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 8, 2011
Three years ago when we moved into our house, the stones of our patio were newly laid and all level. Since then we have been walking across that surface, usually along the diagonal between the patio entrance + shed door and the front door of the house, sometimes around the corner to the compost…
December 6, 2011
Here I go again, bad-mouthing Thor Heyerdahl to his countrymen. But note that I'm quoted as saying, "Norway is a country that has produced many great archaeologists. Thor Heyerdahl was not one of them." Proud Norwegians, your country is great! And its greatness does not hinge upon the posthumous…
December 5, 2011
The Curiosity rover, a science robot the size of a car, is on its way to Mars where it will use a new landing system and hopefully spend several fruitful years trundling about. One of the coolest instruments on it is a laser gun coupled with a spectrometer: Curiosity can zap a rock from a distance…
December 3, 2011
Sweden's goodbye to religious faith and cult continues apace, and so does the relocation of the population from the countryside to the cities. Here's a sign of the times. The National Heritage Board has recently re-issued its 1998 how-to guide for (rural) congregations who wish to quit heating…
November 29, 2011
For the past few days, Swedish skeptics have been shaking their heads in disbelief over Mora municipality's office for the environment. The office had taken the complaints of a man with radiation phobia seriously and demanded that all radio transmitters in the area be turned down or re-pointed to…
November 28, 2011
Here's a cool new detector find from Hvirring in central Jutland, Denmark. I've never seen a piece like this before: measuring only 45 mm in length, it must be a top mount for something - box, horse yoke, staff? But the motif, four dancing gripping beasts, and the style they're executed in, place…
November 26, 2011
Junior made this with his drawing tablet and Photoshop. It's him and his buddy poking each other.
November 23, 2011
Current Archaeology #260 (November) has a piece on the Roman baby burials at Yewden villa in England. Excavated in the 1910s, they have long been suspected to represent infanticide. Now Simon Mays has been able to prove that this is indeed the case by means of new osteological methods and…
November 21, 2011
I've written before about the archaeological landscape surrounding Arlanda International Airport north of Stockholm. Following on yesterday's post about the fake archaeology in Oslo airport, here's a piece of landscape that has been moved inside Arlanda's terminal 2. It's an 11th century runestone…
November 20, 2011
I've written a bit before about Thor Heyerdahl's hyperdiffusionism and the status as a Norwegian national hero he still enjoys despite being completely discounted as a scientist. Last time I passed through Oslo airport I discovered this Kon Tiki-themed restaurant with a faux Ecuadorian Bolivian…
November 19, 2011
Here are some albums that I've been listening to lately. (The previous peek into my listening habits is from May 2010!)
Daikaiju. Daikaiju. 2005. Virtuoso instrumental surf rock.
Dungen. Skit i allt. 2010. Psychedelic 70s prog.
Graveyard. Hisingen Blues. 2011. Bluesy and psychedelic 70s metal.…
November 16, 2011
The Kensington runestone of Minnesota is a rather obvious 19th century fake. But in a recent paper in Saga och Sed 2010, Mats G. Larsson shows something less obvious: the hidden signature of the stone's carver, who also was its finder.
Olof Ãhman came from Forsa in Hälsingland, central Sweden. He…
November 14, 2011
I spent yesterday in good company at the FlemCon 2 gaming convention organised by the S.M.A.S.H. gaming society at Södertörn University College. Juniorette was at a friend's house and Junior is too cool for small cons these days.
Left you see me emoting the "nature red in tooth and claw"…
November 12, 2011
If we look only at contemporaneous written evidence and disregard kings, Iarlabanki Ingefastson is probably the most copiously documented Scandinavian of the Viking Period. But his name does not occur even once on vellum. His memory lives entirely in the many rune stones he commissioned.…
November 9, 2011
Fornvännen 2011:1 is half a year old, and so has been published as an open-access full-text journal. Six months is the Berlin Declaration's limit for what qualifies as Open Access. Check it out!
Joakim Goldhahn on early Swedish rock art documentation
Frans-Arne Stylegar et al. on two bronze…
November 7, 2011
Dear Reader Jim Allen of Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia, kindly volunteered to design some Aardvarchaeology merchandise, for which I am very grateful. Here's Jim at his local museum along with fellow volunteer Charlotte Rogers, in the first picture of readers using their Aard merch! You too…
November 7, 2011
German archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn (1905-90) is a contentious figure. A passionate Nazi soldier and SS archaeologist up until 1945, he became one of the country's most influential post-war archaeologists from the late 50s onward. Fornvännen 2011:3 has just come out containing a contribution on…
November 2, 2011
Yesterday my dad had his boat lifted out of the water like he does every autumn to keep the ice from damaging it. I hadn't seen the lift they used before: it's a remote-controlled motorised thing, fast and nifty. Note the yellow control box.
This reminded me of a fairly common motif in Bronze Age…
November 1, 2011
Year after year, the Swedish language is spoken by a smaller percentage of the world's population. And year after year, the geographical area where Swedish is spoken shrinks a little. But year after year, Swedish is spoken by an increasing number of people. How does this work?
Although Swedish…
October 29, 2011
Back in February I wrote about a new issue of Halland County Museum's periodical Utskrift. And now I have already received two new issues! I'll talk a little about #12 here as I haven't read #11 yet.
The volume is an homage to Lennart Lundborg on his 80th birthday. Lundborg is a beloved figure in…
October 28, 2011
As noted before here on Aard, last winter a man handed in a 2nd century Roman cavalry parade mask to the authorities on Gotland, an island province of Sweden in the Baltic Sea. He says it was found illicitly in the 1980s by a recently deceased metal detectorist. The old man in question was a known…
October 26, 2011
In the 90s, Norwegian death metal musicians were notorious for Satanism, violent crime and church arson. One of these twits burned down the stave church of Fantoft, which though moved in the 19th century had originally been built in about 1150. Any one of my atheist buddies could have told them…
October 25, 2011
A pop musician's and a mathematician's twenties are a precious part of their life. During those ten years of early adulthood, there seems to be a residual childlike creativity or randomness in the brain at a time when a person has had a chance to amass skills and experience. In some fields, the…
October 24, 2011
Here's what's currently outside my kitchen window. Rosehip in the foreground, rowan berries in the middle, and cloned white brick houses like my own in the background.
October 22, 2011
I am making fÃ¥rikÃ¥l, a dish whose name has a kind of brutal literality, meaning "sheep in cabbage". It doesn't ring quite so harshly in Swedish, as we have no separate word for mutton, using the same word for the animal as for its meat. I'm making fÃ¥rikÃ¥l because I had it in Oslo a few weeks…
October 19, 2011
Though I played a lot of tabletop role playing games in the 80s and 90s, I've never been much of a live action role-player (LARPer). Just seems to be way too much preparation for such short events. So the only real LARP I ever took part in was in May of 1992 (it was called Saturday Night Live, ha-…
October 14, 2011
Here's my talk about the Mead-halls book, from the Gothenburg Book Fair, 23 September. It's in Swedish, the background noise is awful and I had a pretty poor voice that day. But anyway.
October 13, 2011
Swedish academic archaeology has a few hard-core post-modernists. Their attitude to the discipline tends to be meta-scholarly (they study people relating to the past rather than the remains of the past), radically knowledge-relativist (they reject rationalist science with its aim to gain cumulative…
October 13, 2011
Steve Jobs is dead, an unfortunate victim of cancer and quackery. I never paid him much attention while he lived. Nor did I ever care much about Apple's products. "Aha", I hear you say, "this is one of those 'PC is better than Mac' screeds". Not so. Because I have been an off-and-on Mac user since…
October 12, 2011
Wednesday 5 Oct. 17:00. About Fisksätra before the 1970s housing development. Fisksätra shopping centre, HAMN project office.
Thursday 13 Oct. 10:00. About Bronze Age sacrificial sites. Uppsala, Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3, Dept of Archaeology.
Monday 17 Oct. 18:30. About…