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 13, 2007Just a brief note to tell you that Sweden's a decent place to live apart from the paucity of daylight in the winters. I suggest that everybody move here.
I knew before that Sweden's the world's strongest democracy according to The Economist, that it has among the highest standards of living in the world, that it's one of the safest and least repressive countries in the world for females, that it hasn't fought a war in two centuries, and that its taxes and liquor prices are extremely high.
I just learned that in addition to all this, Sweden's population is also the most tolerant one in the…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2007The Sage of Brooklyn, Jim Benton, returns with a guest entry after months of blogging silence. This piece originally appeared as a two-part comment on Debunking Christianity.
I am both an agnostic and an atheist. You see, I make a distinction between a 'deistic God' (i.e, a 'Creator') and a 'theistic God' (i.e., one which has in some way interacted with humanity, who has communicated with us.) As for a deistic God, there are three main possibilities:
The Universe is self-existent.
The Universe was created by someone who is himself self-existent.
The 'demiurge' hypothesis: the Universe was…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2007Repatriation and reburial are large concerns these days for museums with a colonial past. Human remains looted from Aboriginal Australian cemeteries were for instance recently repatriated from a Swedish museum. But not only indigenous peoples in the usual sense of the word are making demands. The Guardian reports that British neo-Pagans are increasingly starting to demand reburial of prehistoric human remains. These adherents of newly constructed paganesque belief systems claim a special affinity with, and thus right to, the remains of selected ancestors.
I don't think neo-paganism is any…
aardvarchaeology | February 12, 2007Saw three art exhibitions Sunday with the ladies of my family.
The Culture House, Kulturhuset, in central Stockholm shows US photographer Sally Mann's work, mainly selected from three collections: 1980s pictures of her kids (very controversial in the US back then because of child nudity, an issue few Swedes are able to get worked up about), 1990s landscapes from the southern US, and huge recent portraits of her grown-up kids where any documentary ambition is completely abandoned for out-of-focus fogginess. Absolutely wonderful stuff, and no photoshoppery, only analog chemical photography,…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2007
Readers of my blogging over the past 14 months will have come across many references to, and tidbits from, the work with the archive report for 2005's Viking Period boat grave excavation at Skamby in Östergötland. Howard Williams and myself directed the excavations of the first boat inhumation in that county and the third Pre-Roman Iron Age bronze casting site identified in all of Scandinavia.
I am very happy to announce that the report is now complete, on-line and available for free in English with lots of pics! Get it here, tell me what you think, ask me if anything is hard to understand.…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2007The incomparable net-head archaeologist Ulf Bodin directs the highly successful work to put the collections of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm (Statens Historiska Museum) on-line. Off and on over the past year, I've worked through the scanned catalogues of two centuries, searching for source material relevant to my work with Late 1st Millennium elite manors in Östergötland. To do this, I only needed to visit the museum once, looking in the flesh at some early acquisitions that weren't described well in the catalogue. So I could have done almost all of the work from anywhere in…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2007A new Swedish study on rats suggests that there is a physiological reality behind the idea that relatively innocuous cannabis may act like a gateway drug, leading on to heavier drugs.
Soon-to-be-graduating doctoral candidate Maria Ellgren of Karolinska Institutitet has documented a significantly greater interest in self-administered heroin among adult rats that were dosed with cannabis in the womb or during adolescence. Their brains exhibited changes in parts linked to pleasure and rewards. However, they were not more interested than non-stoner rats in central stimulants such as amphetamine.…
aardvarchaeology | February 9, 2007
The other day, I collected the larger finds from 2005's boat grave excavations at the conservator's studio. Among them are 23 amber gaming pieces, of which I have now taken nice photographs. The pieces' median dimensions are about 35 by 24 mm.
If it weren't for these gaming pieces, the boat grave dig myself and Howard Williams directed at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, would have been quite a disappointment for me. The other grave furnishings were few and understated, consisting mainly of a symbolic (indeed, incomplete) set of horse and driving gear. But these gaming pieces are…
aardvarchaeology | February 8, 2007
Robert Schneider, one of my favourite neopsychedelic musicians, has a new album out, this time with his main band again, The Apples in Stereo. His previous album Expo was issued in 2005 with The Marbles and is an excellent synth-driven yet lo-fi effort. Before that he did two non-psych albums in 2005 (with Ulysses) and 2002 (with the Apples) which didn't do much for me, so the last time the Apples released anything good was in 2000 with the radiant Discovery of a World Inside the Moone.
The new disc, New Magnetic Wonder, consists of no less than 24 songs recorded from late 2005 to late 2006…
aardvarchaeology | February 7, 2007
A buddy of mine sent me a reminder today of why I am happy to not be a contract archaeologist. It's twelve below zero centigrade around here, and still a number of unfortunate Linköping colleagues are out digging. And they're not digging Tut-ankh-amen's tomb today either: apparently they've been assigned the task of excavating and documenting an ancient ploughsoil. Yes, an expanse of clayey soil churned by the ard or plough a long, long time ago. Poor bastards!
See those fuzzy blotches in the pic? They're snowflakes.
Update 8 February: Says my Linköping colleague Katarina Österström:
"The…
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2007
In recent years I've been involved in some archaeological fieldwork at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, Sweden. I like to get a handle on the names of places where I work, what they mean, how they used to be pronounced in the Middle Ages. I was particularly interested in learning about Skamby, because read in modern Swedish, this very uncommon name means "Shame Village".
There are two explanations for the name: a less entertaining one supported by linguistic scholarship, and a funny folk-etymology of recent centuries. I'll give you the scholarly interpretation first.
Names ending in "-…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2007Here's a must-read for anyone interested in the integrity of science, in the face both of post-modern hyperrelativism and of politically motivated distortion. It's a succinct op-ed in the L.A. Times co-written by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, and Alan Sokal, the man who killed pretentious post-modernism with his 1996 hoax paper "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Say Mooney & Sokal:
"... we propose a combination of political activism and institutional reform. Congress needs to establish safeguards to protect…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2007Many people who excel at something do so by concentrating on a few tightly defined areas of interest. A colleague of mine once explained to me that she has a narrow-gauge mind (Sw. smalspårig). I like that expression a lot: this woman hasn't got a one-track mind (Sw. enkelspårig), nor a narrow mind, it's just narrow gauge. In her case, it seems that the tracks of her mind lead either to Iron Age small finds or to reading mystery novels.
Another colleague once conversed with me for the first time when I was between marriages and pretty one-tracked on the subject of women. This friendly…
aardvarchaeology | February 4, 2007I love my kids and a lot of that affection spills over on their friends as well. But I'm not the kind of dad who finds children's games very entertaining. I rarely even pretend to enjoy them. In my opinion, the best baby sitter is another child of about the same age.
So I'm not the kids' play mate, I'm their support staff. Since my son reached the age when he no longer saw other kids as a kind of unusually loud and mucuous furniture, he has had a lot of visitors in the weekends. At about half past nine on a weekend morning, I reckon other families with kids will be awake, and I tell him to…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2007
Dear Cultists, welcome to the Temple of Godlessness that is Aardvarchaeology. I will be your High Priest this evening, introducing the latest and greatest blog writing on the subject of Above Us Only Sky. Sisters and brothers, let us pray.
Austin Atheist sets the spotlight on an atheistic writer in an Austin newspaper who, having recovered from religion, found that "nonreligious life is rich with morality". Not to mention rich with hedonistic pleasures, one might add.
Shalini at Scientia Natura refutes the arguments of a Mr Kook regarding whether the Bible is scientifically accurate.
Jake…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2007
For about a week, the relentless riff from ZZ Top's 1973 hit song "La Grange" has been playing in my head. Such a great, great song, not least the powerful and exact drumming. And the vocals are really funny, with the singer sounding like a right old lecher.
So I got the album, Tres Hombres, and read up a little on ZZ Top. Like the Stones, they're the kind of great band you never think to get any records from, because they're all over rock radio anyway.
I was kind of stunned to find that the trio's members were 23, 24 and 24 in 1973. They must have looked pretty incongruous, three fresh-…
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2007With mounting frustration, I'm watching an attempt to secure adequate health care for an elderly relative turn into something that looks a lot like a failed foreign aid project.
My friend's grandpa lives in the old country, let's say Malaysia. The heptagenarian is getting doddery and forgetful, so the family brought him to Sweden for a month of medical checkup at a pretty stiff cost in air tickets, hospital bills and inconvenience for all involved. The Swedish doctors put him through an array of tests, some of them quite expensive, one involving the procurement of short-lived radioactive…
aardvarchaeology | February 2, 2007
Sun Spurge
My friend Dr Jens Heimdahl is a Renaissance man. He's a quaternary geologist, an urban archaeologist, a palaeobotanist, a talented painter and a writer of essays on weird literature. He's co-translated Lovecraft's novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath into Swedish and illustrated it.
Jens recently studied the plant macrofossils me, Howard and Libby got out of a barrow in Sjögestad parish we test-trenched back in September. According to radiocarbon, the barrow was most likely built in the late 8th or the 9th century AD, that is, the Early Viking Period. With a diameter of 35 m…
aardvarchaeology | February 1, 2007
One thing I've never fought about with my ex-wife nor my wife is money. This is no mean feat asBoth ladies are somewhat Bohemian souls with a taste for fine shoes and ladies' fashion.
I have never made much money myself.
I have a child with each of them.
The secret, apart from the basic requirement of marrying only sensible people with an adequate income, is to keep each person's income and expenses separate. This may sound profoundly un-romantic and anti-family, but believe me, it's a lot more romantic and family-like than the ugly fights that invariably result when one spouse uses the…
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2007
The excellent Markus Andersson has made a cemetery map out of the field measurements me and Howard Williams and our collaborators took at Skamby in Kuddby parish the summer before last. This is the prettiest of Östergötland's three boat inhumation cemeteries. We excavated grave 15, as I have blogged about repeatedly, and found it to contain a burial of the 9th century with unusual furnishings.
Now that the plan is done, all that remains is snapping pics of the finds post-conservation, and then I can stick all the report materials into one big PDF file for the delectation of the world's boat…