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 | February 25, 2007Dear Reader, I like to publish good archaeological pix. If you have taken a really good photograph, drawn a find or done a nice plan or section that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, then feel free to email it to me, along with information about the subject and how you'd like it to be credited.
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007Dear Reader, you no doubt have a skewed and seasick perspective on Stockholm, Sweden, from too much of my blogging. What you need is a blog written from Stockholm by a humorous, skeptical Irishman.
This genre is of course quite the jungle, with more blogs than anyone can reasonably attempt to evaluate. But take it from me: the one you want to read is Paddy K's Swedish Extravaganza. Another really good blogger who just needs to learn to illustrate and market his writing.
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007Should the future Constitution of the European Union make reference to Christian values? The Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel among others thinks so. Or should it be founded on secular liberal principles? I among others think so.
To that end, I have just signed the Brussels Declaration on-line.
We, the people of Europe, hereby affirm our common values. They are based not on a single culture or tradition but are founded in all of the cultures that make up modern Europe.
We affirm the worth, dignity and autonomy of every individual, and the right of everyone to the greatest possible freedom…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2007In its formative late-19th century decades, Swedish archaeology had three journals with a nationwide scope (sometimes also covering Norway with which Sweden shared a king at the time). All three were published in Stockholm by the same small group of people: the Royal Academy of Letters had the academic Antiqvarisk Tidskrift för Sverige (1864-1924) and the more pop-sci-orientated Vitterhetsakademiens Månadsblad (1872-1907), and the Swedish Antiquarian Society had Svenska Fornminnesföreningens Tidskrift (1871-1905).
The two latter merged in 1906 and took the name Fornvännen. This journal is…
aardvarchaeology | February 24, 2007
I know that many readers of this blog are yearning to read a >900-page bok in German about the enigmatic inscriptions on Migration Period gold bracteates. Fret no more, Dear Reader! Svante Fischer just sent me a link to a 7.4 megabyte PDF file containing such a work: Sean Nowak's 2003 doctoral thesis Schrift auf den Goldbrakteaten der Völkerwanderungszeit, published by the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany. Alu, lathu, laukaR!
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2007I would recommend Jason Fox's blog simply for the weight of its name: Hominin Dental Anthropology. That is so heavy metal. But it's also tagged "atheism, Teeth, Anthropology, bones, Paleoanthropology, dentition, bioarchaeology, osteology, paleopathology" on Technorati. And it's a readable mix of these subjects along with linguistics and more whimsical and personal pieces. So check him out and comment away! The only things Jason seems not to have learned yet is to use pics and to market his blog. Jason, I want to see your skinny ass on the next Four Stone Hearth. And I want you to host one…
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2007
The Great Old Ones are stirring in their sleep beneath Guatemala City.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala (AP) -- A giant sinkhole opened before dawn Friday, swallowing several homes and a truck and leaving a father and two teenagers missing in Guatemala City. [...]
The pit was emitting foul odors, loud noises and tremors, and a rush of water could be heard from its depths. Authorities feared it could widen or others could open up.
Security officials were on guard for possible looters and to clear the area of onlookers.
Can the stars be right already?
Link.
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2007The Department of Archaeology at the University of Gothenburg recently published a nice little book written in Swedish by the seasoned contract archaeologist Marianne Lönn: Uppdragsarkeologi och forskning, "contract archaeology and research". Lönn's main theses are:
Archaeologists look at old things to find out what it was like to live a long time ago.
Contract archaeology is research.
This research has its own agenda and needn't pay any attention to what university scholars are doing unless their work is clearly relevant to contract archaeology.
Contract archaeologists should be proud of…
aardvarchaeology | February 21, 2007
As detailed before (here and here) I did a trial dig with friends in an undated great barrow near Sjögestad church in Östergötland last September. We secured samples that allowed radiocarbon dating to the Early Viking Period (9th century) and the identification of several plant species in small hearths that had been lit on the barrow as it was being erected.
I filed the excavation report the other day, and it is now available on-line in Swedish for all to read. Check it out! If anything's hard to understand, don't be afraid to ask.
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, vikings,…
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2007
The great Birger Nerman used to say that the best archaeological finds are made in museum stores. Here's an example.
I just got home from two days at the County Museum in Linköping, where I've pursued my studies of late 1st Millennium central places. Helped by Marie Ohlsén and my other friendly colleagues there, I've checked out their collections of archaeological metalwork and their excavation report archives. Today they fed me semla (a big wheat bun with whipped cream and marzipan) not once, but twice -- that's how friendly they are. (Many thanks for having me, guys!)
Above are pictures of…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2007
Last night my wife and I celebrated the Chinese New Year with friends. First we had an Asian buffet and a few hours of raucous karaoke, then we went to the Hootchy Kootchy Club (their spelling, not mine...).
The HK Club is a recurring cabaret and party in central Stockholm. The theme is nebulously defined as "burlesque", which in practice translated into a dominance of beautiful young femme dykes in immaculate 30s to 50s outfits. But the clientele was mixed as to age and orientation: the only notably under-represented demographic was young hetero guys. I for one didn't miss them: it meant…
aardvarchaeology | February 17, 2007
My 8-year old son is, like myself at that age, a big Star Wars fan. But his road to the stories has been more complicated than mine. Much of what he knows about them comes from a computer game version where everything is for some reason visualised as built out of legos. So he asks me a lot of confused questions that I can't always answer.
Just now we had such a conversation where I learned that he had gotten all three main female characters mixed up: Luke Skywalker's grandma, mother and sister were the same person to him. When I teased him about this he just replied, philosophically, "It's…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2007A few days of vigorous debate here has changed my views on the energy production and environment issue. I now believe we should do the following to improve our slim chances of saving civilisation and the environment.
Downscale our energy use dramatically.
Dam all suitable watercourses on Earth for hydroelectric power. (Screw scenic beauty.)
Replace fossil fuel power plants and lo-tech nuclear power plants with hi-tech nuke plants in affluent democracies, which must for safety's sake sell electricity cheaply to less fortunate countries. The nuke plants should preferrably be in areas with well…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2007
A few words about the Spanish fantasy film Pan's Labyrinth.
It's extremely pretty, well made and finely acted.
It's very violent, enough to gross me out, and unsuitable for anyone under the age of 20.
The plot is driven entirely by the pointless cruelty of a psychopath. Pan's Labyrinth is thus a story of pointless suffering and cruelty, which is a genre I loathe. That's what the real world is like, I don't need that in fiction as well.
Oh, and the title's mistranslated. It's actually El Laberinto del Fauno, "The Faun's Labyrinth".
[More blog entries about film, movies, panslabyrinth; film,…
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2007
It's high time for a first History Carnival here at ScienceBlogs.
Science is the systematic study of source material to find out what the world is like or has been like. If a scientist's source material is written matter and pictures and her questions are about what people's lives were like in the past, then she is a historian.
I'm an archaeologist, meaning that my questions are similar to a historian's though my source material is the wordless material culture of the past. I'll be your host for the 48th History Carnival -- welcome to Aardvarchaeology!
Natalie of Philobiblon heads straight…
aardvarchaeology | February 15, 2007The 54th Skeptics' Circle blog carnival is up at Action Skeptics. Akusai has put some serious work into it this time, weaving a hard-boiled tale of Jack Bixby, Skeptical Investigator around the submissions. Is that a gun in your pocket, Akusai, or should I be skeptical?
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2007I'm an archaeologist and I see things in the long perspective. Let me offer you a suggestion.
The CO2, greenhouse effect, climate issue is no cause for concern compared to the issue of radioactive waste.
I mean, long after our manipulation of the atmosphere's composition and the sea levels has stopped, the waste from our reactors will be an absolutely lethal threat to ecology.
People 40 000 years from now won't give a damn about our CO2 emissions. But our subterranean caches of radioactive waste will still be a huge problem. And I believe that we have a pretty heavy responsibility to them.…
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2007My buddy Niklas Ytterberg recently sent me an impressive excavation report in Swedish. Constrained by the field-archaeological paradox, he dug a really nondescript Neolithic settlement site at Djurstugan near Tierp, Uppland in 2003. Then he somehow found funding to subject the measly finds to a battery of innovative scientific analyses, extracting loads of interesting information.
For one thing, Niklas got the province's earliest ever radiocarbon dates for grain: 2400-2200 cal BC (barley) and 2470-2340 cal BC (wheat). The Funnel Beaker ("TRB") culture, known for its farming, arrives in…
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2007
Norwegian medical doctor Ståle Fredriksen offers a refreshing perspective on healthy living. In his opinion, our thinking about illness is still largely ruled by old superstitions where what happens to a person is somehow just what he or she deserves. If the neighbour has a heart attack, we will semi-unconsciously think that he should have taken more exercise, eaten less fatty foods and smoked less. All these things might have saved him. But Dr Fredriksen's point is that for each person who lives in a certain way and has a heart attack, there are hundreds who live in exactly the same way, or…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2007
How about paying to participate in a Roman Period dig in Bulgaria this summer? I've been asked to help promote the Bulgarian Archaeological Association's 2007 Field School.
This really takes me back. I paid for food and board on my first dig, on Tel Hazor in the Galilee, in 1990. I was an 18-year-old grunt and shifted a lot of topsoil. That autumn I enrolled at the University of Stockholm to study Scandinavian archaeology, and look at me now.