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 | March 4, 2008In 2005, when Howard Williams and I and a bunch of hard-working people excavated a Viking Period boat grave at Skamby in Östergötland, we found a funny little silver pin. It wasn't in the grave, it was found just outside the edge of the superstructure, near the ground surface, though technically in a culture layer of the 2nd century BC. I've been trying off and on to find parallells to the pin, showing its picture to a lot of knowledgeable people, to no avail. Everybody has the same impression as myself: it doesn't quite look like anything from Swedish Prehistory. So in a recent paper I co-…
aardvarchaeology | March 3, 2008I read Donald Prothero's Evolution for the palaeontology and general evolutionary zoology, and I was not disappointed. The book is up-to-date, well-argued, well-illustrated and aimed at the educated lay reader. Stylistically, it's not bad, though poorly copy-edited, and I did find the author's use of exclamation marks and italics a little overdone. Nevertheless: this is good solid pop-sci, very enjoyable.
But it's not just a book about evolutionary zoology. It's also a salvo in a war that's being fought on that far-off continent, Northern America. In this respect it reminded me of another…
aardvarchaeology | March 1, 2008My on-line buddy Vladimir over at Diogenes's Bottle has blogged extensively and almost incomprehensibly about my humble personage. Just look at the possibly wonderful (or not) things he has to say about me!
La început - e drept - ideea ma amuza, caci citeam constant blogul lui Martin, un prieten suedez arheolog, care s-a mutat apoi de la Blogger catre bloggeristii profi-, adica cei platiti sa blogareasca. Martin era si este un personaj interesant. L-am cunoscut live on the web prin 2003-2004, când lucram la primul meu articol despre Basarabi si, din lipsa de materiale bune pe spatiul…
aardvarchaeology | February 29, 2008It's February 2008. I've had access to the WWW for 13 years. Yet I can still not get a news feed filtered to any reasonable approximation of my tastes.
I want very little news: only the important stuff. I think almost all conventional news are a complete waste of time. I want no business, no sports, no reports on individual crimes or house fires, and for Dawkins' sake, nothing about TV shows or pop singers.
Until recently, I took the front-page feed of Dagens Nyheter, my country's biggest newspaper. This is the material they deem maximally important, but it's full of sports and reports on…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2008
When I was in Florida a month ago, right after having lunch with an elder statesman of the skeptical movement, I found the above polaroid photograph on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. The signs above the windows have allowed me to identify the building as a Williams Scotsman "section modular office building". It's a moveable house that you rent for temporary needs. Judging from the state of the board ramp to the left, this particular specimen has been sitting there for quite some time. There are some palm fronds in the top right corner, suggesting that the house is somewhere in Florida…
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2008
The thirty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Archaeoporn. Archaeology and anthropology is quite a lovely and ladylike pastime for us ladies!
The next open hosting slot is on 9 April. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro. But you must be a lady, like me.
aardvarchaeology | February 27, 2008My involvement in the skeptical movement and science blogging has caused me to think about my professional relationship to the concept of science. Archaeology is a social science in the US and one of the humanities in Europe: in neither case is it seen as a natural science, the kind that gets to call itself "science" without any qualifier. Archaeology is dependent on the methods of natural science, but its object is to learn about culture, not nature, a distinction that many including myself find useful.
In Swedish and many other languages, the word for science doesn't denote the natural…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2008Dear potential academic employers,
I know you are all secretely competing for who will have the pleasure of giving me a forskarassistent assistant professor's position, to see me fire the imaginations of a new generation of students, to see me produce awesome research in great quantities and present a charming face for your department toward the media and the public.
I know you've just been joking with me for the past four years, receiving my job applications and saying, with a merry twinkle in your little eyes, "Oh no, the loveable little rascal may have 115 published pieces of work and the…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2008
The Skalk article I mentioned the other day (with the rubber goat) tells the story of an unusual find made in northernmost Jutland in the summer of 2005. Peter Jensen was stripping some land of topsoil for gravel extraction when, from the vantage point of his machine, he spotted something interesting on the ground. Jensen happens to have much experience of machine operation at archaeological digs. It turned out that he had managed to identify a pit in the subsoil filled with thousands of amber beads: an Early Neolithic votive deposit datable around 3500 cal BC.
Most votive amber deposits…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2008
I'm a big fan of Danish archaeology. In my opinion it is the best in Scandinavia, both regarding the sites they have and what they write about them. This love of Danish archaeology has been a strong incentive for me to learn to read Danish easily, though I still have a very hard time understanding it when spoken. (Rumour has it that Danish babies learn to speak on average several months later than other European ones, simply because it's so hard to discern any words in their parents' fond gurglings.)
Swedish and Danish aren't really separate languages in the sense that e.g. French and German…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2008Here's a really good primer on the institutional landscape of US archaeology by Michael Dietler. Some of the perspectives he offers are just mind-boggling.
"There are at least 450 colleges and universities in the United States that offer a B.A degree in anthropology ... . Of those institutions, 98 universities offer PhD programs in Anthropology" [which includes archaeology].
Imagine a country where an archaeology PhD has hundreds of potential academic employers, all of them speaking the same language... If I looked at the nearest 450 undergrad programs measured radially from my home, I'd find…
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2008I've just agreed to a flattering request from real.girl at Skepchick. This means that chances are you will find a skeptical archaeologist in partial deshabillé in the 2009 edition of the Skepchick skin calendar. And I'm train blogging again. And I'm on my way to Lund where historians of religion have invited me to comment on a PhD thesis manuscript about the Migration Period. Life is good!
aardvarchaeology | February 20, 2008
After work today I had dinner with my friends Asko & Eva and then went to the Cirkus concert venue to hear the Mars Volta. For those of you who have missed them, they're a US psychedelic progressive rock outfit whose fourth album just entered the US top-10 at #3.
The band was an octet tonight: singer, lead guitar, drum kit, bass and keyboards, plus a rhythm guitarist who also played keyboard, a saxophonist who also played flute and percussion, and a percussionist who also played a keyboard. Yes, there were at least five keyboards on stage.
The set was about 2.5 hours long, covering all…
aardvarchaeology | February 19, 2008The other day I found and photographed another tree house ruin. I decided to re-post the following piece from September 2006 and make these things a steady presence on Aard, with a category tag of their own.
If you've ever taken a walk in the woods near a housing area, you've seen them: modern archaeological sites, full of artefacts and building debris, abandoned to the elements in a way that is unusual in the well-organised industrialised world. They're settlement sites of a particular subculture with its own rules and customs, thriving on the fringes of mainstream society. I'm referring to…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2008The anthology I edited last spring, Scholarly Journals Between the Past and the Future, has received one long thoughtful review by Alun at Archaeoastronomy and another one by the Grumpy Old Bookman.
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2008Thad at Archaeoporn and Alun at Archaeoastronomy have alerted me to an upcoming new journal: the Past Discussed Quarterly.
"PDQ is a journal designed to provide a bridge between blogging and academia. It will provide stable citeable references for selected weblog posts focussed upon or of interest to the pre-Renaissance past. It is compiled from articles submitted by bloggers on a quarterly basis."
And imagine me thinking that P.D.Q. were just the initials of classical music humorist P.D.Q. Bach, and that the acronym meant Pretty Damn Quick.
[More blog entries about archaeology, journals;…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2008
Here's a particularly fine song lyric from Californian 80s indie band Camper Van Beethoven, off of their 1989 disc Key Lime Pie. The song is a folky number in march time with violin, and David Lowery's singing is exquisitely pained and raw. Following this, they released no new material until 2004.
All Her Favorite Fruit
By David Lowery
I drive alone, home from work
And I always think of her
Well late at night I call her
But I never say a word
And I can see her squeeze the phone
between her chin and shoulder
And I can almost smell her breath
faint with a sweet scent of decay
She serves him…
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2008
The thirty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Our Cultural World. Archaeology and anthropology be da shit, trudat!
The next open hosting slot is on 9 April. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro.
Also, don't miss the brand-spanking-new Skeptics' Circle.
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2008I'm on a train in Östergötland. A while back I caught a fond glimpse of the barrow at Stora Tollstad in Sjögestad that me & Howard Williams trial-trenched and dated to the 9th century in 2006.
I'm giving a talk this afternoon to my colleagues at the Jönköping County Museum's excavation unit about my research in Östergötland.
I think it's pretty damn cool to have wireless broadband on a train.