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, 2007
If you have a lot of samples lying around that you want to run through AMS radiocarbon analysis, then get thee to the Poznan lab's informative web site. Tomasz Goslar tells me he's offering a summer bargain. The standard price is €320 / $430 / £220 plus sales tax per carbon sample, with an…
May 24, 2007
My dear SciBling and fellow big-nose European, Bora/Coturnix, has a wonderful story to tell! After seeing an interesting job ad (regarding a position as on-line community manager for the Open Access journal publishing house Public Library of Science) he blogged about it and said he'd really like…
May 24, 2007
Dear Reader, I have a confession to make. During the past two years I have invested a lot of time, effort and gasoline into locating 500 plastic jars, most of which were hidden under rocks. Some were in crevices in stone walls, others fastened with magnets behind metal fuseboxes and the like. Many…
May 24, 2007
[More blog entries about history, carnival, ancient, classics, medieval, middleages; historia, antiken, medeltiden, klassisk.]
Welcome, everyone, to Aardvarchaeology and the 27th Carnivalesque blog carnival! Aard is a blog about archaeology and skepticism and stuff, hosted here at ScienceBlogs…
May 24, 2007
Photograph from Per Dahlberg's blog.
Woah, I don't like the attrition rate among my colleagues right now. Magnus at Testimony of the Spade informs me that professor emerita Ebba During died on Tuesday 15 May after a battle with illness. Ebba was an osteologist, which means that like all Swedish…
May 23, 2007
The fifteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to move you and soothe you and treat you right, baby.
May 23, 2007
One of the most recent additions to the on-line catalogue of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm is deliciously enigmatic. It's a little sandstone tablet (SHM 18011:100) measuring 73 by 60 mm, covered on both sides with vaguely script-like and architectonic graffitti. The edges are…
May 23, 2007
Popular blog indexing service Technorati has revamped its graphic design and appears to have quit ranking blogs. Now how will I know if I have any personal worth?
Technorati keeps track of how many different sites have linked to yours over the past six months. This figure is called your blog's "…
May 22, 2007
15 years ago, the word processing software I used was WordPerfect 5.1. It wouldn't be able to compete with any current software, except for one thing: hyphenation. I have yet to see any word processing or type setting software with hyphenation as good as that of WordPerfect 5.1.
I co-edit two…
May 21, 2007
Michael Allen, a.k.a. the Grumpy Old Bookman, has a new novella out for free download: Mr Fenman's Farewell to His Readers. It's historical fiction with an unreliable narrator. I can't wait to read it!
"Who was the mysterious Madame de Mentou? And how did she become such an expert teacher in many…
May 21, 2007
Wednesday 23 May will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Greg Laden's blog. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Greg ASAP. (Yes, you can submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
I'…
May 21, 2007
Dear Reader Arkein from the land of the Freedom Fries and EuroDisney set me a-thinking about Medieval barns, butcheries, kitchens and dinner-tables. I've got a story about that, and I believe it's far more likely to be true than that slanderous yarn about Louis XIV's pinkie.
The English language…
May 20, 2007
Blogging here at Sb has many advantages, one of which is a free subscription to Seed. I received the latest four issues the other day and have been reading them with great interest. It's a very pretty mag with great content.
One detail surprises me. Almost all Most of the models in the ads are…
May 19, 2007
Here's a story I heard a long time ago about syphilis. I don't know if it's true: you tell me, Dear Reader.
You know how posh little old ladies and flamboyant gay men like to hold their pinkie finger in the air when drinking tea? This is because of syphilis at the court of Louis XIV in 17th…
May 18, 2007
[More blog entries about sex, monogamy, polygamy, evolutionarypsychology; sex, polygami, monogami, evolutionär psykologi.]
The nature vs. nurture debate will always be with us poor cultured apes. Only very rarely can we lay the blame for our behaviour on genetic programming. A typical issue is that…
May 17, 2007
I'm proof-reading pdf files of Fornvännen's summer issue, including a note I've written about the Kaga foil-figure die. It's full of ugly hyphenations, but contentwise it's OK. So I've put the file on-line here for all you guldgubbar fans.
Update 21 April '08: And here's the final printed version…
May 17, 2007
[More blog entries about atheism, religion, christianity, science, god; ateism, religion, kristendom, vetenskap, gud.]
Science can never have an opinion about the existence or non-existence of a god who keeps himself hidden and doesn't interfere with the world. Thus many scientists take the…
May 16, 2007
Saturday I slipped on a tux for about the fourth time in my life and went to my little cousin's wedding. It turned out a visit to another world, or at least an alien subculture: corporate suit land. Everybody was a lawyer or a businessperson with a lot more money than I'll ever have, and I found it…
May 15, 2007
Samian ware is beautiful reddish amber-coloured pottery, made in moulds and often decorated with figural reliefs. In recent times it has been given the Latin moniker terra sigillata. It was made in peripheral parts of the Roman Empire and rarely moved far beyond its borders. The Swedish finds can…
May 15, 2007
Time to ask the regulars to push some buttons again. (You do realise that this is just an experiment in behavioristic psychology?)
On average, this blog sees about 90 daily visits from returning readers. If, on average, the blog's regulars visit the site only every second day, this means that I…
May 15, 2007
Dear Reader, are you into archaeological surveying? Contour mapping, field walking, metal detecting, aerial photography, geophysics, truffle hogs? Then Kate Page-Smith has a conference session for you at the 13th EAA annual meeting in Zadar, Croatia, in September.
Investigating Archaeological…
May 15, 2007
[More blog entries about history, humour, engineering, catholicism; historia, humor, teknologi, katolicism.]
The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm is advertising a position as lecturer on the subject of bridge-building, in other words, a Pope.
One of the most ancient honorary titles of…
May 14, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, media, journalism, sciencejournalism; arkeologi, media, journalistik, vetenskapsjournalistik]
As mentioned before here on Aard, archaeology is not a single science but innumerable regional disciplines with little relevance to each other. For instance most…
May 14, 2007
I am in mourning for a character in Six Feet Under who died on us last night. The fifth season is airing in Sweden. And I mull over the final scene. Did another character turn into Shaggy from Scooby Doo and act as the dead person's psychopomp on the way to the hereafter? Bizarre, typically bizarre…
May 11, 2007
[More blog entries about skepticism, superstition; skepticism, skepsis, vidskepelse.]
I recently found out that some of Sweden's most influential science journalists like to refer, among themselves, to the Swedish Skeptics Society as "The League of Asperger Patients Against Superstition". It ain't…
May 11, 2007
Dear Reader, you have certainly received Nigerian scam e-mail more than once.
"It is obvious that this proposal will come to you as a surprise. This is because we have not met before but I am inspired to sending you this email by the huge fund transfer opportunity that will be of mutual benefit to…
May 10, 2007
[More blog entries about psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, anxiety, depression, parenting; psykologi, psykiatri, psykoterapi, ångest, depression, föräldraskap.]
I recently had a book on popular psychology recommended to me and found it absolutely dire. And today's paper reports that most of…
May 9, 2007
Here's something pretty cool recommended by my amateur archaeologist and fellow honorary Chinese buddy Jerry Helliker: The Hakluyt Society.
"The Hakluyt Society seeks to advance knowledge and education by the publication of scholarly editions of primary records of voyages, travels and other…
May 8, 2007
The fourteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology 2.0. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to take you through the night.
May 8, 2007
Say "Swedish psychedelic rock" to a musically inclined foreigner, and chances are they'll think of The Soundtrack of Our Lives, an excellent stonesy outfit from Gothenburg. But in New York, a few people who shop at Other Music may think of Dungen instead.
Dungen ("the Grove") combine psychedelic…