, Birmingham-based design student Tatyana Mircheva, has a new photo blog where she puts up some really interesting stuff. This series is a feminist commentary on the superficiality and narcissism of the beauty industry. The young woman worships her own reflection in the…
May 20, 2008
Local newspaper SkÃ¥nskan recently published a highly credulous account of amateur archaeologist Bob Lind's outlandish interpretations of an Early Iron Age cemetery in Ravlunda parish. I wrote them to complain, and staff writer Karsten Bringmark asked me for a statement. Which made it onto the…
May 20, 2008
Yesterday me and my buddy Per Vikstrand visited the third site in our little exploration program for fields with highly suggestive names on 18th century maps. We've already covered the Field of St. Olaf and the Hall of Odin. This time we went to the Field of Ullr near Gävle, an hour and a half's…
May 19, 2008
With its extremely late urbanisation, Sweden doesn't have much of an archaeological record compared to Italy or China or Peru. But we keep really good track of the stuff we have: active organised surveying for ancient monuments has been going on for over 70 years, aided by the fact that Sweden has…
May 17, 2008
Getting up in the small hours on Thursday morning paid off: I'm on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe #147!
May 17, 2008
I'm frustrated about Wikipedia. Cultists are slowly and surely readjusting the Falun Gong article to their own rosy and "oh-how-persecuted-we-are" perspective. The other day I watched some anonymous loon create a new user account for the single purpose of deleting an article about someone he doesn'…
May 17, 2008
I'm at my son's end-of-term violin concert. Wonder if I can blog from the new smartphone w/o using email and a human intermediary?
[Yay, I could! The Samsung for some reason comes with both IE and Opera preinstalled. Though Sb's Moveable Type installation still doesn't work with IE under Windows…
May 16, 2008
Tim of Remote Central has kindly stepped in to host the upcoming 41st instalment of the Four Stone Hearth anthro & archaeo blogging carnival. Send links to good recent anthroblogging to him! It needn't be your own stuff: submit all the goodies you've read lately.
The next open hosting slot is…
May 16, 2008
After some deliberation, I bought a Samsung SGH-i780 smartphone to replace my Qtek 9100. It has served me well for 2 1/4 years, but I felt it was time, and I've put it up for sale. I've only had the Samsung for two days, but I'm very happy with it so far.
Improvements over the Qtek:
GPS navigator…
May 14, 2008
Yesterday I did 5.5 more man-hours of metal detecting at the "Hall of Odin" site in Västmanland with Per Vikstrand. No prehistoric finds: just a piece of a 15/16/17th century brass cooking pot.
Bob Lind's craziness is once more repeated uncritically by a local Scanian newspaper.
I had a nice chat…
May 13, 2008
My home municipality of Nacka is governed by a coalition of right-wing parties. (This, in Sweden, means that our local politics are somewhat to the left [!] of the US Democratic Party.) Aard regular Lennart Nilsson is the chairman of the Nacka section of the Liberal Party, Folkpartiet. I just…
May 11, 2008
Logged my 600th geocache this bright May morning, took a picture of a treehouse ruin near the cache, then drove home listening to the Nashville Pussy. After lunch, me and the Rundkvist ladies took part in the annual street cleaning & planting day. I headed the cleaning of two sandboxes,…
May 10, 2008
My kid's spacy English writing assignment makes me so proud! He's nine, he's only been once for a few days to an Anglophone country, and we rarely speak English at home. Yet he seems to have picked the language up from on-line gaming, and he's long been able to read e.g. the Harry Potter books in…
May 8, 2008
Members of the Manx Detectorists Society have found fragments of the hilt of a Viking Period display sword. It's cast in bronze with rich Borre Style decoration (c. AD 850-1000) and silver wire frills. Though settled by the Norsemen from about AD 800 onward, the island has not previously produced…
May 8, 2008
Had a beautiful day in the field with Per Vikstrand today. He has a new metal detector, a C-scope 1220R, and it seemed to work very well. Not that the stuff we found was terribly interesting: four man-hours in the Field of St. Olaf garnered us only a flint chip and a piece of slag apart from the…
May 7, 2008
The fortieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology, and all relating to the Plzen Plaza!
The Plzen Plaza is a new large (20,000 square meters) shopping mall and entertainment center in PlzeÅ, Czech Republic. The facility built by Plaza Centers…
May 6, 2008
Tobias Bondesson treats us to the tale of a recent find that blew his mind.
Oh, mercy mercenary me!
Being a detectorist is damn hard work! I get out of bed at the crack of dawn on my day off from work to perform the ritual of "sweep, beep, dig deep" for as many hours as I can before I really,…
May 5, 2008
More good and witty UK rapping, this time a year-old hit from Dan le Sac vs Scroobius Pip.
Thanks to Paddy K for the tip-off.
May 5, 2008
For readers with an interest in Scandy archaeology and academic gossip, here and here are two brand new evaluation reports (in Scandy) on the applicants to an assistant professor job (forskarassistent) in Stockholm. According to the evaluation verdict, the job is likely to be given either to a 43-y…
May 3, 2008
I wrote my 1990 high-school graduation paper about the search for a trans-plutonian planet. (That's where I got hoodwinked by Zecharia Sitchin.) In its conclusion, I suggested that the search for such close-yet-dim objects could be automated with computer-controlled telescopes and automated image…
May 2, 2008
Now and then I like to play board games: mostly Blokus, Drakborgen (a.k.a. Dungeonquest), Scrabble and Roborally. The latter is an award-winning 1994 game where each player programs a robot to move through a treacherous obstacle course and tag a series of numbered flags. More often than not, your…
May 1, 2008
Monastic archaeology is enjoying a boom right now in Sweden. Elisabet Regner has written up and analysed Frödin's many years of fieldwork at Alvastra (founded in 1143), Lars ErsgÃ¥rd & Marie Holmström have published the results of their 90s project around that same monastery, Marie Ohlsén is…
April 30, 2008
Raine Borg has an amazing web site about locks and keys through history. And it so happens that he's made reconstruction drawings of how keys identical to the one me and Per Vikstrand found in Torstuna recently were used. It's not a padlock key: it's most likely for a lock mounted permanently…
April 29, 2008
From UK rapper Elemental, an extremely witty song about tea with a funny video!
Via Paddy K and Brass Goggles.