children
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2008
Swedes have taken up US Hallowe'en customs only very recently and half-heartedly, the whole thing being driven by merchants. But we do have something like trick-or-treating: the Easter Crone custom of Maundy Thursday.
Traditionally, there's no Easter Bunny in Sweden. (My mother once shocked our American nanny by serving a rabbit for Easter dinner.) Instead the holiday is associated with witches, believed to make an annual broom-borne pilgrimage to Blue Mountain on Maundy Thursday. There, of course, they celebrate orgies with the Devil. (Don't we all?) About 300 people were executed for the…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2008
9-y-o Junior has had a remarkable streak of luck involving the kids' fantasy movie Spiderwick Chronicles. First he managed to check his e-mail just as the book-club he's a member of sent out a mass-mailed invitation to yesterday's pre-screening of the film. Then, when he and I sat down to watch the thing, the Spiderwick books' Swedish publishers ran a lottery with the seat numbers, and he was the first winner, harvesting two new books and a merch note pad.
In Junior's opinion, the movie was a 8/10. I'm not a member of target audience, and I give it a 5. It's a contemporary-world children's…
aardvarchaeology | February 19, 2008The other day I found and photographed another tree house ruin. I decided to re-post the following piece from September 2006 and make these things a steady presence on Aard, with a category tag of their own.
If you've ever taken a walk in the woods near a housing area, you've seen them: modern archaeological sites, full of artefacts and building debris, abandoned to the elements in a way that is unusual in the well-organised industrialised world. They're settlement sites of a particular subculture with its own rules and customs, thriving on the fringes of mainstream society. I'm referring to…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2008
Spent the day walking around Djurhamn with my colleague Kjell Andersson of the Stockholm County Museum, searching for visible field monuments and generally scoping the area out for our coming investigations. We found no new features belonging to the 16th and 17th cenury harbour, but we identified some good areas for further metal detecting and test pitting.
Also, I added two sites to my growing collection of abandoned club houses and tree houses (of which I have spoken before here, here and here). Note that one has the remains of a PC, an old 386 or 486 judging from the empty processor…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2007Yesterday myself & Junior met up with Paddy K. Sr. & Jr. and went to Cybertown, a laser-game place in central Stockholm. Here we paid SEK 60 ($11) per head and donned vests with laser sensors and attached laser guns, forming Team Blue. Teams Red and Yellow each consisted of five ten-year-olds, and Team Green was a dad and his daughter. Then we entered a blacklit dry-ice-smoking dark labyrinth and spent 20 adrenaline-soaked minutes happily sniping at teams Red, Yellow and Green. We won! Not very surprising, given that our team was the only one with two dads. Individually, though, Green…
aardvarchaeology | December 5, 2007
Here's a funny toy: a remote-controlled car with a built-in metal detector. Drive it over a piece of metal and it'll go BEEP and light up. It doesn't have anything like serious ground penetration, but still, a cool toy.
There are several reasons that metal detecting has not been made into a mechanised remote sensing technique. I guess the main one is that only archaeologists would have any use for such a machine, and we don't have the money to make it worthwhile to develop and market it. Also, while building a mechanised detector and find mapper would be easy, it would be considerably more…
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2007Freedom of religion wasn't formally codified in Sweden until 1952, but for decades Swedish law has forbidden religious teachings in schools. Children are required to attend a government-approved school, and one of the criteria for approval is no religion. This of course refers to the teaching of religion, not teaching about religion: comparative religion studies replaced the subject "Christianity" on the syllabi of Swedish primary schools and high schools in 1969 and still remains. In recent years, however, privately run schools have proliferated in Sweden, many of them backed by religious…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2007
Two weeks ago when I worked for Thomas Englund and Bo Knarrström at the 1719 battlefield on Skogsö, I came across a variant on a type of archaeological site that I've blogged about before. A site where children have built and abandoned something, but this time it wasn't a tree house ruin: to me it looks more like the remains of an outdoor gym built by the cub scouts who periodically camp in a nearby house. You know, chin-ups and stuff.
To this end, the kids nailed and tied horizontal spires to trees, clumsily and with very little regard for the trees' well-being. While they were at it, they…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2007
Up until a thousand years ago, almost all buildings in Scandinavia through the ages had roof-supporting posts dug into the ground. Postholes are lovely things: they're deep enough for at least the bottom end to survive heavy ploughing, they trap a lot of interesting stuff while a house is being built - lived in - torn down, and their layout across the site lets you reconstruct the building in great detail.
When you machine off the ploughsoil from a site and find a posthole building foundation, it is common to mark the postholes with coloured sticks, paper plates or shaving foam and…
aardvarchaeology | 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!
aardvarchaeology | September 8, 2007A 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 expressing a mixture of concentration and a dawning realisation that perhaps they were making absolute fools of themselves. Steppens söner, "Sons of the Steppe/Tap Dance". But us in the audience didn't know enough to realise how naff it all was.
Anyway, Eric was a pretty boy with an elfin face, and so I…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2007My 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 and artist contracted by Sweden's largest publishing house.
Jonathan called me the other day and told me a new kids' book he's been telling me about had come from the printers. It's named Dödshuset. Mysteriet från stenåldern, "The House of Death: a Stone Age mystery", and it's all about a contract…
aardvarchaeology | 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 widely. Above is shown his latest acquisition: a 1970s Sesame Street alarm clock with Ernie in the Bedroom Scene! Many thanks, Robert! And check out the Bert figurine to the left -- that's Robert's own handiwork. He has a morbid fascination with the Evil One.
(You do know, Dear Reader, that Ernie is…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2007
My kids have taken to watching LazyTown, this really druggy and garish kids' show on Playhouse Disney. It's got a lot of caricatured puppets of children with the hands of real people, but also three live actors, the main character played by a little girl in a pink wig. The live actors, particularly the tall fey lantern-jawed villain, ham up their performances mercilessly. Their interactions with the vacant-eyed puppets lend an extra dimension of unreality to the show, and when you add the fact that it's all been dubbed into Swedish so the lip movements don't synch, you've got a product way…
aardvarchaeology | July 27, 2007
I've run into an interesting ethical conundrum involving Molluscum contagiosum. It's a viral infection common among kids, where a pox-family virus causes little pale warts that usually remain from six to nine months. Once the last lesion is gone you seem to become resistant, and the complaint is rare in adults. According to Wikipedia, 17% of kids go through it, mostly between the ages of 2 and 12. There's no antiviral treatment: usually nothing is done about molluscum as removal involves the same regimen of soaking, mechanical scrubbing and mild corrosive agents as for warts, only you have…
aardvarchaeology | July 10, 2007
I've embarked on three weeks of summertime solo fatherhood as my wife works for a cookery mag in town. Today I sent the kids and their friends out to the overcast playground for an hour, listened to the Pixies and re-boxed my computer odds-and-ends, discovering innumerable useful cables and connectors, three old Sportster modems and five or six mouses, most of which have no scroll wheel.
Parenting tip: to get kids to eat veggies, hand them out while they play video games. Zombie-like and unfazed, they will chomp carrots and cucumber as they stare at the screen. Anything that isn't directly…
aardvarchaeology | 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 a Folkets Park (People's Park) established by the victorious early 20th century Labour movement, it has a great big stage, two dance halls, much greenery and loads of bronze sculpture, including a bust of Hjalmar Branting right at the entrance. Since that time, it has also acquired a full…
aardvarchaeology | May 28, 2007
I have the soul of a stamp collector. Some might object that it's an unusually loud and psychedelic stamp collector, but I think it's so. It shows in my research (data-heavy, fussing over terminological definitions, with a lot of statistics), in my attacks on nebulous jargon and muddled thinking in archaeology, in my affiliation with the skeptic movement, in the way I sort things into neat piles and papers into binders after throwing away as much as possible, in the way I do whatever my calendar tells me to do on a certain day, in the way I dislike sudden schedule changes and…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2007
Sometimes I run into these tricky issues that I find it hard to make up my mind about, like the moral aspects of prostitution. Another one is public healthcare aiding circumcision performed for cultural and religious reasons.
Medically speaking, circumcision either of males or females is of course just a holdover from a barbaric past. No enlightened modern Jew, Muslim or generic American -- groups that cultivate this cultural trait -- should even consider it for their children. A cultural identity strongly contingent on the mutilation of babies can't be worth hanging on to without…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2007
Back in September, I wrote a piece about that common type of archaeological site, the abandoned treehouse.
At these sites you'll see rotting boards and beams hanging from clumsily bent nails on a group of trees, gradually collapsing to the ground. Perhaps some old shag pile carpet decomposing on the forest floor. The woods strewn with an enigmatic collection of objects, haphazardly selected, mostly old household gear. When visiting these sites, I always have the feeling that the inhabitants didn't choose the objects they brought there: they took whatever they were given by someone more…