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.
aardvarchaeology
Posts by this author
February 2, 2013
Some recent Facebook updates of mine:
After four years' living in this house I just stubbed my toe on the bathrooom threshold for the first time -- painfully. Unusually, I was wearing semi-industrial hearing protectors on my way to the john -- because also unusually two people were watching TV at…
February 1, 2013
Another one of the rare production dies for 6/7/8th century gold foil figures has come to light, again on Zealand! This is an unusual design depicting a lady from the front. She's wearing a long dress, a cloak and two bead strings. She seems to be cupping her hands around a ring at her abdomen. The…
January 31, 2013
The Kachingle social micropayment site has been nagging me periodically for the past year. It's something along the lines of Flattr, and finally I thought OK, let's try this out. All they want from me is my email address and my permission. And would you believe it – I just got a US cent.…
January 31, 2013
Reading a term paper by one of my Växjö students, I learned something surprising.
Being a well-read and erudite sort, Dear Reader, you may not be surprised. You already know that Japanese women have been having very few babies each since the 1950s, and that thus there's a growing shortage of strong…
January 26, 2013
Teaching 20-year-olds for the past term has begun to make me feel a little avuncular. But yesterday I had this sudden surge in my avuncularity. First, in the morning I finally took the step of shaving the sparse fuzz remaining on my forehead all the way up to the coronal suture. (That's the lateral…
January 25, 2013
A teenage boy carved this imagery, along with some lines of runic script copied from a book, onto a Viking Period whetstone he found in a Sigtuna spoil dump.
Read it all on-line, Open Access!
Lars Larsson presents some Late Palaeolithic antler artefacts from Scania.
Olle Andersson makes and…
January 24, 2013
Junior and I met this guy in the line to the EuroGamer Expo in London last September. Anybody know him?
January 23, 2013
When I was an undergrad in 1990 we were taught that all six periods of the Scandinavian Bronze Age were 200 (or in one case 300) years long. The most recent radiocarbon work shows that they all had different lengths and were more likely 130-280 years long. And the periods with the most abundant…
January 18, 2013
Most prosperous countries have legislation for what kinds of archaeological finds a citizen has to hand in to the authorities. In Denmark, still using a Medieval term, such finds are termed danefae, "property of the dead". And here is Danish TV4's list of the top-10 such finds of 2012. All but one…
January 17, 2013
Paul Peters, Hindawi Publishing
The Scholarly Open Access web site says that Open Access journal house Hindawi Publishing may show some predatory characteristics. I've simply called Hindawi "dodgy". Their Chief Strategy Officer Paul Peters commented here on the blog and then swiftly replied to…
January 16, 2013
Damn, I must have ridden those very train carriages thousands of times! The crash happened just four stops up the commuter train line from where I live. My wife and I went there this morning with our camera. Details here.
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Update 21 January: On the basis of first reports and information from a…
January 15, 2013
Selected Facebook updates:
Dreamed that a podcaster had mixed ham, celery and rice crispies into my favorite tea leaves. Was very angry.
Green tea leaves accumulate in our house way faster than we use them. Bothers my logistics brain.
Misread a headline on a lady's magazine. "A Retro-Style Wedding…
January 14, 2013
Current Archaeology #273 (Dec) has an interesting feature on an 18th century ship of the line found hidden as a construction kit under the floor of a workshop at a naval dockyard in Kent. The timbers were re-used, but not in an economically or structurally rational way. Instead the greatest…
January 12, 2013
My boss at the Academy of Letters used to head the National Archives. Here's a story he told over coffee the other day.
Some decades ago a delegation of Swedish archivists was driving across the American Midwest to visit a Mormon microfilming facility. Stopping in a small town for lunch, they…
January 11, 2013
Two years ago I was dismayed to find that a pair of crank authors had managed to slip a pseudo-archaeological paper into a respected geography journal. Last spring they seemed to have pulled off the same trick again, this time with an astronomy journal. Pseudoscience is after all a smelly next-door…
January 10, 2013
Ferdinand Balfoort contributes a guest entry upon a recent ancestral pilgrimage to Stockholm.
I gladly agreed to write something for the blog after being introduced by Martin to a book by Frans G. Bengtsson about Early Modern Scottish brigades (and brigadiers) in the Nordic region including Sweden…
January 9, 2013
Hot on the heels of the hapless Science Publishing Group, I have received solicitation spam from another dodgy OA publisher, Hindawi Publishing in Cairo, with another odd on-line archaeology journal.
The Journal of Archaeology has 71 academics on its editorial board. And a strangely generic name.…
January 8, 2013
Selected Facebook updates:
John Lennon offers a grammar lesson: "A working-class hero is something to be". It's an adjective and a noun. Not a verb.
A friend of mine is rehearsing Orff's Carmina Burana and not loving it: "I'm liking the work less with every rehearsal and we're performing it three…
January 7, 2013
Etymologically speaking, ”valkyrie” means ”chooser of the slain”. The job of these supernatural shield maidens in Norse mythology is to select who dies on the battlefield and guide their souls to Odin's manor, where they will spend the afterlife training for the Twilight of the Gods, the final…
January 5, 2013
I found some slightly mouldy bread in the cupboard, cut off the mould and made toast. And I thought about bread and microbes.
For flavour, not as a raising agent, I make sour dough. My method is simple: I mix rye flour with water in a glass, cover it with cling film and put it on the countertop…
January 4, 2013
The wonderful Curiosity rover on Mars has been much in the news lately, but let's not forget about the previous rover generation! Opportunity landed on Mars nine Earth calendar years ago today on 25 January, and it still works fine. Its mate Spirit was mobile on the Red Planet for over five years…
January 3, 2013
The Swedish Skeptics have announced their annual awards for 2012. Both the Enlightener award and the Deceiver award are given to the editorial staff of programmes on Swedish national radio.
Medierna is a weekly media criticism show. They roast journalists in an excellently skeptical fashion and…
January 2, 2013
Here are the ten boardgames I played the most over a year with about one gaming session a week.
Innovation (2010)
7 Wonders (2010)
For Sale (1997)
Glory to Rome (2005) *
Lost Cities (1999)
Verräter (1998) *
Pergamon (2011, reviewed here) *
Telestrations (2009) *
Last Night on Earth (2007) *
Wok…
January 1, 2013
Here are my best reads in English during 2012. I read 50 books this year, six of which were e-books. I flirted with LibraryThing for a while, but lately I've found that Goodreads is more the kind of leisure reading database/community that I enjoy. Find me there.
Packing for Mars. Mary Roach 2011.…
December 31, 2012
I saw something odd in Marrakech recently. Along the main avenues there was a considerable amount of construction going on. But also properties right next door that had clearly been vacated years ago without receiving new buildings. And newish buildings and shop space that were boarded up. Freshly…
December 30, 2012
Yesterday the 29th was Aard's sixth birthday, but I was busy making Småland elk meatball lasagna and playing boardgames so I forgot to post. The State of the Blog is good and I have lots of year-end entries to write, as well as a stack of archaeomags to comment on, and hopefully I will get the…
December 25, 2012
In recent years there's been increasing numbers of archaeological research projects that reference climate change as part of what they want to study. This is at the same time wise and a little silly. It's wise because science should serve the concerns of society, and because if you want research…
December 16, 2012
Remember blogging? It was really big back in 2005. My wife and her journalist friends all took it up. And eventually I did too -- a bit more than a week before Christmas that year. A year later I got onto Scienceblogs. And look at me now, seven years down the blogging line. Still enjoying myself!…
December 13, 2012
Science Publishing Group is another scam Open Access journal publisher or academic vanity press. Yesterday they sent me a form-letter invitation to submit papers or become member of an unspecified editorial board or become a peer reviewer. "Join us!" But they don't even publish an archaeology…
December 12, 2012
A perennial annoyance for me as a parent is the many odd ways in which schools force parents to organise the funding for trips and stays at camp collectively. The general idea is sound: it would not be fair to make the parents pay up front, because then the poorer families might not be able to send…