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 | April 6, 2007
Geocaching in the little nature preserve at Lake Kyrksjön in the western burbs of Stockholm, I came across this passionate couple. Every spring there are wild toad orgies in the wetlands around here. The males sing madly for days, mounting and clinging to anything vaguely like a female -- including human hands. The females are much larger and may be seen crawling along doggedly with up to three sex-crazed males hanging onto them. A funny thing about the toads is that they live through this intense springtime awakening with the same grumpy deadpan facial expression as always.
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2007My dear scibling and fellow big-nose European Bora, over at the one Sblog that comes before Aard in the alphabetical list, has "tagged me with a meme". That is, he has handed me a coat of chainmail. No, he's sent me a chain letter, with a blogging assignment. I usually don't bother about these things because a) I'm afraid to scare readers away, b) I don't find them very fun to write myself. But this time, the question is one that might actually be interesting to some people, and somebody posed it to me face-to-face recently. Why do I blog?
As a hint, let me first quote from The Jet's latest…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2007Seed has just revamped and re-launched the "Ask a ScienceBlogger" feature on the Sb front page . This time only one blogger answers each question. With a heavy dominance around here for bloggers in the life sciences, we're unlikely to see many questions that I'm equipped to answer with more than a silly joke or two. Unless you, Dear Reader, send them some rundkvisty questions! Here's the address: askablogger@seedmediagroup.com. Figure out questions that the Seed people may believe that a large number of readers would like to see answered -- then they might pick your suggestion.
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2007I'll tell thee everything I can;
There's little to relate.
I saw an aged aged man,
A-sitting on a gate.
"Who are you, aged man?" I said,
"And how is it you live?"
And his answer trickled through my head
Like water through a sieve.
I'm a birthday boy! Half-way to 70. Why not read one of my favourite absurd poems?
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2007
Yesterday the spring issue of Fornvännen, Journal of Swedish Antiquarian Research, arrived from the printers. I'm proud to be one of its editors.
Very few Scandinavians realise how unfortunate the English title of the journal is. It came about due to a mistranslation of the Swedish adjective antikvarisk, meaning
Concerning the far past and ancient artefacts,
In accordance with professional standards in heritage management,
Of the used-book trade.
"Antiquarian", on the other hand, has the primary meaning "of antiquarians". This is really embarrassing, because the moniker "an antiquarian" is…
aardvarchaeology | April 2, 2007
Early Vendel Period baldric mounts from the Ottarshögen barrow, Vendel parish, Uppland.
Archaeological periods are defined by artefact types. For instance, the Early Neolithic of Sweden is defined by the appearance of Funnel Beaker pottery, thin-butted flint axes and pointed-butt axes (and a long list of other things). Before these types appear, the period has not begun. When they cease to be produced and are replaced by other types, we are no longer in the Early Neolithic. This means that archaeological chronology is largely structured around long lists of artefact types with as stringent…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2007
I'm in the kitchen. My wife just sent me the most amazing link from the living room.
TV Links
Last weekend I missed the only TV show I watch, Six Feet Under, now being aired in its fifth season in Sweden. Since then, I've tried to find the missed episode on DC++ and BitTorrent, to no avail. At TV Links, a high-bandwidth video stream of the episode is just two clicks away. And they have all the other episodes too. Of all the other seasons. Of every single TV series I've ever felt even mildly interested in watching.
I have no idea how they do it. But that site is amazing. I feel like an ad…
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 30, 2007
Stone architecture took off in Sweden from about AD 1100 onward, and we have quite a number of Romanesque-style churches preserved to various degrees. Many have been dated with dendrochronology.
I'm no friend of the Church, but I do like churches. And so I'm saddened to learn that Östergötland, the Swedish province subject to my on-going research, just lost one. Älvestad church caught fire Thursday afternoon and the fire left very little combustible material unburnt. Rural churches are a huge deal to their parishioners, and brave locals got hurt while trying to salvage stuff from the fire.…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2007In recent years, I've bought three copies of a useful piece of software as part of package deals on computers. The software licences include free on-line upgrades, and hardly a week goes by without an offer of some tweak or patch to improve the workings of things. I gratefully partake.
I've been a loyal customer of this software company for almost 20 years. But when I heard what the newest version of their product is like, I began considering alternatives. And in the past few days, I have received offensive messages from them that made up my mind real quick.
Dear Reader, have you heard of…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2007
Dear skeptical Reader, welcome to Aardvarchaeology and the 57nd Skeptics' Circle blog carnival! I used to blog at Salto sobrius, and now Aard offers the same salad of archaeology, skepticism, books, music and general psychedelic whimsy. We've got some really good stuff on the carnival this time.
CLEAR THINKING
Steve at NeuroLogica leads the reader through a number of insights into how our minds work, all important to "cognitive hygiene" and skeptical thinking.
Factician at Conspiracy Factory asks himself, why do smart people say such stupid things?
RELIGION
Angry Professor at A Gentlemen's…
aardvarchaeology | March 28, 2007
Dan, Kai, Thinker, Martin R, Paddy K, Tor, Martin C, Harald, Johnny.
Last night's blogmeet at Wirström's pub in Stockholm was a great success. Counting myself and Paddy K, we were nine guys eating and talking and drinking for hours. After a while we recruited three lovely daycare ladies who took our picture and entertained us.
Martin C had trouble finding our group at first because he was looking for a "great big cluster of geeks". I wonder if he meant that our cluster was too small or that we didn't look geeky enough. Our conversation was geeky though, covering endogenous retroviruses,…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2007
Archaeologists love preciousss metals. Not for their monetary value, but because they keep so well. Take a fine damascened sword whose blade ripples like water, so well balanced that you hardly feel its weight, and bury it: it will look like crap after a few centuries. Bury a golden object, and it will in most cases remain unchanged for millennia. It's basically a question of information integrity. Materials like flint and gold allow us to see exactly what prehistoric people saw, and to understand that their material culture was no less skilfully made and eye-catching than ours.
Today…
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2007
When I was twelve I bought my first LP, a synth-pop creation by a British band popular with middle-class teens at the time. Here are snippets of Martin Gore's lyrics to two of the songs.
You're feeling the boredom too
I'd gladly go with you
I'd put your leather boots on
I'd put your pretty dress on
...
You treat me like a dog
Get me down on my knees
We call it master and servant
I'm not sure at what age I became aware of kinky sex, but I think at the time I didn't quite understand what "playing Master and Servant" really meant. Other themes on Depeche Mode's 1984 album Some Great Reward are…
aardvarchaeology | March 25, 2007On Thursday 29 March I'll be hosting the Skeptics' Circle blog carnival. I'd like to see Aard readers represented: if you've written anything in a skeptical vein recently, feel free to send me a link!
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…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2007With Aard, I'm now back at 19,000, the Technorati rank I had with my old blog shortly before I moved to ScienceBlogs. It took a bit more than three months. Now, if only Google would give me a fookin' PageRank...
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 2007A recent addition to the excellent Runeberg Project e-text repository is the 1931 re-issue of Sven Petter Bexell's 1819 work Hallands historia och beskrivning. It's a patriotic history and description of the province of Halland, a part of Sweden's southwest coast that belonged to Denmark for many centuries. Below is a fine example of just how fanciful early 19th century place-name scholarship and historical writing could be. Source-criticism hadn't really become a formalised set of techniques yet at this point.
"Already in the latter half of the ninth century, the Vikings of Halland,…
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2007
Inger Österholm died the night between Wednesday and Thursday after a long battle with illness. For over two decades, she was a driving force behind the Ajvide excavations on Gotland, where countless archaeology students from Stockholm and Visby received their first taste of fieldwork. Inger specialised in the Neolithic of Gotland, as seen in her seminal 1989 doctoral thesis, Bosättningsmönstret på Gotland under stenåldern. She was a tireless teacher, fieldworker and university administrator, and always very good to me during my post-grad work with Gotland's largest 1st Millennium cemetery.…
aardvarchaeology | March 22, 2007
I've written before about modern ruins. Here's a great Finnish site: Tuomas Romu's photographs. Beautiful work!
Thanks to Mustafa Mond for the link.