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 10, 2007Wednesday last I asked Aard's growing ranks of regular Dear Readers to say "Hey" and introduce themselves. And the response was great! Many, many thanks for all the appreciative comments.
My purpose in asking this was twofold: a) I wanted to get to know you guys better, b) I wanted to know how I could improve the blog. The first part of the plan worked fine: I am very honoured to have such a diverse and insightful readership! But the second part kind of backfired. In fact, it's a classic case of a poorly thought-through research design, and I should really be ashamed of myself. In fact, my…
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2007
Somebody once said to me, "You archaeologists don't really know anything, do you? I mean, it's just guesses, right?". Well, sometimes I do despair about archaeology as a science. Can we actually know anything about what life was like for people in the deep past? Are we doing science at all or just deluding ourselves? But I always pick myself up pretty quickly.
First, I remind myself that all science is a muddled process where we grope laboriously toward solid knowledge and often have to make detours. If archaeology isn't always very good science, then at least it's not alone in this.
Then…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2007
I sometimes run appreciations of little-known blogs here. By no stretch of the word can Pharyngula be called little-read: it's one of the top-few-hundred blogs on the entire net. But today is P.Z. Myers's 50th birthday, and that's cause for rejoicing!
Dear Reader, let's say you happen not to know of PZ and Pharyngula. Then let me tell you that if you want to learn developmental biology and liberal U.S. politics from a witty godless polemicist with a squid fetish, then PZ's your man.
Happy first half century, PZ! May your second one be even better! Your living tissue is now measurably younger…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2007Here's a pretty far-out news item from Dagens Nyheter.
"A 58-year-old Dutchman had one ear and his nose bitten off by another man and a school had a power outage due to a brawl in Växjö on the morning of Thursday.
Shortly before three in the morning police were called to break up a fight in Växjö. They found two seriously wounded men and a long-haul truck full of flowers that had been driven straight into an electrical transformer station. Also, they found a severed ear and nose on the scene that were taken to the hospital and reattached to their owner.
Both men came to Växjö in the Dutch…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2007I just realised that the lyrics of this traditional Swedish children's song read just like the recounting of a hallucinogen experience or a psychotic episode. Imagine a goggle-eyed grizzled old hippie buttonholing you at a vegetarian restaurant and forcing you, giggling, to listen to the story of his life-changing episode back in '68.
It was really funny
I've gotta laugh
This triangular old man came in
He wore wooden clogs and a birch-bark jacket
And a hat trimmed with sausage skin
He sat down on a stool in the kitchen
And pulled a harmonica out of his pocket
And started playing so everything…
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2007The stats for returning readers have taken a healthy jump from about 35 daily in November through January to about 45 daily in recent weeks. I like that a lot! Dear Returning Reader, please take the time to comment on this post, say something about yourself and tell me what kind of blog entries you'd like to see more of here.
aardvarchaeology | March 7, 2007 Gruff Rhys, front man of trippy Welsh popsters The Super Furry Animals, released his second solo album back in January, Candylion. (Here's the promo site.) Its mellow quirky tunes will appeal to fans of the Furries. I particularly like the title track, "Beacon in the Darkness" and the hummable "The Court of King Arthur".
I keep an eye open for pop lyrics having to do with archaeology. Here and here, for example, are two songs about bog bodies. And on Candylion we find the following fine example, indicating that Mr Rhys has been watching Time Team:
The Court of King Arthur
By Gruff Rhys…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007I've been blogging here for over two months now, and Aard is steadily working its way upp the Technorati ranking scale. But Google hasn't taken any notice yet: it still considers the authority of this site to be a 0 on a scale of 10. Meanwhile, my old hibernating blog appears to become more and more authoritative. It used to be a 4 back when I still blogged there. Now it's a 6!?
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007A burgeoning community of atheist bloggers has come into being since Mojoey published his Atheist Blogroll. The many blogs publishing that list has done a lot for Aardvarchaeology's Technorati ranking. I haven't got a blogroll, mainly because it saves me from having to add courtesy links all the time. But I try to spread the link love in other ways, such as doing feature entries on good underappreciated blogs. And so I decided to post the entire atheist blogroll under the fold. Random chance and purposeless existence bless ya, guys!
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007
I'm generally no fan of "contemporary archaeology", where 20th century sites are investigated and interpreted. If you want to know what those people did, ask them or read the local paper. But Claes Pettersson at the Jönköping County Museum has written a piece in this genre that I actually like a lot. (It's in Swedish.)
In recent decades, the Torsvik highway crossroads has been one of those marginal places on the outskirts of a town that are left over between car dealerships, parking lots and supermarkets. This particular place was also an Iron Age cemetery, and last year the time had come to…
aardvarchaeology | March 6, 2007
One of my favourite Danes, Henrik Karll, offers this variation on an emblematic archaeological motif: a grinning skeleton looking up at the sky from a trench. Only this one's accompanied by a 1950s drain pipe that's sliced it lengthwise in half. As detailed on Henrik's blog, he had a snowy watching brief for some small-scale trenching at Holstebro church in western Jutland a few weeks ago. This is one of the dead people he ran into: dating from after the erection of the church c. AD 1100 but before the advent of careful churchyard planning c. AD 1900. It's an adult individual, sex unknown.…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2007Back in August, I blogged about a paper I'd written on the chronology and iconography of Migration Period gold bracteates. It was published around the New Year and is now also available on-line in English. Please tell me what you think!
Rundkvist, Martin. 2006. Notes on Axboe's and Malmer's gold bracteate chronologies. Fornvännen 2006:5. KVHAA. Stockholm.
[More blog entries about archaeology, migrationperiod, Sweden, Denmark; arkeologi, folkvandringstiden, Danmark.]
aardvarchaeology | March 4, 2007Most of Sweden is still seeing continual land upheaval after the latest Ice Age. Where I live, the shoreline recedes half a meter per century, measured vertically. If you build a jetty around here when you're 20, it's pretty much useless when you're 80. This means that the Stockholm Archipelago is in constant flux: underwater rocks become islets, islands merge, and finally they become landlocked hills.
Here's a pop-sci essay in Swedish I published recently in the local historical society's bulletin. It's about the boating situation in my area, Nacka municipality east of Stockholm, a thousand…
aardvarchaeology | March 3, 2007
Here's another underappreciated, undermarketed and eminently readable blog within the ambit of Aardvarchaeology: Chris O'Brien's Northstate Science. For more archaeology and skepticism, read Chris! He's been at it for a year now, he's only seeing 60 hits a day, and by his own admission,
"I have done almost no advertising about the blog, either locally or via other websites - anyone who has discovered Northstate Science has done so either via word of mouth or through searches and links to my posts (hell, most of my relatives, including my mother, don't know I actually have a blog!)"
C'mon…
aardvarchaeology | March 2, 2007
My excellent brother-in-law Peter Köhler is an artist of the well-educated, hip, productive and non-starving kind. He teaches and exhibits his work internationally, and now he's got something coming up at a gallery on Broadway in New York.
VERUS PAINTERS
Works by John Aslanidis, Susann Brännström, Peter Köhler, Karen Schifano, Lorraine Williams
March 8 - April 28, 2007
Opening reception Thursday, March 8, 6 to 8 pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11 am to 6 pm
Tobey Fine Arts is proud to present an exhibition of works by the international group of artists calling themselves the Verus…
aardvarchaeology | March 1, 2007
My friend Stefan Kayat is a truly original man of many talents. With his folk band, Herr Arnes Penningar, he plays eclectic reimaginations of traditional music, and he's also a draughtsman, a painter and occasionally a sculptor. Stefan's asked me to put up a pic of a piece he'd like to sell.
This trussed grey/off-white/purple imp could be named Strung Up or Well Hung. (Just how well he's hung can't be seen in the photograph.) Says Stefan:
I made him out of papier-mâché, fabric, glue etc. over a skeleton of re-shaped wire-hangers. The eye is glass, the teeth and claws are PVC putty. He's…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2007The 55th Skeptics' Circle is on-line at The Second Sight. Lots of skeptical writing to "rebalance, realign, detoxify and maintain your skeptical worldview". Also, it will convince you of numerology's validity.
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2007My friend Jesper Jerkert has edited a volume of skeptical essays, most culled from Folkvett, the Swedish skeptic quarterly we both help co-edit. This handsome book is just out from the Stockholm publishing house Leopard, whose head hombre Dan Israel is an officer of Vetenskap och Folkbildning, the Swedish Skeptic Society, just like Jesper and myself. Don't say we're not doing our bit for the Skeptical Conspiracy for World Domination!
The book's 21 contributions cover themes such as humanistic psychology, Freudianism, parapsychology, stage magic, alternative medicine, computer screen rash,…
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2007
Lars Lundqvist promptly answered my call for archaeopix. Here's a recently discovered 1st Millennium BC stone setting on wooded outland belonging to the hamlet of Åby, Misterhult parish, Småland, Sweden.
The stone pavement, which is not scheduled for any excavation, is a grave superstructure, most likely covering scanty pyre remains similar to those found in Gothenburg Nasties. Such structures are very much ho-hum-yawn to disillusioned cynics like Lars and myself, but the man to the left was really happy to see it. Said this merry Gothenburg biologist: De ä ju änna fantasstisskt att sånna…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2007
Sex sells, so here's a pic of my new psychedelic undies. Stuff them in your mouth, Dear Reader, and they will take you on a long, strange trip.