aardvarchaeology

I'm messing around with Skype and I find it's working very well indeed. (Skype is in fact the only part of my linux installation that can interact with my Logitech USB headset.) So, Dear Reader, feel free to give a shout to mrundkvist!

Commenters on yesterday's entry broached the subject of being the descendant of European royalty. I'd say everybody alive today with even a vaguely europid complexion is such a royal scion. Do the math as you count generations into the past. Two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents…

In the mid-to-late 19th century, just as Scandy (and thus, it's fair to say, world) archaeology was making its first big breakthroughs, a lot of furnished 11th century female burials unexpectedly turned up in the churchyards of Gotland. The chain of events that led to this windfall of new data is…

I just installed Hardy, the brand new version of Ubuntu Linux, on the household's two Dell PCs. They're a Dimension 4550 mini-tower and an Inspiron 6000 laptop, and I'm happy to say that everything's running fine so far. (Almost.) The release is so new that Google hasn't even had time to update…

A number of prominent people in science and science fiction have had samples of their body tissues launched into space after they died. Thus Gene Roddenberry, thus Timothy Leary, thus Clyde Tombaugh, to name only three. Now, I've come up with a similar honour for particle physicists. Currently, it…

The thirty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Hominin Dental Anthropology. Archaeology and anthropology in honour of Maximiliano Gómez. He was the leader of the Maoist Movimiento Popular Dominicano (MPD), a militant organization opposed to the JoaquÃn Balaguer government and to U.…

The former Cistercian abbey of Alvastra in 1639. My brother in arms against pomo nonsense, human/cultural geographer Clas Tollin, has put half the manuscript of his forthcoming book on-line beforehand (fully illustrated, in Swedish). The title is StorgÃ¥rdar, egenkyrkor och sockenbildning i Omberg…

There was a time, around the age of twenty, when I saw some pretty weird movies. First I lived a short bike ride from the Swedish Film Institute, where I caught Kenneth Anger and Luis Buñuel (neither of whom I liked much -- I walked out on Anger's shorts). Then I moved to a place with a TV set…

Restrictions on the use of metal detectors vary from country to country. In England, they are too lax. In Sweden, they are too strict. In Denmark, they are pretty much just right. As I've written before, I think everybody would stand to gain if the Swedish restrictions were eased. My idea is that…

Certain place names over most of agricultural Scandinavia suggest that sacred fields were once prominent features of the landscape there. This was in the 1st Millennium AD, the period I work with. We have places named Field of Thor, Field of Freyr, Field of Frigga, or just Field, and all tend to…

I'm spending tomorrow in a cultic field with Per Vikstrand and a metal detector. So I reckon it were best if we all had a look at the druggiest bit in all of Monty Python first.

Here's a funny little guy from our site in Kaga. It's a crumpled-up disc-brooch, about 75% complete, original diameter 71 mm, copper-alloy pin extant and folded into the brooch, pin-catch extant on back, apparently soldered on. On the surface of the brooch are a central large boss with mock-…

The audio connector on my Qtek 9100 smartphone (handheld computer cum cellphone) has crapped out for the second time in two years. The warranty's lapsed, and repairing the thing would cost a third of what an equivalent machine of a current model would set me back. My 9100's battery life is flagging…

On Wednesday 2 April, British fringe researcher Rupert Sheldrake was stabbed in the leg by a man showing symptoms of severe mental illness. The wound was serious but not fatal. The attacker struck shortly after Sheldrake had called a break in his presentation to the 10th International Conference on…

Tobias Bondesson has kindly sent me photographs of several interesting finds, taken during our recent fieldwork with the heavy dudes of the Gothenburg Historical Society. With his permission, I've inserted them into the relevant blog entries: Fieldwork in Hov and Vretakloster Fieldwork in Tingstad…

The thirty-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at A Very Remote Period Indeed. Archaeology and anthropology, and all seen in relation to the the Rice Track/Soccer Stadium in Houston, Texas. The next open hosting slot is on 4 June. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are…

Those questionable characters in productive Swedish goth band Kurtz have set up an RSS feed direct from their rehearsal room to your desktop. Coming up next: a song about a dorm mate of singer Pocke who was once in 1976 hung-over and wondered where the cereal bowls were. [More blog entries about…

A week ago I complained that I couldn't find any good podcasts, and you guys responded with a wealth of recommendations. More to my surprise, a number of irate fans of the popular Nobody Likes Onions podcast showed up. They left a bunch of nasty comments to the effect that I am a stuck-up faggot…

Frag of a brooch decorated with embossed silver foil. 5th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson. Our site in Kimstad parish looked even better than I'd thought. This was one of many cases where I've come swooping in to sites that I've never visited before and directed metal detecting. In Kimstad, I…

Frag of a lion-shaped badge with a rivet used to fix it to some surface. Photograph Tobias Bondesson. Another day of fruitful fieldwork, with friendly landowners and pretty good weather. We started out with 20 man-hours in the fields around a fortified hilltop settlement in Tingstad parish. The…

Polyhedrical weight. 9/10th century. Photograph Tobias Bondesson. (Martin here, posting from the hostel of Norsholm on the Göta canal, using my handheld and the cell phone network. To get the post on-line, my dear scibling Janet has kindly agreed to act as go-between.) Coin struck for Heinrich…

New genomic research by Matthias Obst of the Department of Zoology at the University of Gothenburg, due to be published in Nature on 10 April, shows that the oldest extant phylum among Earth's animals is the ctenophores (Sw. kammaneter), not, as previously assumed, the sponges. Via Dagens Nyheter…

Here's something cool. Norway spruce trees sprout from subterranean root systems, and though the actual trees come and go, the roots are extremely long-lived. In this they're actually a lot like mushrooms. New research by Leif Kullman at the University of UmeÃ¥ is just being reported on by the…

Last night's Hayseed Dixie gig rocked. This is the bluegrass band playing metal songs that I blogged about recently. Me and Paddy K went there after checking out some stand-up comedy with the ladies. We had been given the wrong starting hour, so we arrived at the Debaser Slussen club in the middle…

The Austrian city of Salzburg has been hit by a measles outbreak among private-school children. Measles are no laughing matter, and thankfully outbreaks like these are rare in the West these days thanks to vaccination. So it comes as no surprise that the school in question is the Rudolf-Steiner-…

[More blog entries about podcasting; podcasting, webbradio.] I've been laid low all day with a cold. To entertain myself while unable to read, I've listened to podcasts, and when I ran out of shows I subscribe to I started checking out Podcast Alley's top-10. Unfortunately, most people being morons…

Reading some US job ads I came across the terms "early career", "mid career" and "late career" applied to academics. As some of you may remember, I decided about this time last year that I had become officially middle-aged (defined as "closer to 50 than 20"). Now it's struck me that I am also mid-…

Viking Period Scandinavians had a funny custom where they would bury silver hoards and not dig them out again. On Gotland, the hoards are so common that the local paper has been known to note tersely that "this year's hoard has been found". But not all Swedish provinces are similarly endowed. My…

I'm trainblogging again, somewhere between Norrköping and Nyköping, and the sun is shining. I am pretty pleased with things, not least with how my project about elite sites in Ãstergötland is working out. Yesterday I received the Kaga parish landowner's permission to excavate in his field after…

Over the past few days I've had an exchange with a paper-mag editor that highlighted the extent to which blogging has eroded my respect for printed media. I was asked by a print mag to write 400 words about archaeology, and they were in a big hurry. I wrote a quick piece (blog-entry length…