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
August 8, 2011
Last Wednesday this brig came past my mom's summer house off Bullandö in the Stockholm archipelago. It's the Eye of the Wind, built in 1911 at Brake in Lower Saxony and originally christened Friedrich. It's featured in the 1980 movie The Blue Lagoon.
Did you know that there's actually a ship…
August 7, 2011
Here's the second t-shirt design suggestion, from Stacy Mason! Compare the first one from Jim Allen/Sweeney.
And Barn Owl has volunteered to distribute the shirts! So unless a third design comes my way soon, I'll set up an on-line poll to decide which image goes onto the Aardvarchaeology t-shirts…
August 5, 2011
I always enjoy reading Current Archaeology, both for the quality content and for the simple fact that it's about the UK, an area whose archaeology I have some little insight into and a great deal of interest in. (My interest hinges largely on the many similarities with the Swedish record and my…
August 4, 2011
Littering really annoys me, indoors, in the streets, in parks - and particularly in woods and wilderness. My whole family often collects bagfuls of garbage on walks or visits to the lake. I can't understand the mind of a person who drops an ice cream wrapper on a forest trail, particularly one that…
August 3, 2011
Here's a few thoughts stemming from comments on my recent post regarding the Norwegian terror shootings. The discussion got a little confused as people thought I wanted to discuss psychiatry, when I was really only commenting on the judicial concept of criminal responsibility versus insanity.
Why…
August 2, 2011
Here's a guest entry from Charm Quark, one of the bloggers at Skepchick Sweden. When I read it there I asked her to give me a translation for Aard.
I have alopecia, an autoimmune disease in which hair follicles go into a resting phase, causing hair loss. The form I've got, alopecia areata, causes…
August 1, 2011
Charles Higham remembers his first digs in France, at age 16, in 1956.
[My brother] Richard and I began in the Grotte de L'Hyene. This was a tunnel complex that contained the occasional Neanderthal artefact. It was dark and cold, and at lunchtime we crawled out into the welcome summer warmth for…
July 31, 2011
Here's the first t-shirt design suggestion, from Jim Allen/Sweeney! Says Jim, "The image could be printed in black or white on a contrasting shirt, or even in three colours - say, white for the eyes and trowel, tan for the outline and green for the lettering." I'm thinking that the URL would go on…
July 30, 2011
It's that time of the year again when little usually happens and Sweden's loudest and most aggressive amateur archaeologist likes to get in the news. As mentioned here before, Bob G. Lind has managed to get my otherwise respected colleague Wladyslaw Duczko to join him and dowsing-rod geologist N-A…
July 25, 2011
A company has offered to sponsor Aard with 15-30 free printed t-shirts bearing the design of my choice, delivered to a US address. I'd like to accept their offer, and so I need help from my readers.
1. I need a hi-res design to put on the shirt. I only have the blog's venerable masthead as a lo-res…
July 23, 2011
I spent yesterday afternoon and evening on Twitter and news sites, following the information that came out of Norway about the terrorist attacks. At current count, a madman has murdered 87 people, most of them teens he mowed down with an automatic rifle, and injured a similar number.
The killer…
July 21, 2011
Of late I have spent some time in the nightmare world of P.G. Wodehouse, reading his 1946 novel Joy in the Morning.* Written though it was after WW2, it is set in a timeless travesty of pre-WW1 England. Much of the humour, as you will know, revolves around the interplay between the mentally…
July 20, 2011
Since the autumn of 2009, I've spent most of my research efforts studying sacrificial finds in the Bronze Age local landscape. I was thus pleasantly surprised (though a little disappointed because I missed the whole thing) when I learned that there had been a symposium on the theme "Sacrificial…
July 18, 2011
"Pyramidology", says Wikipedia, "is a term used, sometimes disparagingly, to refer to various pseudoscientific speculations regarding pyramids, most often the Giza Necropolis and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt." The encyclopedia goes on to explain that there are several kinds of pyramidology…
July 17, 2011
Neal Stephenson is an unusually inventive writer of historical and futuristic fiction. I have previously reviewed his 2008 novel Anathem here. And somehow I have now come to think of one of his weirdest ideas: the subterranean orgy computer in The Diamond Age.
This 1995 book bursts with far-out…
July 12, 2011
Driving through Hagby parish in Uppland on a tiny road Friday, I was lucky enough to cross the bridge at Focksta right at the moment when the afternoon sun hit this lovely runestone straight on. I didn't even have to get out of the car to take the photograph.
Dating from the early 11th century,…
July 11, 2011
In the Lake Mälaren area of Sweden, you rarely find any large pieces of Bronze Age metalwork in graves or at settlement sites. When the beautiful larger objects occur - axe heads, spear heads, swords, neck rings, belt ornaments - they almost exclusively come from odd find contexts that I for one…
July 9, 2011
My wife's from Zhejiang province, and so is this can of pickled cabbage that she bought yesterday. I like the label a lot. It's not quite Engrish: of course, we would say "people's mess hall", but the Chinese characters actually denote an extremely basic canteen-like eatery. A mess hall, a canteen…
July 6, 2011
Skogs-Tibble parish near Uppsala is unusually rich in Bronze Age sacrificial finds, so I'm looking closer at it for some future fieldwork. And I found an awesome site in the Sites & Monuments Register, Raä Skogs-Tibble 93:3:
Skrubbstenen [The Scrubbing Stone]. Boulder with oral tradition,…
July 5, 2011
Scientific American has opened a blog portal, poaching a number of excellent erstwhile SciBlings and other blog buddies of mine! Head on over and greet
Bora Zivkovic at A Blog Around The Clock
Krystal d'Costa at Anthropology in Practice
Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics
Janet Stemwedel…
July 1, 2011
I suddenly have this unaccountable urge to comment on the current issue of National Geographic Magazine. Maybe that isn't so strange. I mean, after all, I like reading the mag and I'm on record as saying, in the Swedish Skeptics quarterly no less, that my ideal museum exhibition would be a 3D…
June 29, 2011
Here's a piece of radical Libertarian politics for you. The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, Svenskt Näringsliv, is a respectable mainstream employers' organisation. Their people have identified a problem with the Swedish university system, viz, that unemployed people are entering…
June 29, 2011
Andreas Oldeberg (1892-1980) is rumoured to have had some pretty ugly political leanings. But just because you like cheese, you needn't socialise with cows. If you're into Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age metalwork from Sweden, there is absolutely no getting around Oldeberg's huge illustrated…
June 24, 2011
I've written before (1 - 2 - 3) about the Kenyan village with a poorly supported and recently concocted origin myth involving Medieval Chinese sailors. Now my buddy Axel Andersson has alerted me to a similar case. But here it's sort of the other way around: a Chinese village with a poorly…
June 23, 2011
I don't like Falun Gong, which I regard as a crazy manipulative cult. And I don't like the Chinese government, which I regard as a repressive capitalist dictatorship. These two organisations, in turn, hate each other. And it looks like someone in the Chinese government is trying to use me to…
June 22, 2011
Geocaching is a GPS-aided combination of hide the Easter egg and orienteering for internet nerds. I have logged >700 caches since 2005 and had lots of fun.
BorÃ¥s Tidning now reports about a not terribly thoughtful geocacher. He had placed a cache in a space locked with a combination lock. Part…
June 21, 2011
Is this part of the Stone of Mora?
After some issues with the image resolution in the PDFs, we've now put Fornvännen 2010:3-4 on-line. Read new research for free!
Middle Neolithic festival site in Scania
Roman bronze coinage found in the woods of northern Sweden
Roman mirror shard found on the…
June 20, 2011
Spent four hours at the EuroCon 2011 science fiction convention Sunday afternoon. That's about enough for me. Though I love sf, and I've made a few appearances as speaker and panelist at cons, I've never really been part of sf fandom. It has always struck me as a strangely rearward-looking kind of…
June 16, 2011
The rivers run almost dry in Qingtian prefecture, Zhejiang province, China, because of recently built power dams. This particular dam on a tributary of the main river was completed three years ago. The resulting lake is 100 meters deep above the drowned villages on the valley floor.
And if they…