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 11, 2012
I'll tell you two things up front: this book is my friend's first published novel; and I would have read it with great enjoyment even if I had no idea who the guy was. Paddy Kelly classifies it astutely as “Dick lit / Romantic comedy”: it's Bridget Jones or Sex and the City, only from a male…
December 9, 2012
I'm bothered by odd redundancy in an 80s song lyric. Millas mirakel advises us that "It is better to light the fire of life than to never be allowed to be yourself". Yes, and? That turn of phrase should compare two undesirable things, like "It is better to lose one toe than to lose both eyes." Here…
December 6, 2012
I haven't blogged much about my research lately. One reason is that I am only working with it at ~50% this academic year since I'm teaching in addition to my usual 25% editor's job. Another is that I'm in an intensive desk-based data collection phase, which gives rise to a lot of hypotheses and…
December 5, 2012
Mads Dengsø Jessen of the National Museum of Denmark wrote me to say that he and his colleagues are re-launching the old Journal of Danish Archaeology (1982-2006) as Danish Journal of Archaeology at Taylor and Francis On-Line. Three papers will hopefully come on-line before Christmas, and further…
December 4, 2012
Today is the Swedish Skeptics Society's 30th birthday! It was started in 1982 on inspiration from the American organisation CSICOP (est. 1976). I've been a member since 1996 and now I'm the society's sixth chairman.
So, what does a skeptical society do? We're a science-friendly resistance movement…
December 4, 2012
For over 20 years I have received Pax, the journal of the Swedish Peace Society. I have always read it as a matter of duty. Rarely has it interested me much. I am a passive pacifist -- a passivist, as a radical relative of mine once wrote me from prison, where he had been put for vandalising a…
December 2, 2012
Beer & Vikings – of course I had to review this new Italian boardgame, the follow-up to 2011's Sake & Samurai in the “Spirits & Warriors” series. Let me say at the outset that the game art shows little influence from actual Viking Period material culture and the text shows little…
November 30, 2012
Our municipality has contracted a survey firm to evaluate the after-school activities for children that it supports. Circus school, piano lessons etc. Questionnaires have been sent to (some? all?) enrolled children.
My kid is in three of these activities. I got three almost identical questionnaires…
November 27, 2012
I found this lovely portrait on Wikipedia. 18th century portraits almost exclusively show people with European looks. But here a Russian painter has painted a Kalmyk girl in 1767. The Kalmyks are a Western Mongolian group living in south-west Russia. The girl looks just like Juniorette's buddy…
November 26, 2012
This past weekend saw my third annual boardgaming retreat: 48 hours in good company at a small Nyköping hotel during the slow season, all meals included. Me and my buddy Pieter took a walk upriver to the first bridge and back past the castle ruin late on Saturday night, but otherwise I spent my…
November 22, 2012
All the monotheistic religions have a problem known as Theodicy or The Problem of Evil. Simply put, it's the question “How can there be evil and suffering in the world?”. The religions in question posit that their god knows everything that happens, so he isn't ignorant of the shit that's going on.…
November 18, 2012
The former Swedish state church has been reasonably independent for twelve years. Now Juniorette's school plans to send the kids walking in festive procession with flaming torches to the Swedish church's local branch for an "Advent gathering". Good fun no doubt, and Juniorette would probably be…
November 11, 2012
These days I usually stick short updates of things I'm thinking about on my Facebook feed, and use the blog for longer pieces. But some of those snippets make me kind of happy, so here's a selection of recent ones.
I never give money to beggars. Instead I make an annual donation to Stockholm's…
November 8, 2012
My part-time employers the Academy of Letters are charmingly unworldly in a muscular way. They're not a government body and are beholden to nobody except King Gustav III who laid down their bylaws in the 18th century. He hasn't cramped their style in quite a while. And they are quite comfortably…
November 2, 2012
Check it out in full, for free!
Kim von Hackwitz on miniature Middle Neolithic battle axes around Lake Mälaren
Roger Wikell & Jörgen Johnsson on the re-discovery of a runic inscription on a cliff side near Stockholm
Herman Bengtsson & Christian Lovén on indications in Medieval church art…
October 31, 2012
Icelandic sagas and a single archaeological site in Newfoundland document a Viking Period presence of Norse people in the Americas. Now National Geographic's November issue has a piece (here and here) on new work in the field, lab and museum collections by Dr. Patricia Sutherland. It deals with a…
October 29, 2012
Qoph is an excellent heavy psych rock outfit from Lidingö not far from where I live, and I'm really excited to learn that their third album is on its way! Here's the first single. I like it!
October 28, 2012
Current Archaeology #271 has a long interview with Mick Aston of Time Team fame. When asked how he got into archaeology, Aston paints a little vignette of the renowned High Medieval archaeologist, professor Philip Rahtz:
[At Birmingham in the mid-60s] Philip Rahtz had just been appointed, and was…
October 22, 2012
Riding the subway back into town today after a morning of looking at sites with an old course mate, I became aware of a loud woman a few seats away who would not sit still. Skinny, early middle age, simple clothes. At first I thought she was talking on her cell phone, but then I realised that she…
October 20, 2012
Jack Parsons (1914-52) was a rocketry pioneer, a science fiction fan and a deeply committed occult follower of the aged Aleister Crowley. I recently read the 2004 edition of John Carter's biography of the man, Sex and Rockets. The Occult World of Jack Parsons.
Despite such promising material, it's…
October 19, 2012
My landscape students in Växjö did extremely well on the exam: 79% passed with distinction. And they were extremely kind in their evaluation of the course, which took place before the exam.
I've been put in charge of an on-line course in upplevelseproduktion, tourist site production, and so will…
October 8, 2012
Let's make a list of religious prophets! But only the ones who, having convinced their faithful followers that they spoke the word of God, suddenly received revelations to the effect that God totally wanted them to fuck children or adolescents. I know of three to start with. Let's have some more,…
October 6, 2012
My dynamic friend and colleague Frans-Arne Stylegar has managed to liberate a respectable sum of Norwegian oil money to fund a collaboration with Ukrainian archaeologists under the direction of professor Igor Khrapunov. The first results of this collaboration have been two international conferences…
October 1, 2012
Spent Friday though Sunday in London with Junior and his buddy, both 14. My original plan had been to find a gaming convention with both a video game track and a boardgame track. But failing that, I got tickets for the Eurogamer Expo at the Earls Court Convention Centre in London, which is all…
September 25, 2012
I've been aware of fossils since my dino fanboy days in Greenwich Country Day School, and I used to collect them in a small way on family trips to Gotland. Back home, I would put fossils in malt vinegar and see bits of shell emerge from the limestone matrix. But I never found a trilobite.…
September 18, 2012
A few weeks ago my friend Tobias Bondesson and his fellow amateur detectorists Iohannes M. Sundberg and Tommy Olesen found a 3.5 kg silver and gold hoard from the 5th century AD near Roskilde in Denmark. They reported their find to the town museum, the hoard was lifted by experts and excavations…
September 16, 2012
The Chinese Twitter equivalent Weibo censors searches for the names of places where there are protests (currently Shenzhen). You could write a script that searches for the main Chinese cities on Weibo and plots the ones that are censored on a map. Presto, a dynamic map of Chinese political unrest!…
September 12, 2012
My dad's a member of a yacht club in order to have sheltered jetty space for his motorboat. It's not a fancy affair, most of the boats being small and decades old. But many of them are sailboats, and for the past ten years the club has been organising family-oriented mini races in the evenings. A…
September 8, 2012
Yesterday I went to Öland and showed my students some sites and landscape. We were joined by human geographer Carl-Johan Nordblom who knows all the post-Viking stuff. Lovely day! Though we couldn't find our way to the best-preserved of the Resmo passage tombs. The land owner has tired of visitors…