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
July 6, 2007
[More blog entries about hiking, Sweden, Norway, mountains; fjällvandra, Sverige, Norge, Dalarna.]
Spent Monday through Wednesday on a trip to Lake Grövelsjön in the mountainous northwesternmost corner of Dalecarlia province. The lake is sausage-shaped with one end in Sweden and the other in…
July 4, 2007
[More blog entries about science, medicine, biology, carnival, tangledbank; vetenskap, biologi, medicin.]
Welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 83rd Tangled Bank blog carnival! This is the blog where all of science -- natural, social and historical -- is just seen as one big bunch of adjunct…
July 4, 2007
Gone mountain hiking with this babe I met at a party eight years ago. The Tangled Bank blog carnival will be one day late.
July 3, 2007
[More blog entries about architecture, history, Sweden, Victorian; arkitektur, historia, oscariansk, Wallenberg, Saltsjöbaden.]
The area where I grew up once belonged to the village of Neglinge, a group of small holdings on the inner margin of the Stockholm archipelago. The nearby inlet was…
July 2, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, Mesolithic, forestfire; arkeologi, mesolitikum, Tyresta, skogsbrand.]
Spent Friday working for my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell, digging on one of their Mesolithic sites in the Tyresta nature reserve south of Stockholm. It's an incredible…
June 30, 2007
Time to get those ace blog entries written!
On Wednesday we have a Four Stone Hearth at Clioaudio (submit archaeology and anthropology entries here). 4SH also has open hosting slots from September onward.
On Thursday there's a Tangled Bank here at Aard (submit life-sciences entries here).
ASAP…
June 30, 2007
Last week a mentally ill man shot one policeman to death and hurt three other people when they came to apprehend him in his home in the Swedish town of Nyköping. This is a very rare and shocking occurrence in Sweden, where gun control is such that most people have never seen a handgun. Wednesday,…
June 29, 2007
Aardvarchaeology's been on-line for half a year today! Before I came here, I'd been blogging at Salto sobrius for over a year, so by now this blogging thing is a big part of my lifestyle and self-image. I love it -- I write about whatever's occupying my mind, a pleasurable pastime in itself, and…
June 28, 2007
There's a newsbit doing the rounds of international summer-starved media about a funny cranium found at St. Nicholas' church in Sarpsborg, Norway during excavations headed by Mona Beate Buckholm of Østfoldmuseet. The cranium belonged to a batch of bones surfacing when some rose bushes were moved.…
June 28, 2007
In the current issue of Antiquity is a review of G.G. Fagan's edited volume Archaeological Fantasies (available on-line behind a paywall). I reviewed this book favourably back in September: it's pretty much a skeptical attack on pseudo-scientific archaeology.
Antiquity's reviewer, however, doesn't…
June 28, 2007
Been tagged with the same chain letter by the guys at Why Don't You Blog? and Tim at Walking the Berkshires. So, in the interest of full disclosure, here are eight random facts about me.
I've played seven matches of Jeopardy.
I'm a Lord of the Forodrim.
I once caught chlamydia from a registered…
June 27, 2007
My friend Lars at Arkland always comes through with ace photographs when I ask for them. Here's a pic he took in 1995 when a landowner at Vittene in Västergötland had come forth with an Early Iron Age gold torque he had kept in a closet for many years. In this picture, our late colleague Ulf…
June 26, 2007
Here's some geology for a change.
At Slättemossa in the province of Småland, southern Sweden, are found ice-polished outcrops of orbicular diorite ("Napoleonite"). This rock consists of granite balls covered with hornblende and other minerals and then encased in a granite matrix. When the inland…
June 25, 2007
I've checked the literature and found out what really happened in the Goldhahn vs. Berntsson fight about barrow-building. Of course, whatever the result, it would have left the Lund Archaeological Review editors looking bad.
June 25, 2007
The fine British journal Antiquity is soliciting material for the Open Access section of its web site. Specifically, Martin Carver and his crew want a) the abstracts of recent doctoral theses with relevance for archaeology, b) obituaries of recently deceased archaeologists. Submit thesis abstracts…
June 25, 2007
Panos Karnezis's new novel The Birthday Party is a re-imagination of the life of Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate. The book is structured around the events of a single day and night towards the end of the tycoon's life, though the bulk of the text is made up of deftly interleaved backstory.…
June 24, 2007
Daryl Gregory's short fiction is quite remarkable. For the two past years, he's managed to top both the Hartwell & Kramer and the Dozois Year's Best anthologies with "Second Person, Present Tense" and "Damascus". I don't want to spoil anyone's fun by saying too much about the stories: just that…
June 23, 2007
Longtime Dear Readers may remember me blogging about the excavations in my friend Jan Peder's garden last summer. Beside his house is a ruin mound full of heavily burnt and vitrified Medieval-style bricks, and he's gotten funds together to do some excavations there. The original idea was that the…
June 22, 2007
Here's an idea for bloggers with an archaeological bent. I'm thinking of putting together a one-off carnival about people's nearest archaeological sites. You go to the nearest site you're aware of, snap a picture of it and explain (in as many or few words you like) the site's significance and life-…
June 22, 2007
It's been a while since I ran any reader-submitted archaeopix. C'mon everybody, I'm sure you have some good snaps sitting on your disk! Please e-mail them to me with a bit of contextual info.
June 22, 2007
The other day I suddenly understood the etymology of the word "helicopter". Many would probably try to take the word apart as heli-copter, which makes no sense. I mean, what does it mean to copt helis? "I am a copter and I sure love coptin' them old helis."
What you need to do is look at words like…
June 21, 2007
Yesterday I met a Slovakian colleague, the amiable Matej Ruttkay of the Institute of Archaeology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. We had an animated conversation in broken German about 1st Millennium graves and he showed me loads of find pix. Matej's own excavations are absolutely ace, with some…
June 20, 2007
The seventeenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. I love that blog's name. Check it out! Archaeology anna anthropology anna boom shakalaka.
June 20, 2007
You listen to a podcast that you like for months and years and you start feeling like you know the people on the show a little. Their voices are certainly familiar and you know a bit about their personalities. And so you start to wonder what they look like. At least I did. So by various means I've…
June 19, 2007
Me and my Internet Service Provider go way back. I got my account with algonet.se in early 1995 and put up my still current web site there after a few months. I've been using my e-mail address there as my main one ever since, publishing it indiscriminately all over the web and UseNet, and still I…
June 18, 2007
Wednesday 20 June will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Hominin Dental Anthropology. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Jason ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on…
June 18, 2007
A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the…
June 17, 2007
Here's a translation of one of my first brushes with absurdism, Swedish rocker Eddie Meduza's 70s song "Va den grön så får du en ny" (original lyrics here with ugly popups).
If It Was Green, Then I'll Replace It
By Eddie Meduza
I'd bought myself a vacuum flask
In a store down in Målilla
It was real…
June 16, 2007
[More blog entries about psychedelic, fairground, carousel, zoo, Sweden; psykedelia, Eskilstuna, parkenzoo, karusell, zoo.]
Invited by my wife's employers we spent the day at Parken Zoo, a highly original amusement park outside Eskilstuna, an hour and a half by car from my country seat. Originally…
June 15, 2007
Most rock carvings have very little archaeological context: people who search for them tend to remove hastily any layers on top of them, and they quit digging when they reach the edge of the carved panel. But in recent decades, there has been a trend among Bronze Age scholars to dig beside the…