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 | January 7, 2007
The premier Swedish dark fantasy quarterly, Minotauren, where yours truly has been a columnist for the past year, is going into an extended hiatus. A fat triple issue to cover 2006 will be distributed in the near future, and then it's goodbye for a while. Subscribers will be compensated. The triple issue will feature pieces about or by Clark Ashton Smith, Leigh Brackett, Arthur Machen and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, among others.
[More blog entries about horror, fantasy, books; skräck, fantasy, böcker.]
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2007
Linnea, one of the Salto sobrius regulars, asked two questions today on the Swedish archaeology mailing list that would be in my archaeology FAQ if I had one.
Who owns an archaeological find made by a member of the public?Is it legal to sell archaeological finds?
Here's how things work in Sweden, which to my knowledge has the world's strongest legal protection for sites and finds.
The first thing to note is that all sites known to the National Heritage Board are protected. This protection isn't tiered like in England: to explain to you Brits, let's say that a Swedish site automatically…
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2007
My wife just hit me with some pretty heavy surrealism, suddenly handing me a foot-long yellow can of spicy Turkish chicken sausage.
Her mother is visiting with us. The other day, this lady had an appointment with her acupuncturist (no, of course I don't, don't blame me). And apart from the treatment, she was given sausage. Dawkins knows what she's expected to do with it.
It's made in Haderslev, Denmark from halal chicken meat. I think I'm gonna eat it.
aardvarchaeology | January 6, 2007
"With a bit of luck, random sequences of letters and figures may form intelligible words and phrases. The most well-known formulation of this fact is the image of the monkeys and typewriters: if you let monkeys hammer for ever on typewriters, then they will eventually write every possible sequence of the typewriters' characters, including every book that has ever been, or will ever be, written. Let us disregard the risk that the monkeys may tire before they have typed for ever; also, let us leave questions of typewriter wear, paper supply and banana prices out of consideration."
In 1999 I…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2007
The winter issue of Fornvännen (2006:5) came from the printers yesterday. Some of the boxes were all wet after some talented individual had put them in a puddle, but most were fine. Here's the contents.
Andreas Nordberg and Roger Wikell of Stockholm present observations from unexcavated 1st Millennium AD cemeteries south of Stockholm, indicating that there may be Migration Period chamber graves there. This challenges the prevailing impression that such graves for some reason avoid Södermanland, the province south of Lake Mälaren.
Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, who recently got her PhD in…
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2007Dear Reader, the new blog has received its first Google hit, less than a week after coming on-line. And what did this web surfer search for? Bikinis? Big Danish bog booty? No: "Aardvarchaeology". It's already a household name.
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2007Grrlscientist is showing this gorgeous picture of a snake that one of her readers sent her. She's actually running sort of a photo publishing service, giving her readers' photography a bit of exposure. I've got to try this myself.
Dear Reader, if you have taken a really good archaeology photograph that you'd like to share with your fellow readers, feel free to email it to me, along with information about the subject and how you'd like it to be credited.
aardvarchaeology | January 4, 2007I usually divide my evenings between the computer and a book, interspersed with the occasional fondle-raid on my wife. Here are a few recommended reads from the past year.
How and Why Lisa's Dad Got to Be Famous. Michael Allen 2006. Charming short novel about the insanity that is reality TV. Reviewed here.
Year's Best SF 11. Ed. Hartwell & Cramer 2006. Excellent science fiction short stories. I particularly liked the contributions by Langford, Gregory, Robson, MacLeod, Rucker, Jarpe, Sterling, McAuley, Chiang, Morton, Reynolds, Haldeman. Reviewed here.
Voices. Ursula K. LeGuin 2006. A…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2007
A rescue excavation at Torreby on the smallish Danish island of Lolland has turned up two wealthy inhumations of the 1st century AD. One is an adult female with silver and gold objects including a finger ring, two S-shaped bead-string hooks, a pear-shaped filigree pendant and a "beaker", as well as a large set of beads. The other is a boy of about 10 with spurs on his feet, a sign of hereditary status. Early Roman Period Lolland is known for the Hoby burial with two exquisite Mediterranean silver drinking cups sporting Homeric motifs in high relief.
I don't know much yet, but here's some…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2007
The first type of megalithic tomb occuring in Scandinavia is the dolmen, a table-like structure built of huge stone slabs and covered with a barrow. They were built in the Early Neolithic, c. 3600-3300 cal BC, and then re-used for centuries afterwards as other megalithic tomb types came and went. Just the other day, the indefatigable Klaus Ebbesen published a hefty catalogue of 404 particularly well-preserved Danish dolmens and the finds made in them, lavishly illustrated with 19th century watercolours. Out of almost 400 pages, only about 50 are text, the rest being glorious data.
"Dolmen"…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2007
Dear Reader, let me tell you about my on-going research.
Written history begins late in Scandinavia. The 1st Millennium AD is an almost entirely prehistoric period here. Still, Scandinavian archaeologists have long had a pretty good general idea about late 1st Millennium political geography. The most affluent and powerful regions show up e.g. in hoard finds and expensively furnished graves. The distribution of Romanesque stone churches from the 11th and 12th centuries appears to correspond closely with the political heartlands of the preceding centuries, and with where there's good arable…
aardvarchaeology | January 1, 2007
Back in September, R.U. Sirius's podcast turned me on to an intriguing new book. It's named The Visionary State, a big, thick and pretty coffee-table book, with text by Erik Davis and countless jaw-droppingly beautiful photographs by Michael Rauner.
Formally speaking, the book is a piece of topographical history, treating of California from the time of the first Catholic missions in the late 18th century until the last couple of years. Places are visited, described and depicted, stories and anecdotes are heaped one upon another, the names of countless people and organisations form a blur.…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2006I miss the porn surfers. Around my old blog, you could always faintly hear the sound of one hand typing. But these hairy-palmed people haven't made the jump to ScienceBlogs yet.
I could write a serious entry about how Muslim veils are analogous to bikini tops, and they would come running in hoards. "The B word! Someone's used the B word!" Or the times when I wrote about Iron Age war booty sacrifices in bogs, and the hit counter would go crazy. In the heat of the moment, it's easy to mistype "big booty" and get "bog booty".
Currently, Aardvarchaeology isn't generating any Google hits at all. I…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2006
As a Christmas present for my eight-year-old son, I bought a miniature hammerworks and had the rubber gaskets (Sw. packningar) on my old steam engine replaced. The gaskets dried out years ago, so it's never been possible to get the vapour pressure up in it. To my knowledge, Samuel had never seen a steam engine run before Christmas Eve.
That morning, we gave the kids their presents, and Samuel didn't really understand what the hammerworks was for. "Errr... Thanks Dad, this looks really... fun..." So I told him we actually had a functioning steam engine too, and then the present got a lot…
aardvarchaeology | December 30, 2006
Here's my reply to the reader's question about the effects of being harshly criticised by a colleague you respect.
I was a highly independent grad student. Some might say obstinate and unruly. This was due to a combination of my personality, my tender age and the science wars of the 1990s. I came to the university of Stockholm as a science major right about the time that Northern European archaeology fell into its belated infatuation with post-modernism and went badly anti-scientific for a while. At age eighteen, after fifty pages of Ian Hodder's turgid Reading the Past, I decided I would…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2006Jeez, so much to learn, so many tweaks to do at the new site!
I've turned off comment authentication since people were having trouble with TypeKey. Comment away!
The RSS feed isn't publicised yet, but it works: http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/index.xml (Thanks, Johan Jönsson!).
I'll be posting in Eastern Standard Time, not because I've suddenly relocated across the Atlantic, but because most of the other Sciencebloggers become unfairly underexposed if people east of the US start blogging here on their local time in what passes for the small hours in that great country.
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2006Back before Christmas, as I was waiting for Scienceblogs to open its doors for me, I checked out the people already inside. Specifically, I wanted to know what sort of scientific backgrounds they had, and what their Technorati rankings were. How would I fit in? Was I a minor player?
In mid December, there were 51 blogs and one metablog on Scienceblogs. None of the bloggers had a main background in the humanities, unless perhaps we count creative writing for the science journalists. The most common scientific leaning by far was various flavours of biology (18 blogs), followed by neuroscience,…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2006
Here's one for Peezee.
Like many Chinese Swedes, my mother-in-law hails from Qingtian in Zhejiang province. Though located in a rich coastal province, Qingtian is a pretty poor place, high up in the hills, with little arable land. Marginal farmers are susceptible to wanderlust, and so Qingtian's sons and daughters have travelled far, taking their rustic dialect and cuisine with them. (Speaking Qingtianese seems to be easy: take Hangzhounese and substitute "öööh" for all vowels.) According to Wikipedia, Qingtian is the single Chinese community of whose population the largest percentage has…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2006
Dear Reader, I'm really thrilled to be on Scienceblogs! You see, I'm the first second or third scholar from the Arts wing that Seed's let in here. Archaeology was long seen as an adjunct to historical research, which is why it's classed as a humanistic discipline and not a social science. We reconstruct societies lost in the mists of time. But our source material is concrete and hands-on: no parchment codices, no taped interviews or questionnaires. Historians dig through archives. Archaeologists dig stuff out of the ground and try to make sense of it. And we can only do that with the aid of…