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 6, 2008
In my recent blog entry "Skepticism and Informed Consensus", I pointed out that a real member of the skeptical movement is not universally skeptical (as may seem evident when you first think of it), but follows scientific consensus. The entry has spun off a lot of side effects: a long supportive…
January 6, 2008
Field archaeology has its perks, one of which is the interaction with the public. Most site visitors are simply full of polite interest. A few tend to be local patriots who wish to reaffirm that their neck of the woods was once enormously important. And then there are those who, well, possess more…
January 5, 2008
The Swedish Skeptics Society (VoF) has just announced its annual awards. The Popular Enlightener for 2007 is none other than my friend Jonathan Lindström, the guy with the Neolithic kids' book! (I abstained from voting, being heavily biased in his favour.)
States the press release, "He receives the…
January 5, 2008
Last night I suffered a less than hour-long bout of scintillating scotoma. It's a weird kind of snow crash in your visual cortex where part of your field of vision is replaced by sparkly geometric patterns. It happens to me once every few years and is sometimes associated with a headache, sort of…
January 4, 2008
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 four Earth years ago today, Opportunity on 25 January -- and both are still going strong! These machines were originally meant to work for…
January 3, 2008
A stoner friend (who is also a dedicated father of two and a successful computer consultant) sent me a link to a sad and thought-provoking story.
A Seattle teen girl takes ecstasy with her friends, the drug apparently triggers undiagnosed diabetes, she dies from ketoacidosis. The girl's friends…
January 3, 2008
The thirty-first Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Walking the Berkshires. Archaeology and anthropology, oh my!
Also, don't miss the 77th Skeptics' Circle over at White Coat Underground.
January 2, 2008
Here's something for lovers and collectors of classic science fiction. Häpna! ("Be Amazed!") was the seminal Swedish sf fiction mag, published from 1954 to 1966, with many translations of the US Golden Age greats but also much work by Swedish writers. Now the Alvar Appeltofft Memorial Foundation…
January 1, 2008
I just learned that my blog entry Your Folks, My Folks in Prehistory has been selected for inclusion in the 2007 Open Lab science blogging anthology! Yay! I was likewise honoured a year ago when I had an entry about the field-archaeological paradox in the volume for 2006.
The 2007 volume is edited…
January 1, 2008
Here are the ten most popular non-carnival entries on Aardvarchaeology for 2007.
Djurhamn Sword Excavated
Stockholm Art Shows
Scandinavian Attitudes to Nudity
Wish I Could Do That in Linux
Lamprey's Spinal Cord Modelled
Djurhamn Sword
Star Wars Lego Girls
Toys to Teach Little Girls Their Place…
December 31, 2007
Over at Respectful Insolence, a lot of people have been discussing the relationship between skepticism and scientific consensus, a topic I brought up recently. And commenter Alvaro has pointed out a kind of counterexample, to whit, that the consensus among US psychiatrists had defined homosexuality…
December 29, 2007
It's been a year now since I started blogging at Sb (after a bit more than a year at Blogspot). Looking at the server stats for December 1-28, Aard is ranked #31 out of 66 blogs here for traffic, with a daily median readership of about 650 uniques, including about 130 identifiable returning readers…
December 28, 2007
I've known for some time from the local papers that the site of the old Tollare paper mill is badly polluted. It's only 1.6 km from my home, on the opposite shore of the Lännerstasundet inlet (one of the main historic shipping routes into Lake Mälaren). A couple of years ago, a large area in the…
December 27, 2007
Guest entry! Charles Redwine treats us to some really good finds porn with commentary: 17th and 18th century native American pottery from Kasita/Cusseta near Columbus, Georgia in the US. Unfortunately, Charles found out that there was some problem with the publication rights to the pix, so he asked…
December 26, 2007
Google Reader is an excellent blog reader, among whose strengths is that it resides somewhere off your computer. This means that you can read blogs from several machines without having to mark a lot of old entries as read. Nor do you have to subscribe to the same feed more than once. Looking at…
December 25, 2007
Town life in Sweden started small in the later 8th century with Birka. The country's capital, Stockholm, is a late town by Swedish standards, having been founded only in the mid-13th century. One of the oldest extant buildings there is the great church beside the royal castle, Storkyrkan. Here,…
December 24, 2007
A discussion in the comments section of the recent Skeptics' Circle reminded me of something I learned only after years in the skeptical movement.
A real skeptic always sides with scientific consensus.
This may sound really unsatisfying and self-contradictory at first. Isn't skepticism about…
December 23, 2007
Here's something for the gearheads.
At home, we've got a permanent Comhem broadband fiber connection offering 10 Mb/s down & up. Its actual performance is about 9 down and 10 up, which is OK. I like to have a swift uplink since I send a lot of large files and keep my data on a DAV server for…
December 22, 2007
Scandy readers will be very familiar with this. As we learned from "Hatten Är Din", "Ansiktsburk", "Fiskpinnar" and other Turk Hits back in 2000, you can get wonderfully absurd results if you listen to a song in a foreign language and pretend it's actually sung in your mother tongue.
Now, a…
December 22, 2007
Two pieces of news to illustrate the state of the academic labour market in Swedish archaeology.
The good news is that an old coursemate of mine has secured a teaching job. He's 46, he completed his PhD in 1999, he's got a decent publication record, he has solid teaching experience and he has…
December 21, 2007
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December 21, 2007
Yet another piece of news about Bob Lind's most recent archaeoastronomical caper (previously covered here and here).
The Scania County Archaeologist has had an independent contractor assess and document the damage done to an Early Iron Age cemetery by Lind and former geology professor Nils-Axel…
December 20, 2007
Dear Reader, welcome to the 76th instalment of the Skeptics' Circle, your bi-weekly portal to the best skeptical blog writing on this or any other world-wide web.
Greta Christina discusses muddled debates where the issue whether certain religious beliefs are factually true gets mixed up with the…
December 19, 2007
Responding to my call for archaeopix, Dear Reader Kristi offers us two pages out of her June 2005 travel journal, recording a visit to Björkö / Birka, site of Sweden's first town c. AD 770-970. Explains Kristi:
"I sketched the things that made an impression on me, from the island and the…
December 18, 2007
The thirtieth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Greenbelt. Archaeology and anthropology to satisfy even the most demanding of connoisseurs!
While I'm at it, Dear Reader, let me ask you to please send me some good archaeological photographs or drawings, with a brief explanation of…
December 18, 2007
Here's one to send you into the vaults, Dear Reader: following John Lynch's lead, I offer links to the first Aard entry of each month this year, each with its first sentence (disregarding carnival announcements).
Jan. "I miss the porn surfers." [link]
Feb. "One thing I've never fought about with…
December 17, 2007
Johan Jönsson of Månskensdans has identified a lookalike of my future self: German musical singer Jerzy Jeske, "Multitalent und Darsteller bei mehr als 40 Premieren in 5 Sprachen". Go Jerzy!
There's also a British actor who looks like I do currently, but I've forgotten his name. I think he was in…
December 16, 2007
In early October two years ago, we had a party. During that evening, a journalist friend helped my wife set up a (pseudonymous, s3kr1t) blog on Blogspot which persists to this day.
I didn't catch on immediately. I'd been a BBS aficionado since the late 80s, regularly spending an hour or two a day…
December 16, 2007
Yesterday myself & Junior met up with Paddy K. Sr. & Jr. and went to Cybertown, a laser-game place in central Stockholm. Here we paid SEK 60 ($11) per head and donned vests with laser sensors and attached laser guns, forming Team Blue. Teams Red and Yellow each consisted of five ten-year-…
December 14, 2007
This is really great. Everybody else has realised that Bob Lind's new "discovery" was a canard. But today, local paper Ystad Allehanda's credulous reporter nevertheless conveys the man's ideas that
Standing stones are unlikely to mark cemeteries. (They are in fact enormously common in early-to-mid…