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
January 7, 2011
Boat Hill, where I live since two years back, is a 70s tract-housing estate where roofs are almost flat. Snow thus tends to build up on them. Of course, pile enough snow onto any structure and it will collapse. But I've come across a curious notion here. Several neighbours have told me to beware…
January 4, 2011
Dear Reader, remember the remote-controlled Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity? How long is it since the last time you thought of them? Spirit landed on Mars seven Earth calendar years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and at least Oppy still works fine! Spirit has sadly been stuck on the…
January 4, 2011
[More about architecture; arkitektur.]
View from the west, 9 January.
Back in November I blogged about how I helped put a roof on my dad's octagonal sauna. A reader asked to see the plans of the building. And here, with my dad's permission, are plans and elevations by architect Ulf Gillberg. Isn't…
January 3, 2011
Historiography is meta-history, that is, the historical study of historical studies in the past. It is useful and valuable to historical research as ongoing quality control and provides a kind of user's manuals for those who wish to use old literature in new studies of the past. Also, it can often…
January 2, 2011
Check out Yves Marchand's and Romain Meffre's poignantly beautiful photographs of abandoned buildings in Detroit! Explains Wikipedia,
Detroit has numerous neighborhoods suffering from urban decay, consisting of vacant properties resulting in low inhabited density, stretching city services and…
January 1, 2011
I seem to be on a poetry roll here, kids.
When I was 14, Citadel Miniatures put out a small run of a novelty pewter miniature named Sanity Claws: a tentacled menacing monstrosity for the festive season. And now Norm Sherman of the Drabblecast, whom I do not hesitate to call a genius and an Elder…
December 31, 2010
Looking for a good book? Here are my best reads in English of the past two years.
2009
The Colour of Magic. Terry Pratchett 1983. Lavishly ornate humorous fantasy.
Dancing with strangers. Inga Clendinnen 2003. On contacts between the first English penal colony and the aboriginals at Sydney Cove in…
December 30, 2010
Yesterday my buddy Swedepat showed up at 13:30. (That's his name to help distinguish him from Irish Pat.) I hadn't been able to find a third or fourth gamer on short notice. But our plan was to try out the new games in my house, and we started off with Juniorette's Christmas present, Forbidden…
December 29, 2010
One of the songs my old band played was a tune that Anders had written to a poem by Hermann Hesse. It's in his 1927 novel Steppenwolf and treats one of the central themes of the book, the idea that immortal genius (such as that of Mozart or Goethe, Hesse felt) might exist on a plane immeasurably…
December 27, 2010
The Swedish Skeptics' annual awards for 2010 were just announced.
Ãsa Vilbäck, MD, receives the Enlightener of the Year award,
"... who has described diseases and treatments in an unbiased and informative manner on her TV show Dr. Ãsa on Swedish state television. By upholding a good popular…
December 25, 2010
When I turned 25 my friend Sanna gave me a little poetry anthology that I have since treasured. Kathryn & Ross Petras's Very Bad Poetry (1997) is a lovely read. One of the versifiers most voluminously represented there is W.T. McGonagall (1830-1902). After quoting his words, "The most startling…
December 23, 2010
Archaeology mags have accreted on my shelf, though something's happened to my subscription to the always enjoyable Current Archaeology. I've written the editors.
Populär Arkeologi 2010:4 opens with a look at the garishly painted reality of Classical sculpture. The only place where you could see…
December 21, 2010
Dear Reader, are you of such a bent that you are not content with reading what I write in English? Is your inclination also to hear me speak in Swedish? Is that what you want, now? Is it? Say it! Is it?
Let's be frank. I think we both know what sort of pleasure-seeking little beast you are.
So head…
December 20, 2010
I'm eager to start reading more e-books. I rarely re-read books (except for work), and my friends rarely borrow paper ones from me, so I have little reason to hang on to paper books. E-books would be just the thing. But the prices aren't any good. I either have to pay more for an e-book than what…
December 18, 2010
Thebes is a multi-award-winning 2007 German board game by Peter Prinz. I just bought it on a tip from my buddy Oscar, who found a good offer on-line and thought of me because of the game's theme. It's about archaeological expeditions in the early 1900s. The box is big, the production values are…
December 17, 2010
According to a fresh press release from the County Museum of Bohuslän in Uddevalla, western Sweden, the museum's maritime archaeologists are studying a well-preserved shipwreck whose construction date lies in the AD 1210s or 1220s.
The shipwreck is in shallow water in the Jore fjord and was…
December 16, 2010
Today is my fifth birthday as a blogger! (Here's my first entry from 2005.) Five years, that's 13% of the time I've been out of the the womb so far. I had no idea that I'd be doing this. Funny how your life can change.
My mean number of unique readers per day has been as follows.
2006: 157 daily…
December 15, 2010
Junior, who is a digital native and knows way more about current net fads than I do, turned me on to the multi-talented Neil Cicierega and his band Lemon Demon. Excellent synth pop that should hit the sweet spot of any Apples in Stereo fan. I know it hit mine!
Here are the beautifully clever and…
December 14, 2010
Here's a case of odd priorities. The Royal Library in Stockholm keeps a copy of everything that is printed in Sweden (and Swedish), and also has a lot of people tending LIBRIS, the national bibliographic database. Recently, the folks who keep track of scholarly publications in historical research (…
December 13, 2010
A re-run from 12 December 2006.
Tomorrow's the feast-day of St Lucy, and my son's school started off the celebrations a day early. So this afternoon, along with a lot of other parents, I had saffron buns and watched kids in Ku Klux Klan and Santa outfits form a long line and sing Christmas carols…
December 10, 2010
Yesterday I had been invited to speak at a seminar organised by the Forum for Heritage Research, a network sponsored by four Swedish organisations in the field. The headline was "Hope for the Humanities", and I must admit that I gritted my teeth at the idealist, anti-market and downright…
December 9, 2010
Hot on the heels of the Motala bone boner, here's another ancient likeness of a wee-wee.
Dear Reader Martin Kenny has kindly given me permission to publish a few pictures of his cock. It's made of sandstone or a similar rock, and to my eye it's pretty clearly modified by human hands, though it may…
December 8, 2010
In October, I wrote about a ruling of the European Commission against Sweden's restrictions on metal-detector use. The angle, kind of irrelevantly one may think, was that our rules counteract the free mobility of goods, which is of course a central concern of the EU.
On 30 November Sweden's…
December 6, 2010
Update 13 December: Florian at Astrodictum Simplex has translated the whole entry into German. Thank you, Florian!
Update 21 December: German pop-sci web zine Scinexx reports on the poor status of the impact hypothesis and refers to this blog entry. They also mention a really weird idea of the CIRT…
December 3, 2010
My old buddy, Aard regular Hi33y, spotted something worth taking a picture of Tuesday night in Birmingham. Not only have I apparently been canonised, I am also the owner of a Brummie rag market!
Yesterday at Landvetter airport near Gothenburg, I found a local wood-stove company demonstrating this…
December 2, 2010
I was at a Viking Period workshop in Birmingham until Wednesday noon. A sudden, major and sustained snow dump on the area south of London meant that I couldn't go home the way I had planned: train to London, train to Gatwick airport, plane to Skavsta, bus to Stockholm, be home in the early hours of…
December 1, 2010
Reviewing David Wengrow's What Makes Civilization? is made difficult by the discrepancy between its title and its contents. Out of about 240 pp in total, only ~180 are intended to be read, the rest being comprised of bibliography, index etc. And these pages do not offer meditation on the necessary…
November 30, 2010
In the preceding entry I gave a list of good stuff about a Gambian vacation. Here's the flip side.
My first trip to Africa, a week in Agadir, Morocco in the mid-1990s, was marred (but not ruined) by the locals' constant begging and aggressive attempts to sell me stuff. I recently relived this…
November 29, 2010
Gambia is Africa's smallest country, with 15 million people living on a flat stretch of river plain carved out of central Senegal. Besides peanut cultivation, tourism is an important source of revenue, and indeed coastal Gambia is one of the most Westernised parts of sub-Saharan Africa in this…
November 28, 2010
Excellent Swedish feature-journalism magazine Filter has a 17-page piece about the skeptical movement in its current issue (#17). Magnus Västerbro's take on the movement in general and the Swedish Skeptics Association in particular is supportive yet not uncritical. I've been a board member of the…