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 | April 3, 2017 I like this illustration. Note the spirals in the woman's hair, repeated in the clouds. Also the hint of post-nookie intimacy suggested by this being *breakfast* tea.
Been helping Jrette study French for a test. Love making up absurd sentences for her to translate. "On my right is Charlemagne. He is wearing Father's pink beret. If you take Father's beret he will not be very nice. But Charlemagne gets to borrow it."
Finally got it. The name of the crowdfunding site IndieGogo references indigo.
Listening to Tubular Bells. Can't get over that Oldfield was 19 when he recorded it.
Updated…
aardvarchaeology | March 24, 201714 months of no teaching gigs and several bad professional disappointments have brought me down a bit. So I checked my calendar for things to look forward to in the coming months.
April. War games exhibition at the Army Museum. Katana sword exhibition at the Royal Armoury. Fieldwork at a promising site in Östergötland.
May. LinCon gaming convention in Linköping. Kontur / SweCon scifi convention in Uppsala.
June. Mountain hiking in Abisko.
July. Summer.
August. WorldCon scifi convention in Helsinki. Castle conference in Koblenz.
Dear Reader, what are you looking forward to?
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2017 In the foreground, a characteristic Swedish archaeological site of the 20th century: the abandoned municipal ski slope. Its construction, use and abandonment all post-date the still-in-use 1913 building in the background.
"Qualitative research" seems largely to mean "anecdotal material with no statistical representativity".
I'm starting a support group for people who think the novel American Gods is not great, not bad, not particularly memorable.
Woah-ho, dude. Lucid dreaming is when you train yourself to a) know that you're dreaming, b) direct events in the dream. This researcher has…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2017
A great thing about a cross-country skiing holiday is that you don't feel any obligation to make good use of the ski-lift money you've paid. Because you haven't.
Gene drives. Amazing, potentially scary piece of science news. Insert code to actively edit the next generation's genome into the current genome.
In order to comment on an article on Norwegian Broadcasting's web site, you first have to pass a test proving your comprehension of its contents.
Been listening to this excellent country tune, pondering the lyrics. The guy is hitch-hiking, standing at the roadside, praying to God that a…
aardvarchaeology | March 11, 2017Inspired by Karin Bojs's and Peter Sjölund's recent book Svenskarna och deras fäder, I've looked into my ancestry by means both genetic and genealogical. Here's a few highlights.
Like most Stockholmers, I'm of mixed rural Swedish stock. My great grandpa's generation contains 16 people born mainly in the 1880s. Only one of them was born in Stockholm. His parents were born in Värmland and Södermanland provinces. The other 15 were born all over rural southern Sweden: Bohuslän (two people), Småland (two people), Södermanland, Skåne and Närke. They went to Stockholm to find work, met and got…
aardvarchaeology | March 1, 2017
Couldn't quite catch a word in an old Blur song. Turned out to be "jumbojet" with the stress placed on the wrong syllable. JumBOjet. Grötrimslyriker, as we say in Swedish.
The Swedish Anti-Theft Association offers tags for keyrings. You put the tag on your keyring and pay an annual fee, and then if someone finds your keyring they can just drop it in a mailbox and the SATA will send it to you. But I've been wondering what happens if you don't pay the fee. So I asked. Turns out that the SATA periodically deletes the addresses of those who don't pay the fee. If they receive a keyring that…
aardvarchaeology | February 21, 2017
Nalin Pekgul: "Us Muslim immigrants used to invite Jehovah's Witnesses to practise our Swedish".
Movie: Sweden, Heaven and Hell. Hilariously over the top Italian exploitation mockumentary about late-60s Sweden that manages to tell volumes about Italy instead. Narration similar to the closing voice-over in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Relentless blonde breast flaunting throughout. Grade: Recommended.
Movie: The Danish Girl. Transgender journey in 1920s Copenhagen and Paris. Main character's self-absorption and sudden unwillingness to doink A. Vikander get kind of old. Grade: OK.
Imagine…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2017Aard regular Phil often expresses worry about the effects of immigration. This has reached the point where I've decided to collect a few points to explain why I am not worried. Phil recently even claimed that when I say I'm not worried, I create more support for anti-immigration movements. This makes no sense to me. I know a lot of fear-and-hate voters are poorly educated, but I don't think they're all stupid.
So here's why I don't worry about immigration.
I have lived for 21 years (and counting) on a multicultural 1970s housing estate and seen very few problems.
My first wife was a second-…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2017A buddy & colleague of mine took this picture in an Eslöv pizza place, commenting drily that it's a fine example of how the cultural heritage can be used. We've got Thor's hammer, we've got two cartoon Vikings, we've got Swedish flags, and note the three yellow crowns on a blue background: the arms of the Kingdom of Sweden, a strong nationalist statement.
Rural Eslöv municipality is one of the anti-immigration Swedish Hate Party's strongholds, with 22% of the vote in the last election. Vikings and Scandinavian Paganism are of course much beloved by the extreme Right, and stylewise the…
aardvarchaeology | February 10, 2017 Veneer inlay, Ewald Dahlskog, Stockholm's China Theatre.
Me and Cecilia von Heijne have just submitted our paper on the coins from Skällvik Castle to a numismatic journal. Yay!
Current Swedish Archaeology has just published my enthusiastic review of Cecilia Ljung's doctoral thesis on 11th century burial monuments. Well done, Doctor!
Danish is such a badass language. It's got words like skaktavlkvadre -- note the VLKV sequence there -- and then you just pronounce everything like you're extremely drunk.
I demand that everyone in Sweden pronounce "Skälboö" as if it were an English word:…
aardvarchaeology | February 3, 2017
Stockholm municipality's high school authority is running an ad on Fb saying "Do not enrol your kid in the science programme. Consider vocational programmes instead. Like the cook programme." Wtf?!
Ads for wristwatches. Guys, I have a mobile phone, OK?
I'm going to assume for the next few years that most Americans are basically like Ursula K. LeGuin and Jon Stewart.
I'm reading Dick's 1964 Three Stigmata. It isn't great, but it's exceptionally trippy / psychotic. Was there anything as strange around at that early date? Burroughs' Naked Lunch is from 1959, I guess.
Movie: The Whisperer in…
aardvarchaeology | January 26, 2017A year ago I took a look at the surrounding landscape here at Sb, investigating which of the blogs were active – defined as which ones had seen an entry during the month up to 19 Jan '16. Now I've looked at the month up to 24 Jan '17. The result isn't great. Four blogs have gone quiet and three have re-awoken, bringing the total down to 15.
A particularly significant loss from the roster is Josh Rosenhouse's EvolutionBlog. This was one of the original Sb blogs in May of 2006, and Josh's farewell entry is dated 18 October 2016.
Not one new blog has been added to the roster in the past two…
aardvarchaeology | January 25, 2017The Opportunity rover landed on Mars thirteen Earth calendar years ago today, and it still works fine after driving ~44 km! This is the farthest any off-planet vehicle has gone so far. Oppy's mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years and then functioned as a stationary science platform for another year before getting killed off by a Martian winter it couldn't avoid. Amazing engineering that keeps working year after year without a technician so much as touching it.
At the moment Oppy continues to explore the western rim of Endeavour crater, where it's spent several years.…
aardvarchaeology | January 24, 2017Fornvännen 2016:2 is now on-line on Open Access.
Ola George reports on a Migration Period chamber grave excavated at Björkå in Överlännäs parish, Ångermanland.
Peter Persson surveys chamber graves in all of Västernorrland county.
Ny Björn Gustafsson on radiocarbon-dated beeswax and metalworking on Viking Period Gotland.
Gunnar Andersson et al. on a recent addition to the collection of runestone fragments from the modern village next to Birka, which allowed them to stick all the fragments together into one monument.
Magnus Lindberg & Maria Lingström on metal detecting in contract…
aardvarchaeology | January 20, 2017
I just wrote a long drinking song in Swedish for the Stockholm Tolkien Society's 5 x 9th anniversary. The first line translates to "Thranduil in Mirkwood imports beverages".
Like most archaeologists I use Academia.edu to share my work, but I have a somnolent placeholder account on ResearchGate as well. They keep pestering me to engage more. Just now they congratulated me on one of my books reaching 20 downloads there. Oh, hoo fucking ray.
Spent several days extracting find spots for some artefact categories from confused & sloppy documentation of a 1915 castle excavation. Got a really…
aardvarchaeology | January 9, 2017 We built a snow entity. I shall miss Cousin E.
Waiting to blow
The introductions to academic paper anthologies often consist of descriptions of the contents. I never read them. That information is in the title to each contribution. Pointless.
H.G. Wells became public domain on 1 January!
My new project is writing a Latin grammar in Pidgin English.
Have you ever been to a Yule Spruce Looting event?
The blotter pad at the bottom of a supermarket meat tray would probably work well as a wound dressing or a panty liner.
Be it known that I cooked 1/4 of a goose with wine, garlic, onions,…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2017The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2016.
The Enlightener of the Year award is given to the science desk at Dagens Nyheter, a major newspaper. Science editor Maria Gunther and medicine reporter Amina Mansoor have made medicine and other science accessible in an initiated yet comprehensible way. Congrats Maria and Amina, well deserved!
The Deceiver of the Year anti-award is really gutsy and interesting this year. Karolinska Institutet is one of the world's most prestigious medical universities. The 2016 award will be remembered as the one given to the most respected…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2017Here are the nine boardgames that I played more than thrice during 2016. The year’s total was 87 different games.
Keltis (2008, travel version, very handy, and Cousin E loves its mathiness)
Sechs nimmt / Category 5 (1994)
Deception: Murder in Hong Kong (2014, like Clue + Werewolf) *
Heimlich & Co. (1984) *
Taluva (2006) *
Blokus (2000)
Carolus Magnus (2000) *
Qwirkle (2006)
Telestrations (2009) *
These are mostly short games that you can play repeatedly in one evening. Taluva and Carolus Magnus are a bit longer. A long game that I played thrice was Glory to Rome. All are highly…
aardvarchaeology | January 2, 2017 The Detective: Jonathan L. Howard's second book about Johannes Cabal, the necromancer.
Here are my best reads in English during 2016. My total was 42 books and 13 of them were e-books. Find me at Goodreads!
Dear Reader, what were your best reads of the year?
The Detective. (Johannes Cabal #2.) Jonathan L. Howard 2010. Sardonically funny Ruritanian detective story.
Bully for Brontosaurus. Stephen Jay Gould 1991. Essays on natural history.
Ready Player One. Ernest Cline 2011. Wonderful adventure story for anyone who played video games in the 1980s.
Murder at the Vicarage. Agatha Christie…
aardvarchaeology | December 31, 2016
If you're a bricklayer with unusually high qualifications, being unemployed is frustrating. But very few customers in the construction business make any kind of public promise to always employ the most qualified bricklayer. Now imagine that they did. Imagine that it were illegal for builders to employ anyone but the most qualified bricklayer. And imagine our bricklayer's frustration when poorly qualified colleagues, who didn't even quote a lower price, got the jobs anyway. Imagine that. And welcome to academia.
Let's all refer to the 19th century historian C.G. Styffe as "Stiffie".
Much-…