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
For the past two years I've been packing a soap-sized handheld computer named the Qtek 9100. It's a version of a design named the HTC Wizard, sporting a slide-out qwerty keyboard and running Windows Mobile. The machine's been good to me, though is has a few annoying quirks & glitches, and I…
It's a running joke around Sb that the single most popular blog entry on the whole site is one where a scibling calls Britney Spears the High Priestess of something not very flattering. In fact, as Spears's latest hit demonstrates, she is the High Priestess of Swedish dance pop.
Look at her run of…
Local newspaper Ystads Allehanda reports on new fieldwork in Ravlunda by amateur archaeologist Bob G Lind and retired geology professor Nils-Axel Mörner. The last time the two enthusiastic gentlemen interfered with the Iron Age cemetery in question, they were reprimanded by the County…
Bluegrass music is rootsy acoustic proto-country. 70s heavy metal is bluesy electrified hard rock. Imagine what classic heavy metal songs would sound like if played by a bluegrass band -- banjo, fiddle, mandolin, bass... Imagine that. Imagine Hayseed Dixie!
This US quartet has released nine albums…
The thirty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology from outer space!!!
And check out the new Skeptics' Circle!
A couple of recent Skepticality interviews (with environmental engineer Kelly Comstock and environmental toxicologist Shane Snyder) taught me something that may seem obvious, but which was radical news to me. Tap water is an industrial product. It occurs nowhere in nature. Water suppliers use…
Childcare is a context where people from different class backgrounds come into intimate contact. Indeed, for as long as there has been childcare, this work has been done largely by working class women, even when the kids in question have been middle- or upper-class. There's a common literary trope…
Bajs-Arne ("Shitty Arnie") is the family cat. Saturday, in a clumsy attempt to check out the view from the kitchen window, he overturned an hibiscus and created an archaeological pottery assemblage. It consists of a complete Swedish 2000s flower pot, a complete Swedish 1940s glazed China soup…
There's actually a use for onion peel. Wrap it around an egg, wrap egg and peel in aluminium foil, and boil the egg the usual way. Red onion peel dyes the shell yellow, while yellow onion peel dyes it deeper tones of brown and orange.
A reader has pointed out that a propaganda website friendly with the Chinese government and hostile to Falun Gong is quoting a recent blog entry of mine. She suggests that this means that I am aiding the government in its harsh persecution of the cult.
I, of course, don't see it that way. Two…
Swedes have taken up US Hallowe'en customs only very recently and half-heartedly, the whole thing being driven by merchants. But we do have something like trick-or-treating: the Easter Crone custom of Maundy Thursday.
Traditionally, there's no Easter Bunny in Sweden. (My mother once shocked our…
Seed's recently taken up with a new advertiser, Proximic, that tries to put relevant ads into bits of the page that us Sbloggers don't control ourselves. Unfortunately, they do this in a mechanised manner that treats "relevance" in a simplistic way. This means that Sbloggers who criticise something…
Last night I had the pleasure of catching two of my home town's best live music acts, each playing in a basement venue a couple of hundred meters apart on Stockholm's southern island. The Crawfish Cook and the Skandalites are both 60s-70s cover bands, but since they cultivate genres I usually don'…
As I mentioned the other day, I'm hoping to do some Bronze Age research once my current project about Dark Ages magnate farms is done. The Swedish Research Council's annual application deadline is less than two weeks from now, and I've put a grant proposal together. The project title is
In the…
Having done some surface investigations with non-destructive methods, a group of volunteer investigators including Patti Hearst's Sharon Tate's sister calls for the excavation of the Manson Family's last hideout.
"Vass said that, considering the quantity and the types of markers of human…
Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia and most of its contents are naked text that hardly takes up any disk space. Thus there is no reason to limit the subjects its contributors can write about. Fans have written hundreds of detailed articles about Pokémon characters. This is fine with me though I…
Dear Reader DuWayne asked what I think about prostitution. By way of answer, here's a re-run of an entry on that issue from May 2006. Two years later, I am no wiser.
News reports from the German brothel industry pending the World Soccer Championship have set me a-thinking about prostitution. It's…
Locksmith Patrick Stübing and Susan Karolewski are a German couple with four children. They are also full biological siblings. "Eeeeewww", I hear you say. And I agree. Eeeeewww. But why do we feel that way?
The incest taboo is as close to a cultural universal as you can get, and is most likely…
Lore Sjöberg at Wired celebrates the achievement of recently deceased gaming wizard Gary Gygax with an entertaining look at what it would be like if Dungeons & Dragons characters behaved like archaeologists.
May 16
We have nearly finished our initial survey of the outer flagstones of the…
PLoS ONE, the Open Access science journal, has finally published something with an archaeological bent: a fine genetics paper about the original peopling of the Americas. As part of their effort to stimulate scientific conversation about the journal's papers, they've put a "Journal Club" on-line…
The thirty-sixth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Afarensis. Archaeology and anthropology, and this time dealing exclusively with koryÅ«. Explains Wikipedia: "KoryÅ« is a general term for Japanese schools of martial arts that predate the Meiji Restoration (the period from 1866 to 1869…
I've discovered that the Wikipedia entry about Falun Gong is heavily biased. Indeed, before I took it upon myself to insert a few words about the criticism the organisation has met with, the article was entirely about a) how good FG is (and I disagree), b) how nasty the Chinese government is (and I…
At PZ's suggestion, I've twiddled some knobs behind the scenes to force the blog to speak utf-8 instead of iso-8859-1. This will hopefully allow you guys to write even stranger comments than usual. Maybe I'll even be able to stop writing stuff like "& a u m l ;" Please try it out! SÃ¥y sömë…
An blind activist buddy of mine is on the war path. This time it's about guide dogs on Swedish Rail:
"Three years ago I got a guide dog. It turned out to be one of the best things I've ever done. Since then, my life has changed fundamentally. I exercise to an extent that I never thought possible.…
9-y-o Junior has had a remarkable streak of luck involving the kids' fantasy movie Spiderwick Chronicles. First he managed to check his e-mail just as the book-club he's a member of sent out a mass-mailed invitation to yesterday's pre-screening of the film. Then, when he and I sat down to watch…
In every story there is a villain, and his adversary is either a hero or a hapless victim. But we don't live in a story.
Most people with democratic opinions see the Chinese government as a group of autocratic villains with a history of persecuting good people. When such a government persecutes a…
I've been a devotee of Escape Pod, the weekly science-fiction short-story podcast, for 2.5 years now. Its audience has grown and grown and grown until Escape Pod is now the world's second-largest paying market for sf short fiction regardless of medium. It's second only to Analog! Steve Eley, who…
Sweden's first town was a place called Birka, frequently mentioned in Viking Period written sources such as Rimbert's book about Bishop Ansgar. The town was on an island in Lake Mälaren near Stockholm. Its remains are extensive and highly visible, and have been the object of constant…
Yesterday I began my return to the Bronze Age. For most of my career I've mainly worked with the Late Iron Age, a period that dominates the landscape of agrarian Sweden completely through its cemeteries and place names. But my first published piece of research, indeed the first research I ever did…