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 20, 2016
The former school / functions venue in my housing area has been converted into housing for single male asylum seekers. I'm putting a note on their front door, offering to teach them some boardgames.
Wonder if the weight-loss advertisers realise that the pics of amply built women they intend to frighten female customers with are actually attractive to a bunch of dudes. They're basically providing free soft porn to a market segment who will never buy their product.
If I had to be a war vet, then I'd prefer to be one whose son wrote Alice in Chains's "Rooster" about him.
When I was a teen in…
aardvarchaeology | September 14, 2016
Learned a neat German expression: Eier kraulen, lit. "to fondle the eggs", means "to fondle someone's testicles", that is, "to stroke a man's ego".
Lithuanian plumbers put the hot water to the right even though the colour coding on the taps is the reverse.
This Romanian researcher thinks that the Yamnaya Culture is an ancient "people" that can be identified in graves by a combination of archaeological data, genetic markers and radiocarbon dates. This is backwards. The Yamnaya Culture is a modern analytical entity resting entirely on archaeological data. No genetic data can prove or disprove…
aardvarchaeology | September 13, 2016In December of last year I finished a collection of short humorous archaeological essays. It's my sixth book, my first one in Swedish, my first one aimed at the lay reader. Since then I've been waiting for established Swedish publishing houses to pronounce judgement on it. Five of them have now turned it down, none with any very detailed explanation, but most of them in terms suggesting that they think it's competently written but it probably wouldn't sell much.
As a long-time blogger and e-book reader, I am not particularly disheartened by this. After all, this blog has a greater number of…
aardvarchaeology | September 7, 2016 Dress pin heads from Viidumäe on Saaremaa.
Fornvännen 2015:4 is now on-line on Open Access.
Therese Ekholm compares radiocarbon dates on bone versus charcoal from ostensibly closed contexts on Stone Age sites in northern Sweden.
Tony Björk & Ylva Wickberg on continued investigations of the Degeberga linear monument in Scania.
Indrek Jets & Marika Mägi on a Viking Period sacrificial site at Viidumäe on Saaremaa that's been robbed by nighthawk detectorists.
Pål Ulseth et al. on technical waste from the Medieval mint in Trondheim.
Tom H. Borse Haraldsen challenges Arne Espelund's…
aardvarchaeology | August 31, 2016
Today is the big book-selling festival on Drottninggatan in Stockholm, "the world's longest book table", which is probably true since the term "book table" is almost unknown outside Sweden. I'm bringing a backpack and the names Bengtsson, Bujold, LeGuin, Maugham, Paasilinna and Piraten.
Several book sellers at the festival have told me "He's great but nobody reads him any more" or "She's great so I'm certainly not selling those" when I've asked about my favourites.
I'm really interested in new ideas and methods in my discipline. But it annoys the hell out of me that what we mainly get is new…
aardvarchaeology | August 30, 2016Here's a guest entry by my correspondent Ben Bishop who's doing a project on Medieval scabbard mounts using data from the Portable Antiquites Scheme (PAS).
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I am researching medieval English scabbard chapes formed of folded copper alloy. They date from the period c. AD 1050–1300. The overwhelming majority are fragmentary when found and recognisable by the most decorative elements (shield for the mounted warrior, dragon head for the winged dragon). They are spread across England, including the Isle of Wight. The counties that are richest in these objects are Wiltshire (particularly L…
aardvarchaeology | August 26, 2016Several colleagues have told me this bizarre rumour that I hope is unfounded. Contract archaeologists at two sites on Öland and in Småland have found more Medieval coins than their conservation budget can cover. So they have to prioritise which coins to conserve. So far so good, and congrats on the lovely finds.
But.
According to this rumour, someone in an official position is demanding that they throw away the coins they choose not to conserve. Because there is no place in this person's administrative framework for unconserved finds from a contract excavation.
Is this true!? Who is this…
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2016
Getting your fridge filled with rusty Medieval nails isn't actually as hard as many people think. Just marry an archaeologist!
It's been decided that from now on the word is pronounced ever-yone or ever-yawn.
Jrette joined me and Lasse for tonight's sailing mini-race. She steered throughout the race, she enjoyed herself and we finished in the middle third as usual.
Cousin E admires Newton and Turing. I've lent him Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
I run an academic job application web site through Google Translate. The gender box asks whether I am a human or a woman.
The stereotype of the sandal-…
aardvarchaeology | August 17, 2016I've been away from my various desks for almost two months while excavating and then enjoying some time off. Here's what's on my plate right now. Saddle. I mean my saddle, in which I'm back.
Landscape archaeology conference, three days in Uppsala. I'm giving a paper on my Bronze Age project.
European Association of Archaeologists, Annual Meeting, five days in Vilnius. I'm chairing a session on castle excavations and giving a paper on our fieldwork methods during the past three seasons.
Apply for grants. I've got 35 kilos of animal bones that need osteological attention. And I only have my…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2016
I just meta-mimed singing into my electric shaver. I wasn't miming singing. I was miming someone in a movie who mimes singing.
Family spooked at one in the morning because a burst of engine noise has been heard. Have burglars arrived at the island? Nope, no strange boat at the dock. Investigation reveals that Jrette has just pulled down the wobbly 80s roller blind in her bedroom: duggah duggah duggah. Oh well, we got to see the Milky Way and several meteors.
Bon Iver's song "Re: Stacks" name-checks the Dead Sea Scrolls. Folkies in the library basement!
Scored some chocolate from Jrette's…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2016 1972 back-cover blurb
I bought a used copy of Maurice Lévy's Lovecraft ou du fantastique (Paris 1972) at the Fantastika 2016 scifi con, and now I'm picking my way through it with the aid of a dictionary. S.T. Joshi has published an English translation, Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (Detroit 1988).
Here's how little of Lévy's literary French I understand without a dictionary. This back-cover blurb is a particularly hairy piece of writing, I should say.
The case of Lovecraft … the thick volume of fantastic literature. A limited case where … should cease: between a neurosis which, while…
aardvarchaeology | August 1, 2016
Excavation finished, team scattered. Now for three weeks' vacation!
This Walter Jon Williams story has two Andean pan pipe bands and a Californian figure swimming troupe that all operate as secret intelligence agents.
Interesting jetsam around the shores of the island today. The flip-flop was pretty good. But the rifled camera bag was exceptional. It contained only a wallet, a little fabric case and a blister pack for hypertension medication, all empty. But the case is branded for a camera dealer in Busan, South Korea.
I like cormorants. In fact, I think it's more important that cormorants…
aardvarchaeology | July 30, 2016Detectorist John Kvanli is the chairman of Rygene detektorklubb and one of Norway's most prominent proponents of collaboration between amateurs and professionals in field archaeology. Of course he has a tattoo! It's an Urnes brooch from c. AD 1100, in the final exquisite Christian style of Scandinavian animal art.
John tells me he has found several fragments of these fragile objects, but the one inked onto his upper right arm is a settlement excavation find from Lindholm Høje, across the fjord from Aalborg in northern Jutland. The needlework was done by the Martin Tattoo Studio in Bangkok,…
aardvarchaeology | July 28, 2016 Why?
I wonder what motivates people to start companies that make or provide boring stuff. What causes a person to devote decades of their life to an organisation that manufactures soap or installs archive shelving? It doesn't surprise me that people take boring jobs: everybody needs a job and most jobs are boring. But what makes a person suddenly think "What I really want to do with my life is run a squeegee company"?
Maybe what they really think is "I want to make more money and avoid taking orders, and the only business I really know anything about is the squeegee business. I am resigned…
aardvarchaeology | July 26, 2016Our second week at Skällvik Castle proved a continued small-finds bonanza, and we also documented some pretty interesting stratigraphy.
More of everything in Building IV. In addition to more coins of Magnus Eriksson, dice and stoneware drinking vessels, we also found a lot of points for crossbow bolts. It's starting to look like the castle guards' day room! As for why we found crossbow bolts only inside one building and none outdoors in the bailey, I figure that they had been amassed there for re-fletching. The dark indoors find context and the undamaged sharp points show that the bolts did…
aardvarchaeology | July 21, 2016
Stoner dude got kicked out of our Christian abstainer hostel for eating our food and waddling around baked out of his noggin. And we found half of the bikini.
A good thing about never having been in particularly great physical shape is that you don't really notice becoming middle-aged.
Stoner dude refers to excavation team's black metal bass player Mats as "the Rasta guy with the camo pants", achieves instant immortality.
It took the addition of Pokémon to make geocaching a majority concern, 16 years after the fact.
Oh for fuck's sake, Swedish Peace & Arbitration Society. You've got a…
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2016The famous royal castle of Stegeborg sits on its island like a cork in the bottleneck of the Slätbaken inlet (see map here). This waterway leads straight to Söderköping, a major Medieval town, and to the mouth of River Storån which would allow an invader to penetrate far into Östergötland Province's plains belt. The area's first big piece of public construction was 9th century fortifications intended to guard this entrypoint, in the shape of the Götavirke earthen rampart some ways inland and a wooden barrage at Stegeborg. This barrage was kept up for centuries, and indeed, the castle's name…
aardvarchaeology | July 13, 2016 Stegeborg Castle seen from our hostel.
Had dinner in Ryd shopping centre outside Linköping. My falafel came covered in this shocking purplish pink sauce. I said, "Oh my, what sauce is this!?" Replied the waiter, "It's pink sauce". (Turned out to be the standard white garlic sauce with colouring, possibly beetroot brine.)
Movie: Ant-man. Superhero action comedy. Grade: Pass. Jrette liked it.
I just told the borrowed cat, "You, Sir, are small, hairy and quadrupedal".
If you don't like traffic jams, the Södertälje motorway bridge is currently only open in the northward direction. For this…
aardvarchaeology | July 8, 2016We spent Thursday afternoon backfilling. As I write this, only trench G remains open, and the guys there expect to finish soon. Here's some highlights of what we've learned during our second week at Birgittas udde.
Trench A in the outer moat demonstrated that the moat had a wide flat bottom, was not very deep and contains no lake sediments. Probably always a dry moat, providing material for the bank behind it. No Medieval finds.
Trench C: section through the deep inner moat.
Trench C in the inner moat demonstrated that this moat too had a wide flat bottom, but it was deeper and is full of…
aardvarchaeology | July 4, 2016
This is the time of year when our yard becomes an extra room in our house. Where a man might sit around butt naked except for a straw hat, reading. I mean he really could. If he wanted to. You'll notice I'm not appending a selfie.
Anybody into Ariel Pink? Seems to be a true original. His 2014 song "Dayzed Inn Daydreams" has the weirdest Motown interlude in the middle.
I never understood, growing up, that democracy means that you run a constant risk of being governed by assholes on the strength of votes by the ignorant, hateful and scared.
Wife's workout app tells her "keep your abs tight". I…