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 1, 2007A few words about a new novel I read half of and didn't feel like finishing. (Better say something or the publishers might strike me from their mailing list.)
Rant is Chuck Palahniuk's eighth novel. It brings Nick Cave's Old-Testament grotesque And the Ass Saw the Angel (1989) to mind in its preoccupation with the bodily exudations of rural Americans. But it isn't at all as absorbing or painful to read, mainly because of Palahniuk's use of innumerable narrators. They take turns saying brief and dry little pieces, neatly labeled with their names and relationships to the central character, Rant…
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2007[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, ethnicity, saami, minorities, indigenouspeople; arkeologi, etnicitet, samer, minoriteter, urbefolkningar]
I got an inspiring question from Z at Enkla bloggen.
"Who made the rock carvings, hällristningar? Was it the Saami people?
Is this a sensitive matter? I've already asked several archaeologists but they haven't answered me."
Archaeology is fundamentally incapable of answering the question "who did this?" without the aid of written history. This is because everything we put into that question when we pose it is non-material, and the…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2007Here's something cool. Google is attacking proposed Swedish wiretapping legislation.
"We have contacted Swedish authorities to give our view of the proposal and we have made it clear that we will never place any servers inside Sweden's borders if the proposal goes through."
Good thing someone outside the country is reacting!
I don't know much about this issue, but I think Google may have misunderstood the situation. It may actually just be a question of how the Swedish authorities operate. Because all governments spy to some extent on their citizens. Only in Sweden and a few other countries…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2007Two months ago my metal detecting team and I were visited in the field by the Swedish State Broadcasting company's TV science show for kids, Hjärnkontoret. They tell me they're running the story tonight, somewhere between 1830 and 1900 hours Swedish time. For those who choose to watch, it may be entertaining to know that minutes before the TV crew appeared on site, we found a 4th century ring made of a material we don't talk to the media about. So in the footage, everybody's quietly euphoric yet clamming up, while the TV people are being really thrilled to get to try out a metal detector and…
aardvarchaeology | May 30, 2007[More blog entries about neuroscience, lamprey, computationalmodeling; neurovetenskap, nejonöga, datormodellering.]
In Stockholm on 14 June, my psychedelic friend and fellow honorary Chinese Mikael Huss will present his PhD thesis in engineering (available on-line). He has built software models of bits of the lamprey's spinal cord. The book's title is Computational Modeling of the Lamprey CPG. From Subcellular to Network Level -- CPG means "central pattern generator".
I understand little of this. I just want to eat the lamprey.
Thesis abstract below the fold.
Due to the staggering complexity…
aardvarchaeology | May 29, 2007This year's issue of the Lund Archaeological Review reached me last week. It's the volume for 2005-2006, and most of the papers are dated 2005. Such a delay is no big deal in archaeology: our knowledge growth doesn't progress at the rate typical of the natural sciences.
What caught my attention in the new issue was three polemic pieces at the back of the volume. First there's another salvo in the war between my buddy Påvel Nicklasson and his erstwhile colleagues at the Jönköping County Museum. To the extent that I understand the conflict, what seems to have happened is that Dr. Nicklasson, a…
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 | May 28, 2007I love the ability to see what people type into search engines before they end up here (an ability provided, for instance, by Extreme Tracking). Much of the time, people are obviously looking for porn. Somebody just typed the following into Google:
Where I can put my penis in the women pic?
Yes, where, oh where indeed?
aardvarchaeology | May 27, 2007
The Swedish State Board of National Antiquities, Riksantikvarieämbetet, has been putting more and more useful things on-line in the past few years. The most recent addition is a blog in Swedish, K-bloggen, where a number of Aard readers and buddies of mine are writing some interesting stuff. Go, see, comment, learn the Swedish word for cultural resource management! Say after me please: "cull-TOUR-mil-yur-VOARD".
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2007Marshmallow Coast's 2000 offering Coasting is one of my favourite albums: quirky and cool neopsych with a lot of acoustic guitar and off-key singing. 2002's Ride The Lightning also has some great songs (listen to "Classifieds"!), but their 2003 production Antistar is boring if not downright bad. It was thus with some misgivings that I put on 2006's Say It In Slang. Dear Reader, I usually hate albums the first time I listen to them. But let me tell you that, to my surprise and delight, I found Say It In Slang as good as Coasting if not better. It's a beautiful piece of cool jazzy guitar pop.…
aardvarchaeology | May 25, 2007
If you have a lot of samples lying around that you want to run through AMS radiocarbon analysis, then get thee to the Poznan lab's informative web site. Tomasz Goslar tells me he's offering a summer bargain. The standard price is €320 / $430 / £220 plus sales tax per carbon sample, with an additional fee for collagen extraction if you submit bone samples. If you order 10 analyses before 31 July, you get them at a 15% discount.
I'm a satisfied customer of the Poznan lab. They did the dates for the Skamby Iron Age settlement and the Sjögestad Viking Period barrow. Send your samples to Poland…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2007My dear SciBling and fellow big-nose European, Bora/Coturnix, has a wonderful story to tell! After seeing an interesting job ad (regarding a position as on-line community manager for the Open Access journal publishing house Public Library of Science) he blogged about it and said he'd really like the job. In a matter of hours, a PLoS editor commented on Bora's blog and asked if the blog entry should be considered as a formal job application -- and Bora got the job! I gather what did it was a combination of his excellent blogging and the way he interacts with his many readers in the comments…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2007
Dear Reader, I have a confession to make. During the past two years I have invested a lot of time, effort and gasoline into locating 500 plastic jars, most of which were hidden under rocks. Some were in crevices in stone walls, others fastened with magnets behind metal fuseboxes and the like. Many were at scenic spots or among strange ruins. I used the Global Positioning System to find those jars. Sometimes I had to solve riddles and conundrums to get the coordinates. Often I have risen at dawn on weekends and gone out to seek tupperware while my family enjoyed a lazy morning. And you know…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2007[More blog entries about history, carnival, ancient, classics, medieval, middleages; historia, antiken, medeltiden, klassisk.]
Welcome, everyone, to Aardvarchaeology and the 27th Carnivalesque blog carnival! Aard is a blog about archaeology and skepticism and stuff, hosted here at ScienceBlogs among a bunch of natural-science blogs, most covering the life sciences. Carnivalesque deals in Ancient, Medieval and (in even-numbered instalments) Early Modern history, subjects in which I am interested but of which I am largely ignorant. Yes, I am a prehistorian. Let me classify your kitchen ware…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2007
Photograph from Per Dahlberg's blog.
Woah, I don't like the attrition rate among my colleagues right now. Magnus at Testimony of the Spade informs me that professor emerita Ebba During died on Tuesday 15 May after a battle with illness. Ebba was an osteologist, which means that like all Swedish bone people she combined the specialities of physical anthropology and animal osteology.
For years and years, Ebba taught osteology on the snug premises in Ulriksdal outside Stockholm made available by the archaeologist-king Gustavus VI Adolphus. Her manner was kindly and unassuming. Yet her published…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2007The fifteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to move you and soothe you and treat you right, baby.
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2007
One of the most recent additions to the on-line catalogue of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm is deliciously enigmatic. It's a little sandstone tablet (SHM 18011:100) measuring 73 by 60 mm, covered on both sides with vaguely script-like and architectonic graffitti. The edges are neatly notched, prompting a museum curator to suggest in the inventory notes that the tablet may have been intended as a yarn spool, nystvända. But no-one really knows.
The tablet was found by Sigurd Curman's team in 1919 during excavations among the ruins of the nunnery of Vreta in Östergötland. The…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2007Popular blog indexing service Technorati has revamped its graphic design and appears to have quit ranking blogs. Now how will I know if I have any personal worth?
Technorati keeps track of how many different sites have linked to yours over the past six months. This figure is called your blog's "authority". Engadget, Boingboing and Gizmodo are currently the top three, with authority assessments of over 19,000. The most popular ScienceBlog, Pharyngula, has authority 2,629. Aard currently has authority 266.
Until yesterday, Technorati provided a ranking figure along with your authority…
aardvarchaeology | May 22, 200715 years ago, the word processing software I used was WordPerfect 5.1. It wouldn't be able to compete with any current software, except for one thing: hyphenation. I have yet to see any word processing or type setting software with hyphenation as good as that of WordPerfect 5.1.
I co-edit two journals typeset by two different people, and the beyond all comparison most common proof error I have to correct is crappy hyphenation. This is a big deal in Swedish where composite words are written without spaces or hyphens, just like in German. Automatic hyphenation always screws up when the second…
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2007Michael Allen, a.k.a. the Grumpy Old Bookman, has a new novella out for free download: Mr Fenman's Farewell to His Readers. It's historical fiction with an unreliable narrator. I can't wait to read it!
"Who was the mysterious Madame de Mentou? And how did she become such an expert teacher in many different art forms? These are the questions which the writer Thomas Fenman addresses in a brief memoir which was written a few months before his death. Fenman's puzzling memoir is now published for the first time; Michael Allen provides a scholarly introduction."
To really round this post-modern…