Aardvarchaeology
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 | July 12, 2017
Swedish 1960s translation of the Game of Life. I just found a uranium mine. According to Boardgame Geek, there are 13,879 better boardgames than this.
I bought a Kindle and I like it. Better than reading on my phone. No screen glare. Weeks between recharges. Bigger page.
As a boy I was shocked to learn that most people have to pay a monthly fee to keep a roof over their heads. I found this to be a horrifically unstable arrangement, similar to staying at a hotel. My parents had never spoken to me about their mortgage loan. I felt that the only monthly expenses anyone should by rights have to…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2017Abisko national park is in the mountains of extreme northern Sweden, Sámi country, reindeer country, where half of the year is lit by constant sun and the other half is frigid darkness and aurorae.
Getting there takes 17½ hours by train from Stockholm Central. There's a sleeper train with no changes, so if you only count time when you're conscious, the trip takes 10 hours. You can fly to Arlanda airport and get right onto this train without making the detour into Stockholm. And the trail head is next to the platform when you get off.
Some friends and I went up hiking over the Mid-summer…
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2017
It would be quite nice if writers feared for their lives over the difference between publishing city and printing city in bibliographies. Then they would be more motivated to get it right.
My parents are great. They've got so much hiking gear, at 74 they still know exactly where they keep it, and they're happy to lend it to me. All I've had to buy for four days' mountain hiking is boots and a pair of sufficiently long waterproof pants.
24 applicants for Stockholm U archaeology lectureship, several with exceptional qualifications. Looking at the list I realise that you could staff two new…
aardvarchaeology | June 27, 2017Academic recruitment procedures in Sweden are a mess. There are at least four strong contradictory forces that impact them.
Meritocracy. As Head of Department you are legally obliged to find and employ the most qualified person on the job market, even if it's just for six months. This is after all the public sector.
Labour laws. As Head of Department you are legally obliged to give a steady job to anyone who has worked at your uni for a total of four semesters in the past five years, regardless of their qualifications.
Funding. As Head of Department you cannot give anyone a steady job unless…
aardvarchaeology | June 20, 2017 On a whim I searched for my surname in the Sites & Monuments Register and was awarded with a distribution map of fieldwork I have directed
Boiled cauliflower is bland and boring. But try slicing it and baking it at a high temperature in the oven with oil and salt. Good stuff!
Archaeoscience friends! The other day when I was feeling happy I had the idea that you guys should develop a method to measure lifetime happiness in human bone. Preferably including variability over the life span.
Proponents of market capitalism tend to confuse a description of how the market works with a…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2017 Poppies along our fence
My wife receives her second university degree today. In addition to her 15 years in journalism, she is now also a trained psychologist. Go YuSie!!!
I assume 45's lawyers cleared the covfefe tweet?
Small but very satisfying discovery. In 1902 a Medieval coin is found at Skällvik Castle. The finder makes a detailed drawing of the coin and sends coin & drawing to the authorities, who promptly lose track of the coin. Gone. In 1954 a list is drawn up of twelve Medieval coins found at nearby Stegeborg Castle. In 1983 the list is published -- and suddenly there are…
aardvarchaeology | June 3, 2017Palaeobotanist Jennie Andersson has analysed four soil samples for me, all from floor layers inside buildings at Medieval strongholds that me and my team have excavated in recent years. There's one each from Stensö, Landsjö, Skällvik and Birgittas udde. Results were sadly not very informative.
Comments Jennie:
"Overall the fossil and carbonised botanical material in the samples, as well as the recent unburnt material, is meagre … No carbonised cereals were found. Three of the four samples did however contain rather large amounts of unburnt bones and scales from fish plus jurpa, a blanket term…
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2017After almost 14 mostly dismal years on the academic job market, I find it a consolation to read an opinion piece in Times Higher Education under the headline "Swedish Academia Is No Meritocracy". In my experience this is also true for Denmark, Norway and Finland. In Norway, for instance, the referee board that evaluates job applications isn't external to the department: it is headed by a senior employee of the department itself. With predictable results.
At Scandinavian universities, people who didn't get their jobs in fair competition are often handing out jobs to their buddies without any…
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2017 In the time of the lilacs, in the month of laburnum
I didn't like any of this year's Hugo-nominated novels, so I'll be voting ”No award” there. But the short-story category really has me confused. The novels aren't great, but most of them are certainly science fiction. Only one of the six shorts though is scifi as opposed to fantasy. Is there no longer a difference between the genre remits of the Nebulas and the Hugos? I thought the Hugos were strictly sf.
Today a number of contract archaeologists and metal detectorists have treated me like someone with valuable skills and knowledge. I…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2017
Ascension with its four days off is shaping up to be the geekiest time of the year. This time I had three big events to choose from: the LinCon gaming convention, the Kontur/SweCon scifi convention and the 45th anniversary of the Tolkien Society. Tolkienians do things in nines.
I decided to spend two days at LinCon on the Linköping University campus and one day at Kontur/SweCon in an Uppsala hotel, saving the Sunday for family pastimes.
Here are the games I played at LinCon. And I had lots of free Nepalese tea from the tea bar!
Through the Ages II (2015). This update of a 2006 civilisation…
aardvarchaeology | May 25, 2017
I don't know what "the winter of 1473" means. January and February? November and December?
Just got home from a sunny bike ride that was also incidentally my least successful geocaching expedition ever. I was in Hammarby Sjöstad, a recently built and densely populated urban area. The only way a geocache survives in such an environment is by extreme stealth. And GPS navigators do really poorly between tall buildings. I simply couldn't find the little fuckers.
Cousin E has taught us the popular old Maoist card game "Fight the Landowner".
Translationale Magnetresonanztomographie.…
aardvarchaeology | May 22, 2017 Dungeon map by Tim Hartin (paratime.ca)
The original roleplaying game, 1974's Dungeons & Dragons, set the template for a hugely popular genre that persists to this day as RPGs, boardgames (such as Descent) and video games (such as World of Warcraft). The core activity in these games is to enter underground complexes of rooms and tunnels (dungeons), defeat their various inhabitants (dragons, if you're out of luck) and steal their treasure. The player characters who do this are termed adventurers – or, by some these days, murder hobos.
As you may have noticed, there are very few dungeon-…
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2017I'm writing an interdisciplinary book about lifestyles at Medieval strongholds in Östergötland province, Sweden. The central chapter "Activities and roles" is currently 8,900 words. Here are the section headers.
Agriculture at arm's length
Baking bread
Brewing
Animal husbandry and the eating of meat
Hunting and the eating of game and wildfowl
Fishing and the eating of fish
Cooking
Dining and drinking
Waste disposal
Relieving oneself
Lighting
Keeping warm
Healthcare and personal grooming
Fashion and jewellery
Ladyship
Chivalry and horsemanship
Love affairs
Weddings
Growing up
Religion
Music…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2017Supported by a grant from the King Gustavus Adolphus VI Foundation For Swedish Culture, osteologist Lena Nilsson has analysed the bones we collected during excavations last year at two Medieval strongholds. Two weeks with 19 fieldworkers at Birgittas udde produced only 0.4 kg of bones, because the site has no culture layers to speak of and the sandy ground has been unkind. But from the following two weeks at Skällvik Castle we brought home 32.7 kg of bones! And now Lena has looked at them all. Here are her reports:
Birgittas udde 2016
Skällvik Castle 2016
The reports are in Swedish, but the…
aardvarchaeology | May 17, 2017 Archaeological sites in Lake Vättern off Huskvarna
The latest inland ice was 3 km thick and its weight left a big dent in Scandinavia. Since deglaciation (which is, on the geological time scale, a current event) the dent has been straightening out. This causes land uplift. But just outside the edge of the dent, it causes the land to sink. Southernmost Scandinavia is losing land to the sea, not gaining it.
The fulcrum of this see-saw crosses Lake Vättern right at its southernmost point. The lake is receding at one end and encroaching at the other. This is why there is an Early Bronze Age…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2017
Contraceptives really changed society radically. Prior to them literature is full of references to people being too poor to get married. Because getting married was the same thing as having children.
I'm disappointed with streaming movie services. I thought they were like music services, where it's a rare exception if some older band's catalogue isn't available in full. On Netflix and Viaplay it's in fact the other way around: you're super lucky if an older movie is available, and you often have to pay extra.
Snoop Dogg's autobiography: The Chronicle.
Poetry tip: don't put the word "the" in…
aardvarchaeology | May 8, 2017 Edmund de Waal at Artipelag
It's been a fun weekend! Here's what I did.
Watched Jrette's dance show, snappy and lively!
Inspired by Kate Feluś's fine recent book Secret Life of the Georgian Garden, I made syllabub (whipped cream with lemon juice & rind, wine, sugar and a dash of grand marnier), and ate it while checking on the (encouraging) progress of our three tiny rose bushes.
Logged nine geocaches and failed to find two. One hadn't been visited in the past nine months and contained no less than three travel bugs that had been languishing there. I brought them along and placed each…
aardvarchaeology | May 1, 2017
Movie: Little Big Man. Tragicomedy about the Old West and the fate of the Native Americans. Grade: OK.
Submitted my tax returns. Always super easy, which is one of the benefits of having a low income and few assets.
I've researched my ancestry fully four generations back and found no madman, sorcerer, ape or sea monster. What am I doing wrong?
I re-read two random chapters near the end of Peake's Titus Groan for the first time in 30 years. It's really, really good stuff.
I grieve for the multitudes of Windows users who don't know what flag-key plus M does.
The drumming on "Rock And Roll All…
aardvarchaeology | April 20, 2017
There is no year zero in the common era. 1 BC is followed by AD 1. This is because Dionysius Exiguus worked around AD 500, long before the Indian concept of mathematical zero reached European scholars via the Arabs.
I don't quite understand why the guy in Springsteen's "The River" is so super sad. It's not in the lyrics.
I love Turkish fast food and "Here Comes The Rain Again".
Thorn-stabbed left eye acting up again nine months after that brush-clearing session at Skällvik Castle. Right-hand one showing its sympathy by clouding up too, leaving me unable to read or write much. Annoying. But…
aardvarchaeology | April 10, 2017
"If I blow my top -- will you let it go to your head?" W.F. Gibbons
Hit jackpot on the car radio riding with Jrette and her buddy today. First some Tuvan throat singing. Then a fat version of the Marseillaise with orchestra, choir and a solo soprano who sounded like Piaf. It's important that you outweird young people regularly to prepare them for life.
My soft tissue now has a distinctly later radiocarbon date than the dentine in my front teeth.
Over half a thousand people congratulated me on my birthday. Made me feel cherished, like through Facebook and in other ways I'm a small but…