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 | March 22, 2007My buddy Lars Lundqvist, long-time regular Dear Reader and contributor of excellent archaeopix, started a blog three weeks ago: Arkland. It's in Swedish, it's finely illustrated, and it's mainly about Swedish archaeology. Yes, this is the guy who did all those cool digs at Slöinge, Vittene and Saleby. Go have a look and write a comment or two!
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2007
Dear Reader, watch me toot my own horn (yes, I have a very supple spine).
Technorati doth heed prayer. Or at least it heeds "support tickets". So now this blog is visible again on the top-10 archaeology blogs (currently #3 with 187 linkers) and skepticism blogs (currently #9). Netwide.
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2007As reported profusely in the mainstream media, the Chinese government is investing in iffy African regimes to secure access to the troubled continent's raw materials. For years, Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe has for instance received Chinese tech and training to control information flow: phone-tapping, radio jamming and internet-monitoring. You scratch my dictatorial back, I'll scratch yours, little brother.
British-run short-wave radio station SW Radio Africa is routinely jammed in Zimbabwe's cities. Now, reports the BBC's global tech news program & podcast Digital Planet, the radio…
aardvarchaeology | March 20, 2007
Survival of the Sickest is a collection of eight pop-sci essays on medicine from an evolutionary perspective. It does not present any single cohesive line of argument, but the book's title refers to one of the main themes: the idea that common hereditary diseases would not have become widespread in the gene pool unless they once conferred an adaptive edge on individuals.
I read the book quite avidly and it is unlikely to disappoint anyone with an interest in the subject. Yet still I feel that it's a flawed piece of work in two important and interlinked respects: scientific credibility and…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2007
An important skill in archaeology is what my friend and mentor Jan Peder Lamm calls fragmentology: the ability to identify objects when all you have is small pieces. The only way to learn this well is to look at a lot of objects. So here's a fragmentological exercise for you, Dear Reader: of what two objects have the fragments in the pictures been parts? And what parts? And even if you find them really easy, the most important question may be, which details guided your identification? The round thing measures about 14 cm across, the shiny thing about 2.5 cm.
I'd like to extend my standing…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2007
I no longer listen much to the synth pop I loved in my teens. The artist that has perhaps dropped most dramatically in my affections is Jean-Michel Jarre, largely because I really dug him once. But I still listen to one of his albums with great pleasure: 1984's Zoolook.
This disc sounds as if the bombastic and sentimental Frenchman has been slipped something ergotoid in his coffee by the sound-effects crew from the first Star Wars movie and then herded into the studio, tailed by Laurie Anderson and two dozen Ewoks. After a spacey opening dirge, things pick up: extraterrestrial party animals…
aardvarchaeology | March 18, 2007
Dagens Nyheter reports that the Stockholm University Library has seen some pretty bad vandalism. Yesterday morning it was discovered that someone had disconnected the drain-pipe from an upstairs washbasin and opened the taps to the max. Several cubic meters of water flooded out during the night and drenched three floors. Luckily, few books were damaged, but the place will have to close while everything is dried out and the carpeting replaced.
Vandalising libraries is of course on a par with organising book bonfires or bringing down internet hubs, a particularly ugly crime. I hope whoever did…
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2007My kids see a fair share of lukewarm religiosity with their grandma and teachers. At home, they're taught that there are basically two types of characters:
Real people who merit empathy and solidarity, such as themselves,
Fictional ones that you can make up stories about, such as Spiderman, the Little Mermaid and Jehovah, Lord of Hosts.
Being Swedish, I've never come across a religious parenting manual. But I gather they are really common in the U.S., and that some are exceptionally nasty (as discussed by Jim Benton). Enter Dale McGowan, editor of the anthology Parenting Beyond Belief: On…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2007
I got Dick, babies.
Having failed to find any of the suet necessary to make the British dessert Spotted Dick, I settled for a surrogate. The third butcher I talked to told me that he had beef tallow for sale that he usually uses to make black pudding. I bought half a kilogram of the waxy yellow stuff and took it home triumphantly. Self-raising flour is unknown in Sweden, but Google made it easy to find the proportions of flour, baking soda and salt. Mixing the dough was also easy, and I have some experience with steaming Chinese dishes, so I took Dick through that unscathed.
The pudding…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2007Regular Dear Reader Christina lives in a small town in western Canada, where there are "lots of nice rock art and arrowheads and Indians (though they don't want to get excavated for political reasons) ". Here's a cool snippet from a letter she sent me.
"Speaking about books and the local library, I've discovered that if you want to read about Old Norse religion, then you'll have to look in the science fiction section. I guess I should have known, or what? Most likely, the reason is that I live in a town that used to be a really tiny place, but that's grown into a major city in the past five…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2007
There's childhood and youth and young adulthood. And then comes middle age. I've been wondering when my Middle Ages are going to begin. I've left the Iron Age of my youth, for sure, and I have a feeling that my Roman Imperial times are drawing to an end. So, the other day, I found the answer. Three weeks from now, I will be closer to 50 than to 20. That must be my AD 409. That's when the last remaining Imperial officials in the province of Britannia start packing their gear and no longer answer plainly when you ask them how old they are. "Thirty-something" is all they reply.
I'm going…
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2007Dear Reader, please let me remind you of the Hopeful Buttons to the left under my profile. One will exalt this blog in the eyes of Technorati, the second will allow you to heighten the esteem in which the blog is held by a Swedish ranking engine, and the third will let you look at stuff I would already have bought if I hadn't put all my money into absinth and bagpipe Whitesnake-tribute concerts.
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2007Carne vale is what you say to your usual meaty diet when the fasting of Lent sets in. Science fans do it at Tangled Bank 75, other skeptics at Skeptics' Circle 56.
I wonder if they say chili con carne vale in Mexico.
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2007
It's a posthole! It's a rubbish pit! It's an elk-trapping pit with the remains of a wooden catch box at the bottom! No -- it's a hearth. A Four Stone Hearth! The eleventh carnival in the series, to be precise. And it's all about humans. As the poet put it,
"Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the jungle VIP
I've reached the top and had to stop
And that's what's botherin' me
I wanna be a man, mancub
And stroll right into town
And be just like the other men
I'm tired of monkeyin' around!"
This is where we all pretend to be human.
MC at Neurophilosophy digs into a racist neurology paper by…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2007Scandinavians are unusually cool about nudity in certain well-defined situations. The Finnish sauna is a well-known example. Within Swedish families, nudity is also commonplace, while many other nations feel that allowing your kids to see you starkers is tantamount to sexual molestation. (Which is a hot topic here at Scienceblogs at the moment.)
My wife and I once had dinner with a young couple down the street, where the man was a Chilean. His parents also had an apartment on the same street. He told us, chuckling, that his ma & pa could never draw the blinds in their kitchen, because…
aardvarchaeology | March 13, 2007
Dear Reader, are you at heart a shady character? Have you seen the seamy side of things? Is your outlook bleak? Is your appearance disreputable, your gaze shifty, your shirt unwashed, your hair style bedraggled? Are you familiar with spleen, anomie and ennui? Is your mother worried about you?
I mean, Dear Reader, do you miss Joy Division, early Sisters of Mercy, early Jesus & Mary Chain? Don't. Listen to Kurtz instead -- while reading Poe, Huysmans and Baudelaire.
The members of this unsigned Uppsala trio of decadents are all regular customers in the district misdemeanor court. Their…
aardvarchaeology | March 13, 2007
Spotted Dick is a traditional British dessert. I must have it.
More exactly, I must make it. And to that end, I must find suet. I was twice thwarted in this on my lunch hour as I asked at reputable Stockholm butcher's counters. Neither had it, one didn't even know what it was, both referred me to each other.
Suet is hard tallowy tissue that clusters around the kidneys of mammals. Indeed, the Swedish word for it, njurtalg, means "kidney tallow". Victorian Britons used it as shortening in puddings, most famously in Christmas pudding.
Spotted Dick is a steamed, massive, doughy thing tasting of…
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2007At short notice, I've taken on hosting the next Four Stone Hearth blog carnival (about anthropology in the widest sense, including archaeology). It's supposed to come on-line on Wednesday. The carnival's home page currently doesn't reflect the change in scheduling, so you'll simply have to believe me.
There is one small problem. I haven't received a single submission yet. This means that I will have to hunt around pertinent blogs I'm aware of to find good new stuff. Please help me by sending links to good stuff, your own or somebody else's!
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2007
A new peer-reviewed intercontinental multidisciplinary journal has just been announced: Journal of the North Atlantic (JONA). Apart from my discipline, JONA will also cover paleo-environmental reconstruction and modelling, historical ecology, anthropology, ecology of organisms important to humans, human/environment/climate interactions, climate history, ethnography, ethnohistory, historical analyses, discussions of cultural heritage, and place-name studies. Its offices are in Maine and the editorial board includes people based in the US, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Shetlands…
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2007
The spring issue of Antiquity, a journal for which I am proud to act as a correspondent, has come on-line and is being distributed on paper as well. It has a lot to offer those interested in Northern European archaeology: papers on the construction date of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, England; on the late-1st Millennium temple at Uppåkra, Scania, Sweden; on mid-to-late 1st Millennium research as historical archaeology; on the Viking Period towns and trade network around the Baltic; and (as illustrated above) on voluptuous Late Magdalenian female silhouettes knapped in flint and found at…