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 | October 19, 2007
Mats P. Malmer in 1989, holding a miniature replica of a Bronze Age sword. Photograph by Dr Rune Edberg, published with kind permission.
Yesterday, 18 October, was Swedish archaeology professor Mats P. Malmer's 86th birthday. Sadly he passed away on 3 October. I wrote a brief appreciation when I heard the news. Here's a longer one by Anders Andrén and Evert Baudou, both professors of archaeology and members (like Malmer himself) of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters. Andrén is the current holder of Malmer's chair in Stockholm, having succeeded the man's successor Åke Hyenstrand. I've…
aardvarchaeology | October 18, 2007I've just signed another one of Sage Publications' ridiculous publishing agreements, prompting Aard's first re-run of an entry from my old blog. Here's something from 29 September 2006.
I agreed to a really crappy business deal today.
For a long time, academic journals from commercial publishers have grown in number and become more and more expensive. Individual scholars can no longer afford subscribing to them at all, and most research libraries have to prioritise strictly when choosing which ones to take. There is a successful resistance movement against these tendencies, Open Access…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2007
Per Widerström called me today and told me he'd just found a picture stone. This is breaking news, mainstream media not yet alerted. Photographs courtesy of the finder, and I hope to get some shots in horizontal lighting too where the relief scenes will be visible.
Scandinavian 1st Millennium art isn't very rich in figural scenes, focusing more on abstract or heavily stylised decorative motifs. But the picture stones of Gotland form an exception. Starting in the 5th century and surviving into the 12th, this tradition offers a rare peek into the mythology of eastern Scandinavia, far from the…
aardvarchaeology | October 16, 2007Freedom of religion wasn't formally codified in Sweden until 1952, but for decades Swedish law has forbidden religious teachings in schools. Children are required to attend a government-approved school, and one of the criteria for approval is no religion. This of course refers to the teaching of religion, not teaching about religion: comparative religion studies replaced the subject "Christianity" on the syllabi of Swedish primary schools and high schools in 1969 and still remains. In recent years, however, privately run schools have proliferated in Sweden, many of them backed by religious…
aardvarchaeology | October 15, 2007
My part-time employer, the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, has been publishing books for over two centuries and rents a huge storage space for books in central Stockholm. Most of the stock isn't moving very fast. In fact, a lot of it hasn't moved at all since Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee.
Storage is expensive. The Academy now feels that a lot of the funds devoted to storing these old books would be better used in, for instance, scanning the books and putting them on-line for free.
On Saturday 27 October, the Academy's book store is opened to the public, and most of the books will be…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2007In the autumn issue of Antiquity is a fine debate piece (behind a pay wall) by William Meacham of Hong Kong about the Russian Baptist science fraudster Dimitri Kouznetsov. In 1989, 1996 and 2000, Kouznetsov managed to trick three peer-reviewed journals to publish papers full of faked data, references to non-existent journals and thanks at the end to fictional scholars. And all three papers are in different fields. Much of the information about the Russian's scams has been unearthed by Italian skeptic Gian Marco Rinaldi who published his findings in his mother tongue in 2002.
Kouznetsov's 1989…
aardvarchaeology | October 12, 2007
A letter sent to me on 8 October. I translate:
I write to you because of the sword find I had the opportunity to watch on ABC-nytt together with my mother. [...]
Please take the following for what it is worth. As it touches upon the sword you found, I write to you and leave it to you to handle the information.
My mother, N.N., has the second sight, reads cards and receives images out of the lives of people. Apart from the future, she also sees images from the past. [...] To a skeptic and academic, this may sound like complete nonsense. I am an academic myself [...] I must also emphasise that…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2007A blogging and scientific experiment.
There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is ...".
Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/…
aardvarchaeology | October 11, 2007
Peps Persson is both one of Sweden's heaviest blues men and the single most authoritative reggae artist the country's produced. The sleeve of his 1975 hit album Hög standard parodies the sleeve from a likewise excellent ABBA album released earlier the same year. Yet the music is intricate studio-built stuff, far from the lo-fi live aesthetic popular with Swedish lefties at the time (who hated ABBA as a matter of political principle).
The album is sung entirely in a broad Scanian dialect, including a charming cover of Bob Marley's "Stir It Up". That song's Scanian lyrics are cheerfully lewd…
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2007The twenty-fifth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Tim is celebrating the carnival's first birthday, yay! Archaeology and anthropology to make you and take you for the ride of your life.
The next open hosting slot is on 5 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro -- come as you are.
aardvarchaeology | October 9, 2007Yesterday by train to Gothenburg with the Djurhamn sword sitting in its package on the hat rack above my head. I spent much of the trip in the pleasant company of the Realm's Herald, numismatist Dr Henrik Klackenberg, who happened to be on his way to a church excavation near Skara where he was going to classify newfound coins.
In sunny Gothenburg I caught a ride with a soft-spoken Kurdish taxi driver to Gamlestaden, the site of a 15/16th century predecessor of Gothenburg, currently an industrial suburb, where Studio Västsvensk Konservering resides in a refurnished textile plant. Here I was…
aardvarchaeology | October 8, 2007
My number one archaeological hero, professor Mats Peterson Malmer, died on 3 October aged 86 minus 15 days. I knew him a little starting in the mid-90s, read most of what he ever wrote with avidity, sent him most of what I wrote, tweaked bits of some work of his in a paper published only months ago. When I was a green PhD student feeling miserable under the post-modernist orthodoxy at the Stockholm archaeology department, his 1984 Fornvännen paper "Arkeologisk positivism" came as a revelation to me.
Leif Gren took the above pic at Mats's 80th birthday party: Mats is showing myself and my…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2007Here's something I've been wondering about. Anybody know Arabic historical linguistics?
Al-qaeda is Arabic for "the base, basis, foundation, military base". Alkaid is the Arabic name for Eta Ursae Majoris, a star in the Big Dipper. It's short for al-qaid al-banat an-nac, meaning "the leader of the daughters of the bier", because the three stars of the Dipper's handle were seen as mourning maidens, wailing at the bier of their father who had been murdered by Polaris.
So qaida is foundation and qaid is leader. Are these words true cognates? Does Al-Qaeda have its own star in the sky? The…
aardvarchaeology | October 7, 2007Wednesday 10 October will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Remote Central. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Tim ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
There's an open hosting slot on 5 December and further ones closer to Christmas. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me.
aardvarchaeology | October 6, 2007Monday's entry about the Djurhamn sword rocketed up the lists at the social bookmarking sites, and so Wednesday became the best day for traffic ever here at Aard. On an average day in the third quarter of this year, the blog saw about 650 unique visitors. For Wednesday, the number was 52,200. Someone to whom I owe thanks submitted the entry to Digg -- under the heading "Offbeat News", the section for entertainingly shaped carrots and blurry phonecam clips of poor dear Britney Spears' genitalia.
Looking at sites that linked to the entry, I soon found with some amusement that the whole thing…
aardvarchaeology | October 5, 2007Three good albums, listened to in the car when driving to & fro the Djurhamn dig.
Silverbullit, Arclight (2004). This is dark and Gothamesque rock, sort of the Cure + the Stooges + Kraftwerk. The band searched high and low until they found a drummer who could and would play like a drum machine. One of the best Swedish records of the decade.
Olivia Tremor Control, Black Foliage (1999). The Pet Sounds era Beach Boys discover musique concrète just as the water supply becomes heavily contaminated with mescaline. Completely otherworldly yet drenched in the sweetest vocal harmony.
Skip Regan…
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2007I'm thinking maybe it isn't worth the effort to keep the Good Books and Good Albums lists going in the left-hand column. Better to put that effort into writing more blog entries about books and albums? Dear Reader, if you're a regular and would miss the lists, please say so in a comment.
aardvarchaeology | October 4, 2007
Over at David Nessle's, his witty readers are discussing translations -- more particularly, bad translations. I collect crap translations from English to Swedish, so I decided to offer some to you, Dear Reader. To make this palatable to non-Swedish-speakers, I'll add a second step to explain what the Swedish mistranslation means literally in each case.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Main character drives around on a rainy night looking for a place called Cornflower. Meeting someone, he asks for directions, but the other guy just drives off and our hero yells an insult after him.
"Excuse…
aardvarchaeology | October 3, 2007
On the excursion during the Sachsensymposium in Trondheim last month we visited Slipsteinsberget ("Grindstone Hill"). Not only did we visit the place, but the entire conference (some of whose participants were in their 70s) climbed around the whole hill (rain-sodden, wooded and steep) like mountain goats. Our guide was the charming Bodil Østerås, head of Egge Museum. Her 2002 Augmented Master's Thesis (No. hovedoppgave) Slipsteinsberget i Sparbu : kva eit klebersteinsbrot kan fortelje om gamle steinhoggartradisjonar deals mainly with the site we visited.
The hill consists mainly of…
aardvarchaeology | October 2, 2007
Today we finished fieldwork at the find spot of the sword I wrote about yesterday. Sieved 5 sqm without a single non-recent find, but the only way to know is to sieve. My dad came out with a pulley and removed the hazel stump that had been sitting on the sword, so we're pretty damn sure there wasn't anything else of interest within the confines of that trench.
Immediately outside the trench, though, began a quay foundation, taking the form of a straight c. 20 m long stensträng, a line of stone blocks, at a right angle to the incline. You can see it as a diagonal from top left to bottom…