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
August 1, 2014
I wonder how many head shops worldwide are called The Joint Venture.
When friends of my kids cycle to our house, they always leave with their saddles yanked up a good bit. Because apparently other parents don't notice when the kids grow too tall for their bike saddle setting.
Finally figured out…
July 21, 2014
Deep in a single square metre of trench D at Landsjö castle, on the inner edge of the dry moat, we found five identical coins. Boy are they ugly. They're thin, brittle, made of a heavily debased silver alloy and struck only from one side; they bear no legend and the image at the centre is…
July 18, 2014
Common Stinkhorn on Landsjö castle islet
This lady in Wyoming sends me a picture of "sacred procreation rocks", one looking like the sideways outline of an erect cock and the other simply with a hole in it. "They were found less than a few thousand feet from each other." In the picture, the cock…
July 14, 2014
A fun thing about historical archaeology, the archaeological study of areas and periods with abundant indigenous written documentation, is when the archaeology challenges the written record.
According to the patchily preserved historical sources, Landsjö hamlet was a seat of the high nobility in…
July 9, 2014
Christian Loven's plan of Landsjö Islet with letters marking on-going fieldwork.
Landsjö castle is on a high islet in the lake next to the modern manor house. Nobody ever goes there. The ruins are covered by vegetation and they're in bad shape: only along the western side of the islet do they…
July 2, 2014
With two days of digging and one day of backfilling left at Stensö Castle, trenches A and B have already given a rich harvest of new information.
The northern tower was a green ruin mound when we came to site. We now know that the tower was built entirely of greystone, it was round with a diameter…
July 1, 2014
WTF! Ugly digital version of the wonderful claymation Shaun the Sheep! Curses!
Top three Women As Sex Robots songs: Rollergirl: Superstar. Teddybears Sthlm: Yours To Keep. Kylie Minogue: Can't Get You Out Of My Head.
In the otherwise excellent boardgame Lords of Waterdeep there's a quest called "…
June 30, 2014
Compare the disc from Stensö to these "fairy stone" calcium carbonate concretions from the Harricana River in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue admin region, Quebec, Canada. The Stensö piece has been sanded smooth and flat on one side. Locally these things are known as marlekor or mallrikor.
Thanks to…
June 28, 2014
After four days of rubble removal in trench A, we found the south wall of Stensö Castle's northern tower. Note how the wall facing (left) ends, and a pale mass of wall core (lower right) emerges out of the tower. This is the castle's previously unseen western perimeter wall.
Our first week of…
June 25, 2014
Medieval walls are usually shell walls, where you construct an inner and outer shell of finely fitted masonry while filling the space between them with a jumble of smaller stones and mortar. Usually the facing stones don't project much into the core. When the wall is allowed to erode, once the cap…
June 24, 2014
Stensö castle, trench C, the part along the perimeter wall. Note the ashlar.
Drove down to Vikbolandet on Sunday night with my excellent colleague Ethan Aines from Stanford, and we were met at expedition HQ by seven of my Umeå students from last autumn semester. Very pleased to see them again!…
June 22, 2014
It's Sunday morning and I'm getting ready for four weeks of excavations. I haven't done any digging since the Pukberget cave dig in 2011, and my last multi-week dig with a big team was at Sättuna in 2008. So it's high time, and I'm excited. Getting stuff from my study, packing stuff at home, buying…
June 17, 2014
No chair could cast a shadow like this
Many graphic designers like to cut out objects from photographs and give them a digital drop shadow on the page. Here's an example of why this is often a bad idea. Since it's working with a 2D image, the drop shadow algorithm has to assume that the object…
June 16, 2014
Core po-mo science studies professor says roughly "You don't get to choose your own reality and laypeople don't know better than scientific consensus about factual issues."
Rode a Bombardier CRJ 900 from Copenhagen to Warsaw and then the competing model Embraer 170 from Warsaw to Munich.
Five years…
June 12, 2014
A few months ago I registered on Elsevier's clunky old on-line manuscript submissions site and submitted a paper to Journal of Archaeological Science. It got turned down because the two peer reviewers disagreed on whether it should be accepted or not. No biggie: I resubmitted elsewhere. Today…
June 10, 2014
Part of my subscriptions list in Podkicker
I give these podcasts $5-8 monthly. Only the HPLLP has a pay wall.
The Drabblecast -- Norm Sherman produces strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners.
The Geologic Podcast -- George Hrab on skepticism, music and more.
The H.P. Lovecraft…
June 9, 2014
Sweden doesn't have much of a written record for the Viking Period. We have most of the rune stones but hardly any of the sagas. And thus among Swedish Viking scholars it is not uncommon to be rather poorly read, like I am, in the eddas, the sagas and the other written sources of the period. The…
June 6, 2014
I've blogged before about becoming an archaeological dad, when new work built upon and superseded stuff I did in the 90s. Now stuff I did in the 00s has become, if not history, then at least museology, in the pages of Dr. Carl-Johan Svensson's PhD thesis in didactics (freely available on-line as a…
June 2, 2014
These are the work balls I'm currently juggling. All fun stuff!
Prepare for a month's excavations at two sites near Norrköping starting 23 June.
Finishing touches to Bronze Age book manuscript and illustrations.
Publish Aska in Hagebyhöga geophysics paper.
Manage Fornvännen's manuscript influx.…
May 31, 2014
My buddy Anton dug for two summers at Denisova Cave during high school!
Any Tolkien fan can tell you that orks are not safe to be with. That's why I'd never ever trust any of my coworkers around a dairy farm.
Annoying how the liver, the spleen and the kidneys all do a bunch of functionally…
May 24, 2014
My excavations this summer will target the ruins of two Medieval castles near Norrköping. Christian Lovén and I have selected these two because unusually, both have curtain walls (Sw. ringmur) but do not seem to have belonged to the Crown. The High Middle Ages in Sweden are poorly documented in…
May 23, 2014
Back in 2012 we had a look at the first novel written in Swedish, 1666/68's Stratonice by Urban Hiärne (1641-1724). He went on to become a high-ranking doctor, founded a hydrotherapeutic spa resort, was instrumental in putting an end to the Swedish witch hunts and fathered 26 children by his three…
May 16, 2014
Learned a joke from a German on Twitter. It works in English as well. Q: What do you call a Nazi sitting on a high voltage cable? A: National resistance.
Played "Hoochie Coochie Man" to Jrette to explain where the anonymous piano riff she uses as a ring tone comes from. And mightily did she groove…
May 10, 2014
Spent Wednesday through Friday in Estonia at the kind invitation of Marge Konsa and the Institute of History and Archaeology in Tartu. Gave a lecture on computer-aided statistics for burial studies (here's my presentation), then went to Tallinn, where Jüri Peets and Raili Allmäe showed me the finds…
May 5, 2014
I put Tove Jansson's Moomin character the Muddler, Sw. Rådd-djuret, into a presentation. It's about multivariate statistics for archaeologists, and I accompany the picture with the following quotation.How could you forget about the Muddler when you launched the ship, Sniff said accusingly. Did he…
May 2, 2014
The Christian Democrats dropping under the 4% cutoff for Parliament is a thing devoutly to be wished for in itself. But also, I just realised, if they do, then their votes will evaporate, losing the Right coalition a considerable part of their current majority.
I feel really bad for people who don'…
April 29, 2014
The 12-15th centuries are reckoned as Sweden's Middle Ages. Politically, it was a highly volatile period, where the average tenure of a ruler was less than 11 years. One trait that can look modern to a present-day observer is that some of these tenures were divided up into several separate terms…
April 25, 2014
Fornvännen 2013:3 is now on-line on Open Access.
Morten Axboe and Magnus Källström on a classic find of runic gold bracteates from Trollhättan, recently expanded by a metal detectorist who would have been better informed about how to go about things if Swedish law had encouraged responsible metal…
April 16, 2014
I want my spell-checker word list to reside in the cloud so that I won't have to start from scratch, adding names of Swedish provinces and archaeologists to the list, separately for each computer I work at.
I'm tired of Star Trek and Star Wars. Let's forget about them. The Space Odyssey took place…
April 11, 2014
Since late ’09 my main research project has concerned the Bronze Age in the four Swedish provinces surrounding Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren. I've looked at the landscape situation of the era's deposition sites, which is pretty much where you find bronze objects. Yesterday I finished the first draft…