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 | June 14, 2007Here's a charming interview with Apples in Stereo front man Robert Schneider, followed by him performing "Energy" from the new album. All courtesy of the Instant Talk Show. (Total clip length 9 minutes.)
aardvarchaeology | June 13, 2007As an undergrad and PhD student in the 90s I heard a lot of rumours about the 1988-93 excavation of Gullhögen, a barrow in Husby-Långhundra parish between Stockholm and Uppsala. These rumours held that the barrow was pretty weird: built out of charcoal (!), unusually rich, and sitting on top of unusually rich Roman Period graves. Supposedly, someone was out here re-sieving spoil dumps to collect individual gold filigree grains.
Few really knew much about Gullhögen. In a 2001 Fornvännen paper, Kent Andersson could make only the briefest of mentions of some Roman glass and a gold ring found at…
aardvarchaeology | June 12, 2007I am almost completely unable to enjoy Chinese pop music. In fact, I can barely stand listening to it: I find it saccharine-yet-bland and silly and clichéd. But there's one aspect of it that's kind of fun, though I can only appreciate it with the help of an interpreter. Chinese musicians record cover versions of a lot of Western pop hits, and the lyrics they write are amazing. When compared to the originals, that is.
Here are snippets of two late-70s song lyrics, translated by my wife from Chinese to Swedish and by myself from Swedish to English.
The birds are singing and cawing
Telling me to…
aardvarchaeology | June 11, 2007Antiquity is the world's most respected and widely read academic journal in archaeology, our equivalent of Nature or Science. Its summer issue reached me last Friday and yesterday I brought it to the beach. On the first page of his editorial (entertaining, anti-po-mo, available on-line behind a paywall), Martin Carver attacks creationism and quotes a blog entry from March last year by Aard regular Chris O'Brien of the Northstate Science blog! After quoting Turkish creationist Harun Yahya and describing his propaganda efforts, Carver continues:
Here is Christopher O'Brien, a Forest…
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2007From age twelve to twenty-five, I was a gaming geek. It started with the Swedish version of Runequest (Drakar och Demoner) and the Lone Wolf solo adventure series, and soon branched out into computer games and sundry board games. Gaming was a big part of my life and I had a lot of fun with it.
In my teens I used to hang out at a gaming store and go to gaming conventions. There my friends and I encountered innumerable somewhat younger and even more enthusiastic gamers who milled around at belly height of us big guys. We scoffed at their "hack 'n' slay" gaming style, so much cruder than our own…
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2007
An old sorcerer has passed away. Karl Hauck was the single most influential contributor to the iconology, the interpretation of mythological imagery, of 1st Millennium AD Northern Europe. Hauck's interpretations built upon solid knowledge of later written sources, most importantly the Icelandic literature of the High Middle Ages. They were sometimes fanciful, always creative, and quite impossible to ignore for anyone working in that field.
Writes Hagen Keller (and I translate):
"On 8 May Karl Hauck died, aged 90. He was the founder of the Institute for Early Medieval Studies and former…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007A week ago, Australian historian Keith Windschuttle gave a talk in Sydney under the heading "Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History". The full text is on-line, highly recommended.
"The argument that all history is politicised, that it is impossible for the historian to shed his political interests and prejudices, has become the most corrupting influence of all. It has turned the traditional role of the historian, to stand outside his contemporary society in order to seek the truth about the past, on its head. It has allowed historians to write from an overtly partisan…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007
Dear Reader -- let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to the Strawberry Parking Lot.
For the past century and a half, the naming of Swedish places has largely been taken out of the people's hands and regulated by the authorities. New names of big important places are no longer negotiated organically among those who talk about them. Instead, county and municipal planners tell people what to call a certain place. Thus a number of new names in my home area: Saltsjöbaden, Solsidan, Jarlaberg. Fine names handed down from on high, meaning "Salt Sea Bathing Resort", "Sunny Side" and "Earl's…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007Two fine crittergraphs from Felicia Gilljam, a prominent Swedish Secular Humanist. Both snapped in recent years in Grödinge parish near Stockholm.
Top, a slow worm (Anguis fragilis, Sw. kopparödla). Below, a Southern Hawker dragonfly (Aeshna cyanea, Sw. blågrön mosaikslända).
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2007
Eight years ago to the day I was invited to a party one Sunday afternoon. I didn't know the hostess very well: we'd only met twice, at a Mercury Rev concert and a library, and we'd exchanged e-mail addresses. At the time, I was eight months into a surreal period of my life when I was happily learning to be a dad half of the time and energetically dispersing overdue wild oats the other half. That Sunday, I showered and bought some flowers and went.
The party was a buffet in a little courtyard in Stockholm's Old Town, and the guests were many and colourful: largely young bright exchange…
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2007The sixteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology beyond your wildest dreams.
"Give yourself over to absolute pleasure
Swim the warm waters of sins of the flesh
Erotic madness beyond any measure
And sensual daydreams to treasure forever"
Richard O'Brien
aardvarchaeology | June 5, 2007David Nessle is a Swedish comic artist, author, editor, translator, sf fan and blogger. His blog is without any serious competition the wittiest one I've encountered in the Swedish language, and I read it religiously. Recent themes of his blogging have been a Saami version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", an ongoing tiff among Swedish poets, amateurish 60s comics, small-town Swedish food packaging, what to do with all one's books, his collection of plastic action figures and classic dinosaur artist Zdenek Burian. Go read!
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007A recurring theme in my blogging is my frustration at completing a PhD at 31 and finding myself completely supernumerary. A few unwise policy decisions of the government's has allowed a generation of middle-class Swedes like myself to specialise in academic subjects for which there is no market whatsoever. Two cases indicative of what the academic labour market for archaeologists is like in Sweden reached my ears yesterday.
In competition with several doctoral students and recent PhDs, a highly qualified colleague who completed his PhD in 1998 has just landed a one-day-a-week job as a…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007Since the last time we checked in with Kurtz back in March, those blackhearted deviants have released nine new songs on their web site. That's more than an LP's worth of original material in less than three months. Their sound has developed through the adoption of Garageband software. Fans of the Sisters, Joy Division and J&MC, get thee there for sordid kicks and ugly memories.
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007Swedish social sciences zine Axess just published a thematic issue about the twilight of post-modernism and the lingering pockets of anything-goes relativism that it's leaving behind. Essays by Johan Lundberg, Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom, Richard Wolin and Christofer Edling. Currently only in Swedish, but English translations will be on-line shortly.
On the Swedish scale, Axess is a moderate conservative mag. On the US scale, it's somewhere just left of Bill Clinton.
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007A team headed by Elizabeth A. Matisoo-Smith of the University of Auckland has analysed the DNA of archaeological chicken bones from Chile and found that the fowl belonged to a Polynesian breed. Now comes the cool bit: the bones date from the 14th century. We've known since the 60s that Scandinavians beat the Spaniards to North America. Now we find that Polynesians beat them to South America. Columbus's travels just mark the start of a continued non-native presence in the Americas.
Via the LA Times. Thanks to Hans Persson of Du är vad du läser for the heads-up. Did you know that his blog's…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007Wednesday 6 June will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Testimony of the Spade. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Magnus ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2007
Sweden has been going through a process of secularisation and de-Christianisation for more than half a century. In the same period, rural population figures have dwindled as people move to towns and cities to study and find jobs. One result of all this is that rural churches, of which there are thousands, see very few visitors these days. The non-conformist 20th century wooden ones are steadily becoming converted into summer houses or torn down in most parts of Sweden. However, of the parish churches belonging to what was until recently the Protestant State Church of Sweden, only two were…
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2007Got up at half past seven, spent the morning geocaching around Haninge. Found nine out of ten caches I searched for, listened to music and podcasts, sunshine, happy! Saw some sights:
A hill fort
A huge sun-dial sculpture
The ruin of a bunker (?)
A modern runestone (c. 1900), cemented to a cliff and covered with spray-painted graffitti
A frisbee golf course full of buttercups
Two potholes / giant's cauldrons / jättegrytor
A mid-11th century runic inscription on a cliffside, with a looped and be-runed dragon and a big central cross, commemorating a deceased person and mentioning a bridge built…