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 14, 2011
Current Archaeology #254 (May) has a pretty funny 6-page feature by Spencer Smith of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. He claims to have found the site of a Surrey manor house that saw the birth of the last Prince of Wales who was actually an independent Welsh…
June 13, 2011
Fecal sample submission window.
Dan, be cake. Because the Danish-Belgian Cake Company says so.
"Busen" means "breasts" in German and "the naughty one" in Swedish.
No appointment needed. Come whenever you lie fallow.
"Shroff" means "tariff" in Engrish. Maybe.
Porular blog Aardvarchaeology a…
June 10, 2011
Ever since I started blogging in 2005 I've been talking about my Ãstergötland project, where I've been chasing the elite of the mid-to-late 1st millennium in one of Sweden's richest agricultural provinces. This project has produced a number of journal papers, talks, radio appearances, archive…
June 9, 2011
"Lie Fallow" means "in your spare time, without a prior appointment" in Engrish.
Everybody loves Engrish, the surreal dialect of English found on signs, in menus, on clothing etc. in the Far East. Much of it seems to stem from blind over-use of dictionaries, where the non-Anglophone user picks one…
June 8, 2011
I've written a bit before about the slightly odd interior decoration in Chinese hotels. Here's a Lovecraftian table lamp that sits on the check-in desk, inspiring cosmic dread, at the Relax hotel in Hangzhou.
June 7, 2011
Listening to the Dice Tower and Spiel podcasts and reading forum entries on Boardgame Geek, I've come across two central aspects of US boardgaming culture that have me kind of baffled. One is the ubiquity of open-to-all gaming groups, and the other is the emphasis on the FLGS, the Friendly Local…
June 6, 2011
2011
Having completed our first twelve years together today, my wonderful wife and I have agreed to go on for at least another dozen.
1999
June 4, 2011
Dear Reader, it's raining in Hangzhou and I am not well. I have had the shits since Wednesday evening, some headache, and last night I seem to have had a fever. Both of the latter problems are kept at bay by wonderful ibuprophene. I was fully active and enjoyed myself Thursday and Friday. But I'm…
May 30, 2011
Here's just short note to tell you, Dear Reader, that the Great Firewall of China is fucking annoying. I am unable to access Twitter, Facebook, any Blogspot blog and often most of Google's services including Gmail.
Meanwhile, the Chinese populace is so closely keyed in to what's happening in the…
May 28, 2011
Len Fisher is an Australian physicist based in England. He's also a foodie involved in molecular gastronomy. In 2002 he published an essay collection on the UK market, The Science of Everyday Life, which has now been re-issued for US readers.
Before looking at the book's contents I have to comment…
May 27, 2011
I've criticised Western museums for buying or accepting as gifts looted Chinese antiquities. This practice, in my opinion, stems from an outdated and irresponsible fine arts perspective where the exact provenance of a museum piece is not very important. When you're dealing with anonymous…
May 26, 2011
Chinese tourist sites follow a set of conventions that seem to go back hundreds or thousands of years, far into a past when tourism, as we understand it, did not yet exist. Essentially we're dealing with named and inscribed sites. I have visited many in my Chinese travels, but since I can't read…
May 24, 2011
My mother-in-law grew up in the mountains near Fushan in the prefecture of Qingtian (pronounced CHING-tien), inland Zhejiang province. Though the prefecture's name means "Green Field", it's pretty poor and has been a major emigration area for decades. The owners and staff of many or most Chinese…
May 22, 2011
On the flight from Amsterdam to Hangzhou Saturday, I observed some interesting behaviour on the part of my Chinese co-travellers. After the main meal, the stewardesses went around hawking tax-free goods. At this time, a bunch of people stood up and formed a large prattling group in the aisles…
May 18, 2011
Marabouts are West African con men & fortune tellers who market their services in Europe with little flyers printed on coloured paper. In France, there's an ongoing collectors' craze for these notes. I found one under my windshield wiper the other day. I translate:
Mr Seeki
Fortune teller,…
May 17, 2011
Here's a fun find, courtesy of my buddy Claes Pettersson. As detailed on Jönköping County Museum's blog, a funny little cast-brass trinket came to light during fieldwork at Odensjö ("Odin's Lake"), where recently a very fine Roman era weapon burial has also been unearthed. From a functional…
May 16, 2011
I've reported before [1 - 2] on the on-going discoveries in the Tjust area of NE SmÃ¥land province. Here Joakim Goldhahn is employing the country's best rock-art surveyors to work through an area that is turning out to be extraordinarily rich and diverse in Bronze Age petroglyphs. These years will…
May 13, 2011
One of the stranger concepts in Tolkien's writings is that of "High Elves". Why are these elves high? It has nothing to do with drugs, though in the Tolkien Society we used to joke about them smoking lembas. And it has nothing to do with stature, though nobility and body height go together in…
May 12, 2011
My colleague Karl-Magnus Melin specialises in ancient and modern woodworking and has a major paper in Fornvännen's summer issue about well fittings made from hollowed-out tree trunks. He's kindly sent me some post-conservation pics of a Viking Period wooden drinking bowl. It's lathe-turned unless…
May 11, 2011
In the car yesterday I listened to two excellent narrations of Lovecraft short stories. And I marvelled upon re-encountering the opening paragraph of "The Picture in the House" from 1919.
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven…
May 10, 2011
Today I did four hours of metal-detecting at a site in VÃ¥rdinge where a Wendelring bronze torque from about 600 BC has been found. Reiner Knizia's popular card game Lost Cities has a thinly applied archaeological theme, and on the board is actually an image of a Wendelring torque just like the…
May 9, 2011
Once I went metal-detecting without my GPS. Luckily the site was not far from my home and I found only one object worth collecting, so I could mark the spot with a stick and return after dinner to get the coordinates. Another time I forgot my rubber boots and was confused by my detector's strange…
May 5, 2011
The other day asked what UK practice regarding the treatment of archaeological human remains has been like in recent decades. Dear Reader Dustbubble gave such a good answer that I must promote it to guest-entry status.
Martin sez ".. But what, then, was the practice like between 1857 and 2008?"…
May 3, 2011
Funding trips for classes of school children is a complicated business in Sweden. This is due to two commonly held conventional ideas. One is that it would be unfair to ask each family to simply pay for their kid, since not all families may be able to afford the trip. The other is that the kids…
April 30, 2011
For some years I have been a happy reader of (and frequent commenter on) Current Archaeology. Now Dear Reader Marcus Smith has arranged (or bought?) a complimentary subscription for me to the other big UK pop-arch mag, British Archaeology. While CA is a private property, BA is published by the…
April 28, 2011
Bertil Albrektson is a very cool Bible scholar. A former professor of Old Testament Exegetics in Turku, Finland, he was on the most recent Swedish Bible translation commission despite being an atheist. His ground-breaking little 1967 book History and the Gods. An essay on the idea of historical…
April 26, 2011
[More about photography, children, childpornography, pornography, porn; fotografi, barn, pornografi, porr, barnporr, barnpornografi.]
In issue 2011:1 of Fotografisk Tidskrift, the journal of the Swedish Photographer's Association, is a fine essay in Swedish by Jens Liljestrand (Twitter @…
April 24, 2011
The other day I overheard a cringeworthy conversation between two 70ish ladies of the New Age persuasion. They were talking about how a great change is imminent in our society, as heralded by the unusually many catastrophes taking place (huh?), and by the 2011 end of the Mayan calendar, "or was it…
April 23, 2011
When I was a kid, beavers were kind of exotic animals that lived in distant parts, like bears or wolverines. Over the past decade or two though, they've multiplied here in Nacka municipality, much as the wild boar population has exploded in this part of Sweden. Still, the beavers haven't really…