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
March 6, 2007
One of my favourite Danes, Henrik Karll, offers this variation on an emblematic archaeological motif: a grinning skeleton looking up at the sky from a trench. Only this one's accompanied by a 1950s drain pipe that's sliced it lengthwise in half. As detailed on Henrik's blog, he had a snowy…
March 5, 2007
Back in August, I blogged about a paper I'd written on the chronology and iconography of Migration Period gold bracteates. It was published around the New Year and is now also available on-line in English. Please tell me what you think!
Rundkvist, Martin. 2006. Notes on Axboe's and Malmer's gold…
March 4, 2007
Most of Sweden is still seeing continual land upheaval after the latest Ice Age. Where I live, the shoreline recedes half a meter per century, measured vertically. If you build a jetty around here when you're 20, it's pretty much useless when you're 80. This means that the Stockholm Archipelago is…
March 3, 2007
Here's another underappreciated, undermarketed and eminently readable blog within the ambit of Aardvarchaeology: Chris O'Brien's Northstate Science. For more archaeology and skepticism, read Chris! He's been at it for a year now, he's only seeing 60 hits a day, and by his own admission,
"I have…
March 2, 2007
My excellent brother-in-law Peter Köhler is an artist of the well-educated, hip, productive and non-starving kind. He teaches and exhibits his work internationally, and now he's got something coming up at a gallery on Broadway in New York.
VERUS PAINTERS
Works by John Aslanidis, Susann Brännström…
March 1, 2007
My friend Stefan Kayat is a truly original man of many talents. With his folk band, Herr Arnes Penningar, he plays eclectic reimaginations of traditional music, and he's also a draughtsman, a painter and occasionally a sculptor. Stefan's asked me to put up a pic of a piece he'd like to sell.
This…
February 28, 2007
The 55th Skeptics' Circle is on-line at The Second Sight. Lots of skeptical writing to "rebalance, realign, detoxify and maintain your skeptical worldview". Also, it will convince you of numerology's validity.
February 28, 2007
My friend Jesper Jerkert has edited a volume of skeptical essays, most culled from Folkvett, the Swedish skeptic quarterly we both help co-edit. This handsome book is just out from the Stockholm publishing house Leopard, whose head hombre Dan Israel is an officer of Vetenskap och Folkbildning, the…
February 27, 2007
Lars Lundqvist promptly answered my call for archaeopix. Here's a recently discovered 1st Millennium BC stone setting on wooded outland belonging to the hamlet of Åby, Misterhult parish, Småland, Sweden.
The stone pavement, which is not scheduled for any excavation, is a grave superstructure, most…
February 26, 2007
Sex sells, so here's a pic of my new psychedelic undies. Stuff them in your mouth, Dear Reader, and they will take you on a long, strange trip.
February 25, 2007
Dear Reader, I like to publish good archaeological pix. If you have taken a really good photograph, drawn a find or done a nice plan or section that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, then feel free to email it to me, along with information about the subject and how you'd like it to be…
February 25, 2007
Dear Reader, you no doubt have a skewed and seasick perspective on Stockholm, Sweden, from too much of my blogging. What you need is a blog written from Stockholm by a humorous, skeptical Irishman.
This genre is of course quite the jungle, with more blogs than anyone can reasonably attempt to…
February 25, 2007
Should the future Constitution of the European Union make reference to Christian values? The Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel among others thinks so. Or should it be founded on secular liberal principles? I among others think so.
To that end, I have just signed the Brussels Declaration on-line.…
February 25, 2007
In its formative late-19th century decades, Swedish archaeology had three journals with a nationwide scope (sometimes also covering Norway with which Sweden shared a king at the time). All three were published in Stockholm by the same small group of people: the Royal Academy of Letters had the…
February 24, 2007
I know that many readers of this blog are yearning to read a >900-page bok in German about the enigmatic inscriptions on Migration Period gold bracteates. Fret no more, Dear Reader! Svante Fischer just sent me a link to a 7.4 megabyte PDF file containing such a work: Sean Nowak's 2003 doctoral…
February 23, 2007
I would recommend Jason Fox's blog simply for the weight of its name: Hominin Dental Anthropology. That is so heavy metal. But it's also tagged "atheism, Teeth, Anthropology, bones, Paleoanthropology, dentition, bioarchaeology, osteology, paleopathology" on Technorati. And it's a readable mix of…
February 23, 2007
The Great Old Ones are stirring in their sleep beneath Guatemala City.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala (AP) -- A giant sinkhole opened before dawn Friday, swallowing several homes and a truck and leaving a father and two teenagers missing in Guatemala City. [...]
The pit was emitting foul odors, loud…
February 22, 2007
The Department of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg recently published a nice little book written in Swedish by the seasoned contract archaeologist Marianne Lönn: Uppdragsarkeologi och forskning, "contract archaeology and research". Lönn's main theses are:
Archaeologists look at old…
February 21, 2007
As detailed before (here and here) I did a trial dig with friends in an undated great barrow near Sjögestad church in Östergötland last September. We secured samples that allowed radiocarbon dating to the Early Viking Period (9th century) and the identification of several plant species in small…
February 20, 2007
The great Birger Nerman used to say that the best archaeological finds are made in museum stores. Here's an example.
I just got home from two days at the County Museum in Linköping, where I've pursued my studies of late 1st Millennium central places. Helped by Marie Ohlsén and my other friendly…
February 18, 2007
Last night my wife and I celebrated the Chinese New Year with friends. First we had an Asian buffet and a few hours of raucous karaoke, then we went to the Hootchy Kootchy Club (their spelling, not mine...).
The HK Club is a recurring cabaret and party in central Stockholm. The theme is nebulously…
February 17, 2007
My 8-year old son is, like myself at that age, a big Star Wars fan. But his road to the stories has been more complicated than mine. Much of what he knows about them comes from a computer game version where everything is for some reason visualised as built out of legos. So he asks me a lot of…
February 16, 2007
A few days of vigorous debate here has changed my views on the energy production and environment issue. I now believe we should do the following to improve our slim chances of saving civilisation and the environment.
Downscale our energy use dramatically.
Dam all suitable watercourses on Earth for…
February 16, 2007
A few words about the Spanish fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth.
It's extremely pretty, well made and finely acted.
It's very violent, enough to gross me out, and unsuitable for anyone under the age of 20.
The plot is driven entirely by the pointless cruelty of a psychopath. Pan's Labyrinth is thus a…
February 15, 2007
It's high time for a first History Carnival here at ScienceBlogs.
Science is the systematic study of source material to find out what the world is like or has been like. If a scientist's source material is written matter and pictures and her questions are about what people's lives were like in the…
February 15, 2007
The 54th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival is up at Action Skeptics. Akusai has put some serious work into it this time, weaving a hard-boiled tale of Jack Bixby, Skeptical Investigator around the submissions. Is that a gun in your pocket, Akusai, or should I be skeptical?
February 14, 2007
I'm an archaeologist and I see things in the long perspective. Let me offer you a suggestion.
The CO2, greenhouse effect, climate issue is no cause for concern compared to the issue of radioactive waste.
I mean, long after our manipulation of the atmosphere's composition and the sea levels has…
February 14, 2007
My buddy Niklas Ytterberg recently sent me an impressive excavation report in Swedish. Constrained by the field-archaeological paradox, he dug a really nondescript Neolithic settlement site at Djurstugan near Tierp, Uppland in 2003. Then he somehow found funding to subject the measly finds to a…
February 14, 2007
Norwegian medical doctor Ståle Fredriksen offers a refreshing perspective on healthy living. In his opinion, our thinking about illness is still largely ruled by old superstitions where what happens to a person is somehow just what he or she deserves. If the neighbour has a heart attack, we will…
February 13, 2007
How about paying to participate in a Roman Period dig in Bulgaria this summer? I've been asked to help promote the Bulgarian Archaeological Association's 2007 Field School.
This really takes me back. I paid for food and board on my first dig, on Tel Hazor in the Galilee, in 1990. I was an 18-year-…