Martin Rundkvist
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.
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Posts by this author
December 29, 2013
I've been blogging for a bit more than eight years now, and today Aard turns seven. Traffic for late 2013 is ~600 daily readers, pretty low compared to the most recent peak at 1000 in early 2012. This is probably because of my lower posting frequency and because the URLs of individual older blog…
December 23, 2013
I love listening to podcasts during housework, commuting and travelling. I use the Podkicker app on my Android phone. Some of my current favourites are put out by the old media: NPR, CBC and BBC. But here are five faves without old-media ties.
The Drabblecast. ”Strange stories by strange authors…
December 21, 2013
Skalk 2013:6 (December) has a nice piece about shell middens and Mesolithic oyster cooking, recalling a few points I made back on my first blog. You can't open a fresh oyster without a steel knife. But if you heat the oyster even just slightly, it opens. I was also interested to learn about a…
December 19, 2013
The Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslersämbetet) has evaluated our basic university programmes in a long series of subjects. The results for archaeology were published yesterday, based on the status 2012. There were 21 BA (3 yrs), Mag.Phil. (4 yrs) and MA (5 yrs) programmes at…
December 16, 2013
Here's what I did to replace Windows 8 (boo) with Linux Mint (yay) on a 2013 Asus ultrabook with the problematic UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) firmware, using an external DVD drive linked to the machine with a USB cable.
Download Linux Mint and burn a bootable DVD.
Disable Windows…
December 12, 2013
Fornvännen 2013:1, last spring's issue, is now on-line in its entirety on Open Access.
Joy Boutrup et al. on openwork braids of silk and metal thread that decorated 15th century elite fashion garments.
Påvel Nicklasson on zoologist and archaeological trailblazer Sven Nilsson's travels in England…
December 10, 2013
When I was a kid around 1980 me and my buddies used to play in small tracts of woodland around where we lived. There we sometimes found woods porn, Sw. skogsporr: damp and fragmented pornographic magazines. We learned quite a lot from them that stood us in good stead later in life.
Back then,…
December 9, 2013
I read something annoying; always a good impetus for a blog entry. The offender this time is Nick Saunders of the University of Bristol, writing in Current World Archaeology #62 (Dec/Jan, available on Academia.edu). And the theme is what he calls ”the birth of Modern Conflict Archaeology”. This…
December 7, 2013
I'm confused by this political science paper I'm editing. The guy wants to find a middle way for the EU between two kinds of authoritarianism: technocracy and populism.
I understand the first word to mean ”rule by academic experts who don't care what the voters say”, and the second to mean ”rule…
December 6, 2013
Ikea’s typhoon rescue relief outguns China’s. Nope. Not surprised that their government does not care much.
China Ends One-Child Policy.
“Viking-age” ‘gold men’ unearthed in Sweden”. Actually, a bit older than the Vikings...
When the workload grows too huge, I recommend a solution found in…
November 30, 2013
Once when I was a kid I read in the paper that Elvis had stolen black people's music and sold it to the whites. What an incredibly racist perspective.
Archaeologists have it easy at Hallowe'en parties. No need to dress up: just be a grave robber and come as you are.
You know you're not a kid any…
November 22, 2013
We interrupt this transmission for some adolescent self-examination.
My high school Swedish teacher – I've forgotten her name – played the saxophone and kept an Irish wolf hound. They're pretty wussy creatures as a rule, but my teacher's pet was extreme. She explained that though big as a calf, the…
November 19, 2013
I should blog about the recently announced finds of Romano-Celtic era cult images and Vendel Period gold foil figures at Västra Vång in Blekinge, but I find it kind of boring to act as an archaeological news purveyor. I'll just refer you to this paper about the first find from the site and say that…
November 11, 2013
Certain experiences during my mid-teens a quarter of a century ago left me with this strong Pavlovian reaction to a ladies' perfume called White Linen. It's not very popular any more, and not at all among young women. So imagine my moment of confusion when without warning a whiff of White Linen…
November 7, 2013
Bassam Al-Baghdady (@Al_Baghdady on Twitter) is a Swedish film writer. He's translated Richard Dawkins' 2006 best-seller The God Delusion into Arabic. Bassam tells me the file may be disseminated freely, so go ahead and download Dawkins' God Delusion in Arabic for free! وهم الاله بقلم ريتشارد دوكنز…
November 5, 2013
This is the view from the staff break room in the humanities building at the Kalmar campus of the Linnaeus University. To the lower left is the university building. I haven't been here much during the 14 months since I began my stint as some-time lecturer at Linnaeus. Most of my teaching has been…
November 2, 2013
From Current Archaeology #284: "The 'Great Hall' was entirely excavated in 2012, and represents one of the largest structures of its type". Cf. "Dr. Rundkvist belongs to one of the handsomest archaeologists in his generation."
The reason that there are no Neanderthal sites in Sweden is apparently…
October 29, 2013
Linux is a common operating system, not least in its Android version, and it is universally assumed that a PC (or whatever "IBM compatible" is called these days) will be able to run it. In fact, machines that can’t run Linux are extremely rare since aficionados keep porting the open-source…
October 28, 2013
In Current Archaeology #284 (November), Rob Collins has an insightful piece on an intriguing little metal-detector find documented through the Portable Antiquities Scheme. It's a cast copper-alloy erotic miniature sculptural group, apt to excite both a person's scholarly and prurient interest.
At…
October 18, 2013
Fornvännen's web site has become subsumed into the general document repository of the National Heritage Board. I am not happy about this. But still, we can now offer two new issues on-line for free! So much good research here!
Autumn 2012 (no 3):
Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay on the first farmers of Öland…
October 7, 2013
My personal genealogy has never interested me much, knowing as I do that the number of ancestors multiplies by a factor of two with each generation. Thus in AD 1800 someone born in 1975 had about 2^8=256 ancestors of child-bearing age (or slightly fewer if someone has been productive in more than…
October 5, 2013
One of the main attractions to me of blogging is my core group of smart and funny regular commenters. The most prolific of them is Birger Johansson. As far as I can tell he's been with the blog since November 2009, almost four years. I've recently invited him to write a weekly guest entry using the…
October 4, 2013
I put the business part of my electric shaver in methylated spirits for half an hour. Loads of organic gunk sloughed off of it. Now I know where half of my face has been all these years.
Neighbour from Afghanistan describes his interpreter gig with refugee children & teens in Sweden. They're…
October 4, 2013
"Early Clovis knew their land and stone” -- Of course they bloody did! Finding a site with good obsidian would have been like striking oil today. People would have kept track of the site, and traded with far-off communities.
For humans who want to make more random (or at least thoroughly scrambled…
October 3, 2013
About the time of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, Greek writers started to offer lists of Seven Wonders that the well-read traveller should see. In the 2nd century BC the Hanging Gardens of Babylon began to show up on such lists. The location of Babylon is well known: on the River…
September 26, 2013
Here are two pages out of this week's Swedish crime chronicle, showcasing the rare beauties of the small-town criminal mind. Both remind me of the movie Fargo in different ways.
The first one is awesomely stupid. Wednesday shortly after noon a young couple were driving through the outskirts of…
September 24, 2013
Wolf warrior David Huggins reminded me of the greatest conundrum in finer etiquette: how a gentleman should behave when approaching the lower end of a narrow staircase while in conversation with a lady.
All men know that it is courteous to hold open doors and allow others to pass before us, not…
September 23, 2013
My maternal grandpa Ingemar Leander worked as a sales agent of the Swedish Match Company in Punjab in the 30s before he got married. It was the adventure of his lifetime. Here's the story of his that I remember best.
Once when he went crocodile hunting on the river the party was a little clumsy and…
September 21, 2013
I've suddenly and catastrophically gotten tired of most of my favourite podcasts, removing them from the subscriptions list in Podkicker on my smartphone. It's a lot like breaking up with friends of many years, except that the podcasters' feelings are unlikely to be hurt by my faithlessness. Dear…
September 21, 2013
Junior's buddy expressed an interest in psychedelic pop. Here's a selection of good albums, one for each decade. There is of course also heavier psych rock with prominent blues guitar in the tradition of Hendrix.
60s. Beatles, Revolver
70s. This decade produced a treasury of psych rock, prog rock…