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 | December 29, 2016Today is Aard's tenth anniversary! And 16 December was my eleventh anniversary as a blogger, since I blogged at Blogspot for over a year before I came to Scienceblogs.
2016 has been a good year for the blog's traffic: about 540 daily readers which is better than 2014 and 2015, very encouraging! It hasn't been a great year for me professionally though, with a number of really bad disappointments in academia, mostly related to nepotism, and quite a lot of financial worries. The latter luckily turned out to be unfounded. And I'm pleased with having directed my biggest excavation yet and…
aardvarchaeology | December 20, 2016
Would it be cruel and unusual to wake Cousin E with a rousing rendition of the Brigands' Song from the Ronja movie?
Went to the snow-covered golf course, sat down in the moon shadow of a spruce tree at the edge of the fairway, watched until I had seen three meteors, went home.
Place-name scholar Ann-Christin Mattisson 1986: "Our knowledge about the nobility's domestic architecture in the Middle Ages is ... limited, i.a. because too few sites have been excavated and dated, but also because the remains are often too insignificant to merit any more thorough investigation." (p. 25)
Movie:…
aardvarchaeology | December 10, 2016
OK so Google Inbox is excellent and I use it all the time. Takes so much of the stress out of e-mail. But I wonder, when are we getting Google Imbolc?
Hehe. This Swedish author intends to talk about the actions of the Medieval aristocracy, instead puts "their acting". And his language reviewer does nothing about it.
Story germ: we discover the existence of alien visitors when one is found as a piece of mangled, semi-decomposed roadkill on a major highway.
Google Maps knew that I was near Vienna. Then it got confused and teleported me to St. Pölten.
Yay Rausing Foundation! Now we'll see what…
aardvarchaeology | December 2, 2016
There was a major 19th century arts magazine titled Glissons, n'appuyons pas. This means "Let's glide, not support", that is, "Let's live an easy life without having to support ourselves". Opera reviews were a big thing in the mag.
Private parking is "idiot parking" in Greek, because here the word idiot means "private person". Our sense of the word comes from the ancient distinction between a skilled person who could take part in public affairs and an untrained one who was just himself, an idiot. The Greek word for the mentally challenged, meanwhile, is vlakas.
I saw an old high-wheel…
aardvarchaeology | November 28, 2016Professors tend to have a few pet issues that they emphasise time and again over their careers as researchers and supervisors. This is quite clear with two 1960s-70s professors in my field. In Bertil Almgren's case, one such pet issue was the source-critical quality of archaeological information. In Mats Malmer's case, one was clear and exact verbal definitions of terms.
I agree with both of these imperatives. But there's one case where an adherence to Almgren's priorities over Malmer's was clearly not the right way to go.
Birger Nerman's monumental folio-format work Die Vendelzeit Gotlands,…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2016Downtown Kavalla's mix of well-kept properties and hopeless ruins confuses me. I've seen similar in the Baltic States, but there it has to do with uncertainty about the ownership after the Soviet period, I've been told. That doesn't apply here. So I googled real estate agencies and went visiting on my lunch break.
The first clue was simply that I couldn't find most of the agencies at their stated addresses. One had closed down so recently that the sign was still there and the shop space hadn't found a new tenant. The real estate market here isn't exactly booming: demand is low. But eventually…
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2016
Thanks to metal detecting, the 7th century material has exploded with duckbill brooches / næbfibler in Denmark and conical brooches in Norway. The making of every one of those brooches resulted in a pile of durable, easily identified mould fragments. Where are those? Ground up into grog / chamotte for new moulds?
Distinguished older Slavic construction worker on commuter train is annoyed on cellphone, says kurva at least once in every sentence.
I need to stop reading US news. It's sheer self-harm since I'm powerless to help.
Tea leaves flavoured with berries and cream. What is the substance…
aardvarchaeology | November 19, 2016I watched ten films at the 2014 festival, fourteen last year (at two festivals back to back), and this year I managed ten again. I had bought tickets for fourteen, but stuff got in the way: a huge blizzard that knocked out public transport, subtitles disappearing, and a call to marital duty.
The people who book movies for this festival really know what they're doing. Half of the ones I saw get my special recommendation:
Small Town Curtains / Småstad. Five middle-aged siblings play five middle-aged siblings dealing with the death of their father. In Vadstena. In a broad Östergötland dialect.…
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2016Fornvännen 2016:1 is now on-line on Open Access.
Anton Seiler on a weapon grave with fragments of a Vendel helmet found at Inhåleskullen near Uppsala. Some of the metalwork is interestingly decorated in Salin's Style III/E and must be late additions to the assemblage.
Rune Edberg and Johnny Karlsson on the bone skates of Birka and Sigtuna. Almost none are long enough for grownups!
Anders Nord and colleagues on the pigments used on Medieval stonework in churches on Gotland.
Sabine Sten and colleagues on a wide range of studies done on the bones in Holy King Erik's reliquary in Uppsala…
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2016This past weekend saw my seventh annual boardgaming retreat: 43 hours in good company at a small hotel (in Nynäshamn for the first time), all meals included. My buddy Oscar organises everything. This year we broke the attendance record, with 28 participants, mainly guys in our 30s and 40s. Before Sunday lunch I left early and went to the release event for Karin Bojs and Peter Sjölund's interesting new book on X-chromosome haplotypes, Swedish male-line descent and genealogy: Svenskarna och deras fäder, “The Swedes And Their Fathers”.
I played thirteen sessions of ten different games in…
aardvarchaeology | November 11, 2016The Swedish national register of archaeological sites is one of the best in the world. But if you ever consider using it for any kind of research purpose, have a look first at the register's map of sites just west of Örkelljunga in Scania. The diagonal line is the parish boundary between Tåssjö and Rya. Tåssjö has undergone intensive survey for forest sites, most of which derive from Early Modern resource extraction. Rya has not.
aardvarchaeology | November 10, 2016 Tree-house ruin near the old chapel cemetery on Skogsö.
Fear me! I make bad puns in really, really bad Mandarin!
One Celsius and sleet. I have to drive for four hours today, so I'm switching tyres first.
Skänninge is dying. So many empty shop premises and housing properties. Facades flaking. Railway has cut off the eastern approaches to the town square. Last wave of investment in construction seems to have coincided with the mexibrick fad around 1970.
Incomprehensible: the re... play I guess? Of Toto's "Africa" with a few hip-hop passages inserted. Why oh why?
Why doesn't the Linköping…
aardvarchaeology | November 8, 2016For the first time since 2011 I haven't got any teaching this autumn semester, which is really bad both for my finances and for my troop morale. (I feel like my colleagues would celebrate or not even notice if I got eaten by a grue tomorrow.) To boost both I'm instead seeking paid extramural speaking gigs. Here's what I've got scheduled at the moment.
27 Sept. On early local history, in Sickla.
6 Oct. On the Skällvik castle excavation, in Söderköping.
19 Oct. On archaeology and religion, in Jönköping.
20 Oct. On archaeology and religion, in Visby.
27 Oct. On archaeology and religion, in…
aardvarchaeology | November 7, 2016My detectorist friend and long-time collaborator Svante Tibell found a seal matrix in the field next to Skällvik Castle this past summer. In the Middle Ages of Sweden, people of means didn't sign their names to documents. They carried seals around, with which they made imprints into chalk-mixed wax, and these were affixed to paperwork such as property deeds and wills. If you lost your seal matrix, you lost your ability to sign documents – and you theoretically gave that ability to whoever found your seal. When people died during this period, their seal matrices were carefully destroyed.…
aardvarchaeology | October 31, 2016
Leonard Cohen got from the used books store to the cake shop ahead of me. /-:
Wish somebody would demolish all the modern houses on top of the ruins of Visborg Castle.
The ruin of St. Olav's church in Visby is a protected ancient monument. It is being damaged by the ivy that covers it. Sadly the ivy is a protected plant.
Ny Björn points out something interesting about St. Olav's ruin in Visby and its super ivy. An important reason that the ruin and the ivy survive today is that both fit well with Romantic ideas about picturesque ruins. Thus they were both preserved, and both for the same…
aardvarchaeology | October 22, 2016
The New Dawn rose I've been pampering has almost outgrown its trellis.
Movie: Kubo and the Two Strings. Oddly titled Japanese fantasy story with beautiful imagery and sappy moral. Grade: Pass.
The UK imports roughly the same amount of tea annually as the rest of Europe combined.
About the Trump campaign's response to the "just grab her" clip: me and my nerdy buddies never had those misogynistic locker-room conversations even during our lower teens. Ridiculous of him to claim "all men".
In 1980 a lot of penpal ads in my kids' mag listed Jimi Hendrix as an idol. Mom and Dad's music...
When I…
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2016 The New Dawn rose I've been pampering has almost outgrown its trellis.
Movie: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Two film-making high school boys befriend a girl just as she is diagnosed with leukaemia. Grade: Pass With Distinction.
Heard this ad for contact lenses offering prices that are "up to 70% of what you usually pay". You may want to think that through again, guys.
Swedish Racist Party representative makes confused motion to Parliament about removing state subsidies from newspapers that don't actually have those subsidies, capping the percentage of the media that members of a given…
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2016Cousin E pointed out something odd about the International Mathematical Olympiad. It's an annual competition for high school students. And girls do super poorly in it. We ran some stats on the data for 2015 and 2016, and found that a national team with more than one female member gets less than half the median points per capita of an all-male team. With one female member, it's 59-78%.
The question I want to address is not whether women are in empirical fact worse at maths than men. Nor do I, if this is the case, want to discuss whether it's because of nature or nurture. I want to understand…
aardvarchaeology | October 3, 2016From 2014 on, Swedish metal detectorists have had to report all finds datable to before 1850 to the authorities. I have recently shown in a note in Fornvännen that this rule came about by mistake, and that it has broken the County Archaeologist system. It takes hours for a county heritage administrator to process one metal detector permit. It also takes only a few hours for a detectorist to find a copper coin from the 1840s, which voids her/his permit for that site. S/he then applies for a new permit, which means that the pile of unprocessed permit applications on each administrator's desk…
aardvarchaeology | September 30, 2016
Just got the application referees' evaluation for a job I've been hoping for. I'm afraid to read it. Taking a walk first.
I'm really tired of this thankless shit. Impatient for December, when I'll know if I'll have money to write that castles book or if I should start calling people about a steady job in contract archaeology. The one I stupidly turned down in fucking 1994.
Osteologist Rudolf Gustavsson has documented traces of flaying on cat bones that we've found at Stensö Castle. Reading the ribald 15th century "Marriage Song" that has just appeared in a new critical edition, I found a…