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
September 14, 2007
Olof Eriksson skotkonungr (c. 980-1021) is the first man of whom historical sources of adequate quality tell that he managed to get himself elected king of both the Götar and the Svear. These tribal groups had previously been organised separately, and thus Olof may fairly be seen as the first king…
September 13, 2007
The twenty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The John Hawks Anthropology Weblog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to scratch your itch and soothe your yearnings.
The next open hosting slot is on 24 October. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
September 13, 2007
Being an archaeologist, I like tombs, and being a science fiction fan, I like Jules Verne. So you can imagine that I'd like Jules Verne's tomb regardless of what it looked like. As it turns out, David Nessle has pictures from Amiens showing the tomb in question, and it's an incredible piece of…
September 13, 2007
Seen this? A mashup of a filmed conversation between atheist crusader Richard Dawkins and meth-user cum charismatic preacher cum gay john Ted Haggard, set to audio from Monty Python's parrot sketch. W00t! Many thanks to Dear Reader Martin C for the link.
September 12, 2007
Last night's blogmeet was even better than the previous one: more people, some lady bloggers, some archaeologists and all presided over by Prof. Steve Steve. The professor was in a wild mood and immediately upon arriving did something indescribable with a large tabasco bottle, claiming that this…
September 12, 2007
Here's a story kindly brough to my attention by Tegumai, Paddy, Hans and Ian Joe (am I forgetting anyone?). Pub in Wirral near Liverpool is torn down in 1938 to make room for a car park. Buried wooden boat is found by demolition men, who are ordered to keep quiet and cover it up. Nottingham…
September 11, 2007
The Oseberg ship burial of Norway is a mind-blowing find, full of Early Viking Period carved woodwork and textiles of unparalelled quality. Dated by dendrochronology to AD 834, the long ship and its contents were sealed under a clay barrow, perfectly preserved when excavated in 1904. I consider…
September 10, 2007
As mentioned here before, I'm going to The Amazing Meeting 5.5 skepticism conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 25-26 January. Now I've also signed up for the 2nd Science Blogging Conference in Durham, NC, the preceding weekend. If everything goes according to plan, I'll be co-organising a session at…
September 10, 2007
Back in July I went to a big toy store to buy presents for my daughter's fourth birthday. I got her some street crayons, a magnetic drawing board and a head dress with silver antennae. While browsing I found the product in the above picture. I didn't buy it for her. Let us cleaning!
September 9, 2007
Punk musician G.G. Allin (1956-93) led a short hard life marked by drug binges, violence, mental illness and on-stage coprophagy. I've never heard any of his music, but reading about this legendary underground figure I came across the above remarkable photograph.
Dear Reader, please disregard for…
September 8, 2007
A memory: Eric, one of the kids from mellanstadiet when I was ten or eleven. Him and another boy were taught a tap dancing routine by our gay counter-tenor music teacher Rune, performing it woodenly in the lecture hall for the entire school. They wore striped vests and straw hats, their faces…
September 8, 2007
Hot on the heels of my paean to the Stockholm Sluice, here's something about the Hornsgatan street in Stockholm. Be warned, though: this work has been deemed substandard by the Swedish editor of Vice Magazine.
HORNSGATAN
By Martin Rundkvist, 19 March 2007
Hornsgatan, the Street of the Horn, used to…
September 7, 2007
I spent most of the past week with Professor Steve Steve at the Internationales Sachsensymposion in Trondheim, Norway. We had two and a half days of paper sessions and one day's bus excursion in the vicinity, all pertaining to post-Roman archaeology.
Here the professor is studying a Roman/…
September 6, 2007
My blog has so far landed me one paid writing assignment, and today I got a copy of the mag where it was published. Sort of.
Vice Magazine is a wannabe-controversial fashion mag. Its June issue has a glue-huffing teen boy on the cover and there are web-cam boob pics inside. You get the picture.…
September 5, 2007
Here are the lyrics to a really great of Montreal song off their heavily beatlesque 2001 album Coquelicot Asleep in the Poppies.
Penelope
By Kevin Barnes
Penelope, shoot the apple off my head
I need to go to the store to get some sleep.
Because I've run out of sleep.
The row boat came so David…
September 4, 2007
The Liberal Party in my home municipality of Nacka has started a blog and kindly put local bloggers on their blog roll. They've tagged Aard "Extreme Archaeologist". I'm taking that as a compliment -- I mean, they aren't calling me "Archaeological Extremist".
As mentioned here before, Sweden's…
September 3, 2007
The Coral: Roots & Echoes (August 2007)
Power pop and cowboy rock: Lee Hazlewood (R.I.P.) meets Teenage Fanclub. Catchy!
of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (January 2007)
My generation is releasing divorce records. Kevin Barnes has come a long way into disco zombie territory…
September 1, 2007
My Norwegian buddy Torkel reminded me of the wonderful site TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME. These guys are beyond words. And there's a second collection that I hadn't seen before! Satan laughing spreads his wings, as TV comedian Ozzy Osborne used to sing back when I was just…
August 31, 2007
Internationally reknowned evolutionary biologist and legendary party animal Professor Steve Steve is on tour in Scandinavia. In the above image, taken moments ago, the professor and I discuss evo-devo on the Rundkvist family's balcony in Fisksätra outside Stockholm. I hear he's got some radical…
August 31, 2007
My friend and colleague Jonathan Lindström is a talented man. He started out as a teen amateur astronomer and local historian of his dad's coastal Estonian heritage, became a field archaeologist, then an ad copy-writer, then a museum staff writer and artist, and now he's a freelance science writer…
August 30, 2007
The twenty-second Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to send you spinning into space like a SPACE APE.
The next open hosting slot is on 24 October. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to…
August 30, 2007
Welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 68th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival! For first-time visitors, let me say that this is a blog about whatever runs through the mind of a skeptical research archaeologist based in Stockholm, Sweden. For first-time carnivalers, let me explain that here, skepticism…
August 29, 2007
There's been some discussion lately about chess-playing software and intelligence. Some smart humans play chess well. Certain software can beat them at chess. Does this mean that the software is smarter than those humans? Of course not.
For one thing, intelligence is about versatility, about being…
August 28, 2007
Tomorrow, 30 August, Aard will be the site of the 68th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival. Please submit good skeptical writing to me!
Today, the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will be held at Hominin Dental Anthropology. If that isn't a heavy metal blog name, then I don't know what is. It ain't too…
August 28, 2007
Dear Reader, you of course know that there's a rare moss named Anomodon attenuatus. But did you know that its Swedish name is piskbaronmossa, "Whip Baron Moss"? I wonder if it grows upon the grave of the Marquis de Sade.
August 28, 2007
My friend and colleague Robert is a collector, and so is his wife. She's into Oscar II memorabilia and vintage lingerie in its original packaging, he's into almost everything. Robert's collector's heart of hearts, though, is with cartoon figurines. Wallace and Gromit in particular, but he ranges…
August 28, 2007
It is with mixed feelings that I note that Seed has recruited an archaeologist for its Seed Salon dialogue feature ("yesss!"), and that the one they've chosen is Mike Shanks ("nooo!").
Now, why would anyone dislike Mike Shanks? Well, because of, in one word, post-modernism. I read Shanks's dreadful…
August 27, 2007
Last Monday, we had a guest entry by my friend Howard Williams about his excavation of a Devon manor site abandoned in the 1580s. Here's his account of some other recent work of his, stuff many people may not recognise as archaeology, but nevertheless treating source material that very few non-…
August 26, 2007
Lately I've repeatedly come across two bits of English usage that look really wrong to me. Checking them up, it turns out that in one case I was right, in the other wrong.
Principle/principal. Many native English speakers of extremely high academic accomplishment don't seem to know that "principle…
August 25, 2007
One of the brightest stars of Swedish literature is Carl Michael Bellman (1740-1795). Much of his work is a kind of humorous beat poetry set to music, chronicling the lives of Stockholm drunkards and whores. Central themes are boozing, sex and death.
"You think the grave's too deep?
Well then, have…