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 | September 5, 2014The English language has a rich tradition of songs celebrating the joys of orgasm. Here are just a few examples.
Sumer Is Icumen In (anon., 13th century)
Come Again (John Dowland, 1597)
Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus (Charles Wesley, 1745)
Come, Thou Fount Of Every Blessing (Robert Robinson, 1757)
Come, Ye Disconsolate (Thomas Moore, 1816)
Oh Come, All Ye Faithful (English lyrics Frederick Oakley, 1841)
Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel (English lyrics Neale & Coffin mid-1800s)
Someday My Prince Will Come (from the 1937 animated Disney feature Snow White)
Come Dance With Me (sung by Frank…
aardvarchaeology | September 3, 2014Here's a neat case of self-perpetuating archaeology. Medieval history spawned sword & sorcery literature. This literature spawned tabletop fantasy role-playing games and Medieval re-enactment groups. These games and groups spawned live action role playing. And now the larpers have created a market for faux-Medieval coinage, which they are buying at game stores, using at larps and dropping here and there. Metal detectorists are starting to find coins like the one in the picture and submitting them to intrigued museum curators.
Can anybody tell me the name of the company that makes/made…
aardvarchaeology | September 2, 2014I've read Marilyn Johnson's forthcoming book Lives in Ruins. Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble. It's a collection of lively and enthusiastic portraits of contemporary archaeologists in their professional environment. Some may find the tone a bit too enthusiastic, pantingly so in parts, but that's a matter of taste. Archaeologists should arguably be thankful to have a friend like Marilyn Johnson.
Still, she's an outside observer of our tribe, and she approaches us from a very particular direction. Take her introductory statement that “Field school … usually takes place in a…
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2014
14 August marked 200 years of unbroken peace for Sweden. Eight generations. Most of us don't even remember the name of the latest ancestor of ours who survived a war.
Other people get moments of déjà vu. I get moments of dissociation, when Martin Rundkvist seems not to be me.
Neat serendipitous combination of podcasts. I listened to Norm Sherman's excellent reading of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out Of Space" on the Drabblecast. It's about a family killed slowly and horrifically by emanations from a meteorite that hits the ground near their farm. Then Planetary Radio came on with the words "The…
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2014Mushroom picking again this morning, this time in the area between Lakelets Skinnmossen and Knipträsket. Found more velvet and birch boletes than we cared to pick.
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Orange birch bolete, Tegelsopp, Leccinum versepelle
Velvet bolete, Sandsopp, Suillus variegatus
Chanterelle, Kantarell, Cantharellus cibarius
Gypsy mushroom, Rynkad tofsskivling, Rozites caperata
False saffron milkcap, Blodriska, Lactarius deterrimus
Oh how annoying that the image gallery function is so bug-ridden.
aardvarchaeology | August 28, 2014The library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters is (one of?) Scandinavia's biggest research library (ies) for archaeology, the history of art and allied disciplines. Since it's co-located with the archives of the National Heritage Board in the East Stable next to the Swedish History Museum, it's an amazing place to do research. And it just got even better.
Librarian Annika Eriksson tells me they have been working on this for quite some time, and now they've got it up and running. The library's assortment of commercial digital resources – notably hundreds of paywalled research journals –…
aardvarchaeology | August 23, 2014It's the time of the year when it used to become legal to catch and sell Swedish crayfish (since 1994 there is no limit), and so the grocery stores sell Turkish and Chinese crayfish for a few weeks. The traditional way to eat them is to boil them with dill, salt and a little sugar, and serve them with toast, strong cheese, beer and akvavit. I don't drink but I love shellfish, so crayfish time is always a treat for me. My wife, being refreshingly unorthodox about traditional Swedish customs, and indeed about all traditional customs thanks to a Maoist childhood, served crayfish with smoked…
aardvarchaeology | August 22, 2014Has it really been almost four years since I blogged about mushrooms? This afternoon me and my wife repeated our September 8, 2010 expedition to the hills between Lakes Lundsjön and Trehörningen and picked almost a kilo of mushrooms in a bit more than an hour. We got:
King bolete, Stensopp/Karl Johan, Boletus edulis
Bay bolete, Brunsopp, Boletus badius
Orange birch bolete, Tegelsopp, Leccinum versepelle
Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum
Entire russula, Mandelkremla, Russula integra
Two kinds of red or brown brittlegill, mild-tasting and thus non-poisonous. Scandyland has more than…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2014
Another good Swedish word: försoffad, literally "becouched", of people who have grown lazy and passive.
Do the Syndics of Cambridge syn with their dics?
I've started writing an essay collection based on the routines I've developed for party conversations about archaeology with laypeople.
It sometimes makes me nervous to see all the things we design to work only as long as gravity is switched on. Teacups. Doors. Cars. Trains. They're all pretty shoddy engineering.
I woke once in my teens from a tremendous crash and just had the time to see sparks showering from the wall socket next to my desk…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2014I've been reading a 1974 edition of Sigfrid Steinberg's 1955 classic Five Hundred Years Of Printing. Overall I've found it interesting and instructive, with a fine touch of sarcastic humour. But I came across a few paragraphs on the value of universal literacy that are so alien to me that I almost had to rub my eyes.
Compulsory and free education on the elementary-school level was achieved, at least on paper, in most civilized countries in the course of the nineteenth century … At the same time … there is the basic question of the purpose of educating the masses. What use is the knowledge of…
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2014
I wonder how many head shops worldwide are called The Joint Venture.
When friends of my kids cycle to our house, they always leave with their saddles yanked up a good bit. Because apparently other parents don't notice when the kids grow too tall for their bike saddle setting.
Finally figured out how the fuck I can accordion sheets while sleeping. I sweat a lot. The sheet gets glued to me. When I turn over, I'm like a big roller moving the sheet to one side and bunching it up next to me. After rolling over I often end up on top of the damp warm wad of layered fabric, steam ironing it with my…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2014Deep in a single square metre of trench D at Landsjö castle, on the inner edge of the dry moat, we found five identical coins. Boy are they ugly. They're thin, brittle, made of a heavily debased silver alloy and struck only from one side; they bear no legend and the image at the centre is incomprehensible. But I love them anyway, because they offer a tight date: this coin type was struck for King Valdemar Birgersson c. 1250-75. And the first written mention of Landsjö dates from 1280, so it all works out.
Valdemar became king because he had an extremely powerful and ruthless father, the jarl…
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2014 Common Stinkhorn on Landsjö castle islet
This lady in Wyoming sends me a picture of "sacred procreation rocks", one looking like the sideways outline of an erect cock and the other simply with a hole in it. "They were found less than a few thousand feet from each other." In the picture, the cock stone is helpfully pointed at the hole. I wonder if I should send the lady a picture of my procreation stones.
All week we've been met by this nasty stench when landing with the boat on the castle islet. We thought it was a dead fish of which we had found some bits. But yesterday we realised that…
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2014A fun thing about historical archaeology, the archaeological study of areas and periods with abundant indigenous written documentation, is when the archaeology challenges the written record.
According to the patchily preserved historical sources, Landsjö hamlet was a seat of the high nobility in about 1280 but then became tenant farms no later than 1340. This means that the castle on Landsjö islet was probably in good defensible shape and inhabited in 1280 but not after 1340.
During last week's excavations we found a previously unknown strong wall delimiting the castle's high inner bailey,…
aardvarchaeology | July 9, 2014 Christian Loven's plan of Landsjö Islet with letters marking on-going fieldwork.
Landsjö castle is on a high islet in the lake next to the modern manor house. Nobody ever goes there. The ruins are covered by vegetation and they're in bad shape: only along the western side of the islet do they rise even a metre above the rubble and accumulated forest mulch. Visible is a 59-metre N-S stretch of perimeter wall with a preserved corner at either end, and a shorter W-E stretch of perimeter wall from the south-western corner. Along the inside of the visible wall are vague suggestions of two…
aardvarchaeology | July 2, 2014With two days of digging and one day of backfilling left at Stensö Castle, trenches A and B have already given a rich harvest of new information.
The northern tower was a green ruin mound when we came to site. We now know that the tower was built entirely of greystone, it was round with a diameter of about 5.5 m, and it was planned and built together with the perimeter wall. The lost western half of the latter did not join the tower on a radial line. Instead more than half of the tower's circumference was outside of the perimeter wall, allowing flanking, where bowmen in the tower could strafe…
aardvarchaeology | July 1, 2014
WTF! Ugly digital version of the wonderful claymation Shaun the Sheep! Curses!
Top three Women As Sex Robots songs: Rollergirl: Superstar. Teddybears Sthlm: Yours To Keep. Kylie Minogue: Can't Get You Out Of My Head.
In the otherwise excellent boardgame Lords of Waterdeep there's a quest called "Retrieve Ancient Artefacts". Come on, do I really have to deal with work during game night too?
Shampoo is hársápa in Icelandic. Hair soap.
Borley Rectory in Essex has been called the most haunted house in England. I think there is a sound scientific basis for that statement. No house in England is…
aardvarchaeology | June 30, 2014Compare the disc from Stensö to these "fairy stone" calcium carbonate concretions from the Harricana River in the Abitibi-Témiscamingue admin region, Quebec, Canada. The Stensö piece has been sanded smooth and flat on one side. Locally these things are known as marlekor or mallrikor.
Thanks to project advisor Lotta Feldt of the Östergötland County Museum for setting me on the right track.
aardvarchaeology | June 28, 2014 After four days of rubble removal in trench A, we found the south wall of Stensö Castle's northern tower. Note how the wall facing (left) ends, and a pale mass of wall core (lower right) emerges out of the tower. This is the castle's previously unseen western perimeter wall.
Our first week of two at Stensö is over, and already Chris, Fanny and Simon have made trench A answer the question we've asked of it. Way back in line with the trench's top edge on the flank of the northern tower's ruin mound, they've uncovered a neat wall face of dressed ashlar, and out of this tower wall projects an…
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2014Medieval walls are usually shell walls, where you construct an inner and outer shell of finely fitted masonry while filling the space between them with a jumble of smaller stones and mortar. Usually the facing stones don't project much into the core. When the wall is allowed to erode, once the cap stones have fallen off, the facing starts to peel from the core one ashlar or brick at a time from the top down. Before the resulting rubble layer's top (rising) reaches the level of the wall's eroding top (descending), halting erosion, you'll see a ruinous wall that is thick and smooth-faced in its…