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
June 25, 2012
Following up on Saturday's entry on the bleak prospects for many UK archaeology departments, I'd like to share a remark made by a senior colleague a few years back.
All archaeological research covers a certain area of the world. What parts get covered is largely decided by 19-year-old non-…
June 25, 2012
Aard has a persistent problem after the migration of Sb to Wordpress. Every day up to a couple of hundred comments spontaneously get "reported" and become invisible. This mostly hits old entries but also some of the newer ones. So don't despair if your comment shows up on the site briefly and then…
June 23, 2012
As noted here three years ago, UK contract archaeology is in a deep slump where hundreds of archaeologists have been laid off and a number of excavation units have closed shop. Those experienced and well-connected field archaeologists who got the sack didn't evaporate: many of them are still out…
June 20, 2012
With Fornvännen's summer issue on its way from the printers to subscribers, we have published the full contents of last winter's issue on-line (2011:4). This is one of the rare cases where no women have contributed papers, but it's good stuff anyway.
Robin Lindblad on why axes were depicted on…
June 18, 2012
Recently while reading Mats Keyet's 2000 biography of Swedish beat novelist Sture Dahlström, I came across the sad story of the Huskvarna drug. It killed Dahlström's father and many others.
In 1961 Dr. Hjorton's powder was made a prescription drug. This measure was of no great consequence anywhere…
June 15, 2012
Today I celebrate 20 years as a professional archaeologist!
In the spring of 1992 I turned 20, completed my BA, got married and moved out of student accommodation. I was very lucky: I had immediately upon graduation gotten a four-month job on a contract dig for the Arlanda airport bullet train,…
June 11, 2012
I had a brief but interesting conversation with a distinguished Chinese art historian the other day. He's my age but has been far more successful than me despite relocating to Sweden. We were talking about science and superstition, because apparently someone had described the Swedish Skeptics that…
June 11, 2012
Played the zombie movie boardgame Last Night On Earth and Airlines Europe, both very enjoyable.
Had a party where I couldn't understand what anybody said since they spoke Mandarin, but I was happy being Grillmeister, waitor and dishwasher.
Logged five geocaches, which involved cycling around,…
June 10, 2012
Here are three podcasts reporting from the Berlin World Skeptics Conference that took place 18-20 May, all featuring yours truly among others.
Skeptikerpodden (in Swedish)
Token Skeptic (in 'Stralian)
Hoaxilla (in German and English)
June 8, 2012
An unfortunate side effect of the upgrade to Wordpress has been that the feed URLs for this blog have changed, costing me 2/3 of my traffic. This will hopefully be rectified soon, but right now the URLs are:
http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/feed/
or
http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/…
June 7, 2012
As I've written before in a number of venues (e.g. Fornvännen and Antiquity), the current Swedish metal detector legislation needs to be changed. It is too restrictive in relation to honest amateur detectorists. It is keeping them from a) making valuable contributions to archaeological research, b…
June 5, 2012
In March of 2011, the Swedish government launched a state commission under County Governor Eva Eriksson to evaluate our legislation and national goals regarding the cultural environment. Yesterday the commission delivered its report, in which a number of interesting suggestions are made for changes…
June 4, 2012
This has me excited! The Board of the Swedish Skeptics just decided on a date and a city for the 14th European Skeptics Conference: 23-25 August 2013, Stockholm, Sweden. Check it out!
The Swedish Skeptics Association (Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning) invites skeptics worldwide, and…
May 30, 2012
Spent the day digging with my friends Mattias Pettersson and Roger Wikell like so many times before. I like to join them on their sites for a day every now and then (2007, 2008, 2010). The two are mainly known as Mesolithic scholars, but I have been with them on a Neolithic and a Bronze Age site as…
May 26, 2012
Here's a novel way to present a cemetery excavation to visitors.
At Broby in Täby, one of the world's most runestone-rich spots, is the 11th century inhumation cemetery of the famous Iarlabanki family. My colleague Lars Andersson of Stockholm County Museum's archaeology service has been excavating…
May 21, 2012
Yet another case of that silly and damaging humanities idealism.
Last month the Daily Beast listed archaeology among the thirteen most useless major subjects at US colleges, as measured by employment opportunities and earnings potential. Bradley T. Lepper, curator of archaeology at the Ohio…
May 20, 2012
Blogging from a plane over Germany! Whee! A Boeing 737-800 Berlin-Stockholm operated by Norwegian. My 1st experience with internet on a plane.
May 19, 2012
I'm at the Sixth World Skeptics Conference in Berlin, co-organised by the German GWUP and the US CSI. These conferences have been going on biannually since the mid-90s with a recent hiatus. It's the first time I'm at a skeptical event in Continental Europe. With only 300 seats it's not quite as…
May 18, 2012
Now this is how you sell pens!
The squaw had disappeared into the thick under growth, leaving a track Queen Elizabeth I 2010 Mont Blanc Limited Edition White Rollerball like a hippo in the snow. Bud could have overtaken her, of course, and he could have made her take the baby back again. But he…
May 16, 2012
ScienceBlogs was handed over to National Geographic long ago. Behind the scenes, work has progressed to migrate the site from Moveable Type to Wordpress and put NG's yellow-margins branding onto everything. And now the switch-over is imminent. Late May maybe? The new site is already up on an…
May 16, 2012
Bizarre musical development. The drum and base genre of music was created when people turned up the tempo on drum machines to insane speeds. But this guy plays drum and base beats live! Ree-spect!
May 15, 2012
Current Archaeology #266 (May) has a big feature on the Medieval and Renaissance version of Saint Paul's cathedral in London. The current one designed by Christopher Wren, I learned, re-uses none of the earlier edifice's fabric and is not even orientated on the same axis. It was the world's first…
May 14, 2012
I'm a month from my 20th anniversary as a professional archaeologist and I'm considering my options. Unlike most people who make a living in my trade I have not worked much in contract archaeology and I have spent only a few months on the dole. Instead my main source of income during these two…
May 13, 2012
I was thinking about African American culture and how it still shows signs of these people descending from slaves, US slavery having been abolished less than 150 years ago. And I asked myself, what is that subculture going to be like a few hundred years in the future? Then it hit me. That's where…
May 12, 2012
Here's an extremely useful resource. The Swedish National Heritage Board has scanned the great multivolume corpus publication of Swedish runic inscriptions, Sveriges runinskrifter, and put it on-line for free. Currently as PDF files, but in the future there will also be a structured database.…
May 9, 2012
My buddy Claes Pettersson is a field archaeologist in Jönköping and always has a lot of fun projects going. Last year he told me about an undocumented manor park he had studied through geophysics. Right now he's digging bits of Jönköping's obliterated castle. And recently he sent me an…
May 8, 2012
Rode a pretty rare/air plane Bromma - Kallinge on Friday morning. It was a Saab 2000, a 1992 Swedish turboprop model of which only 63 where ever built. (Apparently they saw daylight in the mistaken hope that customers would want a turboprop this size, rather than the ubiquitous jets, and lost Saab…
May 7, 2012
Sigh. Another crappy publishing deal. This firm wants me to write a 500-word encyclopaedia entry and assign copyright entirely to them, with the right to re-edit in the future. And what do they offer in return?
A £30 book coupon and access to a paywall website.
I just can't see why I would find…
May 5, 2012
The Swedish Skeptics have received the 2012 Harry Martinson Memorial Prize from his birth municipality Olofström and the Harry Martinson Society. Martinson, a Nobel laureate, was a poet and prose writer who is particularly well known for his book-length science fiction epic poem Aniara. As…