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
April 18, 2011
My dynamic colleague Bengt Nordqvist, for whose project I volunteered a few days in the summer of 2009, believes that contacts of his have found two Classical figurines of Venus (above) in the Gothenburg area. It looks like a fun possible case of misidentification. I don't know Classical…
April 15, 2011
When I was in grad school, twelve years ago to the day, my thesis supervisor gave me a part-time job. He got me onto the editorial board of Swedish archaeology's main research journal.
I became co-editor of Fornvännen on 15 April 1999. The other editors were pretty busy people, I was paid by the…
April 11, 2011
So Friday morning, we swam in the hotel pool after breakfast. Then we went into town and had lunch with Heather Flowers at the Acadia café, whereupon I gave a well-attended lunch talk about my Bronze Age project to staff and students at the U Minn Anthropology Department. Good to reconnect with…
April 10, 2011
Journalist Geoffrey York has dug deeper for the Globe and Mail into the story about alleged descendants of Medieval Chinese sailors on the coast of Kenya that I wrote about once in '07. He finds that not even the locals, who supposedly tell "legends" about their Chinese ancestry, believe any of it…
April 10, 2011
I'm a picky reader when it comes to entertainment, and if I don't like the first 50 pages of a novel I rarely continue. The most recent casualty of this policy is a book I was very kindly given by Birger Johansson, Rob Thurman's The Grimrose Path (2010). Its a modern urban fantasy with angels and…
April 9, 2011
I really like this shock absorber at the end of the Minneapolis light rail line under the Mall of America parking garage. It looks like a robot rhino.
April 7, 2011
Touching down at Minneapolis airport shortly before 19:00 last night, my wife and I were met by the charming Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich from the Anthro Dept. They got us installed at our hotel and joined us for dinner at the food court of the monstrous Mall of America. (There's a theme park…
April 6, 2011
Three years ago I visited the US. Security at Newark was a little slow, but I just showed them my Swedish passport and sailed in. You see, there was a visa waiver agreement back then. And I thought there still was until 1½ hours before I was scheduled to take off to the US again this morning.
I…
April 4, 2011
Success and failure in archaeological fieldwork is a graded scale. I wrote about this in autumn 2008:
My excavation at Sättuna has taken an interesting turn. I'm not feeling particularly down about it, but the fact is that we're getting the second worst possible results.
The worst result would be…
April 2, 2011
I joined the Swedish Skeptics Society in 1997. Not because I was particularly aware of or bothered by paranormal claims or alternative medicine, but because I was an unhappy grad student in an Artsy post-modernist environment that was extremely hostile to the idea of cumulative rationalist…
April 2, 2011
Birger Johansson is an awesome guy. We've never met, but he's one of Aard's most prolific and witty commenters. And then, out of the blue, he suddenly tells me that he's got some free shipping to spare on Amazon and sends me a hoard of books, a DVD and a graphic novel! THANK YOU BIRGER! I hereby…
March 31, 2011
I've got a lot of fun stuff going on right now. Yesterday I drove to Uppsala, talked to the County Archaeologist about a site for almost two hours on an empty stomach, was fed cake by my friend and colleague Ãsa of Ting & Tankar, spoke about Bronze Age sacrificial sites to her staff at the SAU…
March 29, 2011
I just got paid half a year's back wages by the ScienceBlogs Overlords. Christmas came early! No, I mean, last Christmas came late!
Paying me off wasn't such a big deal as I usually make only $75 a month. But at least two of the heaviest hitters here on Sb have also been paid. That's a tidy sum…
March 27, 2011
I was reminded of this timely song when discussing an odd 7th century burial at Norsborg with my friend Dr. Ing-Marie Back Danielsson. The buried individual has been murdered, which triggered the association.
March 24, 2011
Half a year ago I gave a talk about sacrificial sites to a Bronze Age seminar at the Stockholm County Museum. Now the contributions have appeared in a fine little volume in Swedish that can be read on-line for free or mail-ordered from the museum. Thanks, editors, for swift and accurate work!
March 23, 2011
Sankt Joachimsthal ("Valley of Saint Joachim") is the German name of Jáchymov, a small town in the Czech Republic. It's in the Erzgebirge mountains near the country's north-western border towards Germany. This place currently has only a bit more than three thousand inhabitants, and yet its name…
March 22, 2011
Last Wednesday I saw the first snowdrop. Last Saturday I heard the first blackbird evensong. Magpies are making these soft chirping noises that spell "let's get it on". This morning it was above 5 Celsius in the shade, and I skipped my long-johns for the first time this year. And when I went out…
March 18, 2011
I'm waiting to hear about jobs I've applied for in Norway and the UK. I'm waiting for responses to a few funding applications. I'm waiting for the snow to melt and the start of fieldwork season.
Dear Reader, what are you waiting for?
March 15, 2011
Skalk's first issue for 2011 opens with a great article by Mr. Bronze Age Religion himself, Flemming Kaul. It deals with two wooden votive helmets found in a bog on Lolland in Denmark. Their closest parallels are from a big multiperiod deposit of pre-Roman metal helmets found at Negova/Negau in…
March 15, 2011
Hi Bloggers,
Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating from Turkey and Qatar, and until it stops, Rackspace must block IP ranges in order for the site to be accessible to anyone. They are also unwilling to…
March 14, 2011
Juniorette is a precocious seven years old. Here's her rendition of Leonard Cohen's 1984 song "Hallelujah", with the Swedish lyrics by Py Bäckman. The performance is influenced to a certain degree by another young Swedish singer's version, Molly Sandén's on her 2009 album Samma himmel.
While…
March 14, 2011
Here's an idea that I'd like some reader feedback on.
Would it be worthwhile to put together an EPUB e-book, about as long as a 200-page paperback, of selected blog entries of mine? I'm thinking I'd organise it in thematic sections and sort each section chronologically. And publish the thing for…
March 12, 2011
Less than a month now! Dear Aard readers Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich of the University of Minnesota have invited me to speak there in April. My wife will accompany me and interpret whenever we run into someone who speaks only Mandarin.
Now, Dear Reader: can you offer me further Minnesota…
March 11, 2011
"The main strength of the book lies in the description of the numerous ways in which peat was utilised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author clearly proves that peat is a fascinating substance with qualities that made it suitable for a wide variety of tasks, from horse bedding…
March 10, 2011
In Sweden, as increasingly in the entire industrialised world, the cost of archaeological rescue excavations rests upon the land developer. This is known as "contract archaeology" or, euphemistically, "mitigation". Here it's largely an affair within the public sector: most of the fieldwork takes…
March 9, 2011
Dear Bloggers,
We have been forwarding reports from bloggers and users to our hosting service, Rackspace, over the past few days. After monitoring our traffic and these reports, Rackspace has determined that ScienceBlogs is experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and has blocked…
March 9, 2011
From the York office of archaeology's equivalent of Nature:
Antiquity invites the submission of high-quality archaeological photographs for publication in the journal.
Two photographs will be selected and published each quarter. A judging panel will decide the best photograph published each year…
March 8, 2011
The National Geological Survey of Sweden has put an interactive deglaciation and shoreline displacement model for the country on-line for free. You can download detailed hi-res maps of your favourite parts of Sweden for 0-16 thousand years ago, and a few thousand years into the future! (But only…
March 7, 2011
I've told you before about the Chiemgau Impact Hypothesis, where a small group of researchers cultivate a minority view of a glaciogenic lake basin in Bavaria as a meteorite crater dating from the 1st Millennium BC. Here on Aard I've published a paper in collaboration with geologists Robert Huber…
March 4, 2011
I've shown samples of Spanish archaeopotter Pablo Zalama's Beaker Culture pieces before. Here are some new replica Roman lamps of his.
If only Swedish pottery had been this good prior to the High Middle Ages! OK, the burnished ware of Ãland and Gotland in the Early Roman Period is good. And some…