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
December 12, 2007
The Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm has recently completed a new permanent exhibition about Swedish prehistory. It was planned under the stewardship of the controversial Kristian Berg, a non-archaeologist whose attitude to the museum placed in his care may be summarised as politically…
December 12, 2007
The German language now has its own ScienceBlogs. Thirteen new SciBlings! I can read them but I can't write German well enough to take part much. So far they don't have any archaeologists, but I've found a few entries of interest to people with such predilections.
Volker at Darwins Erbe ("D's…
December 11, 2007
Here's another snippet from my on-going book project. Context: I've surveyed the central-place indicators of the Late Roman Period (AD 150-400) in Östergötland, and now I'm moving into the book's main period of study from AD 400 onward, starting with an evaluation of the Migration Period hillforts…
December 10, 2007
Dear Reader, according to my server logs, you are likely to live either in the US or in Sweden. Considering the blog neighbourhood I'm in, and the contents of Aard, I believe you care about science. Regardless of party politics, and wherever we all are in the world, I think we can agree that we…
December 10, 2007
An album I can really recommend is LA quartet OK Go's 2005 disc Oh No. It's catchy, glammy rock with swagger and brains and decadence, recorded in Sweden and beautifully produced by Tore Johansson and the mighty Lindgård/Mopeds brothers. In addition to them kicking ass musically, the band's lyrics…
December 8, 2007
Bob Lind chalking some apparently quite genuine cupmarks, a ubiquitous type of Bronze Age rock art.
Alternative archaeoastronomer Bob Lind (note that I do not call him an unhinged man with crackpot theories) felt himself vindicated this past summer by the Swedish Heritage Board. On a set of new…
December 7, 2007
This 88-page booklet by Åsa Virdi Kroik is named "You'd rather lose your head than turn in your drum". The title refers to shamanic drums among the Saami. The book is based on an MA thesis in the history of religion defended at the University of Stockholm in 2006. Reading it, I soon realised that…
December 6, 2007
The twenty-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Remote Central. Archaeology and anthropology gonna be fun, gonna be fun, gonna be fun in de sun!
The next open hosting slot is on 27 February. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an…
December 5, 2007
Here's a funny toy: a remote-controlled car with a built-in metal detector. Drive it over a piece of metal and it'll go BEEP and light up. It doesn't have anything like serious ground penetration, but still, a cool toy.
There are several reasons that metal detecting has not been made into a…
December 4, 2007
A long-time friend of my parents wrote me a letter recently, telling me that she'd found something unusual in her late mother's jewellery box. Today I visited her and had a look.
It's a small cast copper-alloy crucifix, darkly patinated, with a semi-obliterated image of the crucified Christ…
December 3, 2007
Virginia Hughes -- that bright, lovely and suddenly quite aptly named minion of our Seed Overlords -- has asked me to write something about parthenogenesis. (That's virgin birth, for you non-Greeks.) Now, I don't know anything about biological parthenogenesis. I just suspect that my wife may have…
December 2, 2007
My Bulgarian ICQ buddy Tatyana Mircheva is studying design in Birmingham, UK. Recently, she published this photograph on her blog. It's really good, and I assumed it was some professional advertising shot she'd lifted from the net. Turns out it's a self-portrait, shot at home with the aid of a…
December 2, 2007
Wednesday 5 December will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Remote Centrral. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Tim ASAP. (You are encouraged to submit stuff you've found on other people's…
December 1, 2007
Today, the Swedish Skeptics Society celebrated its 25th anniversary with an afternoon seminar in Stockholm. I've been a member since 1997, a co-editor of the society's journal Folkvett since 2002 and a board member since 2004. The >2000-member society is Sweden's nearest equivalent of CSI (…
November 30, 2007
Professor Åke Hyenstrand, chair of archaeology at the University of Stockholm from 1988 to 20013, died on Wednesday 28 November, aged 68. He was mainly known for his large-scale analyses of the Swedish sites and monuments register and for studies of late-1st Millennium political organisation. A…
November 29, 2007
Back in June I posted a translation of a remarkable opinion piece written by two senior psychiatrists, commenting on their examination of a mentally ill man who had just committed his second murder. Today the papers report that Socialstyrelsens Rättsliga råd ("The judicial council of the social…
November 27, 2007
From about 1845 to 1930, Sweden saw massive emigration to the United States. According to one estimate, about a third of the country's population left. In 1900, more Swedes lived in Chicago than in Gothenburg. Many factors conspired to send people on their way: population expansion, a lack of…
November 26, 2007
Reading a good paper by Sten Tesch (in Situne Dei 2007) about porphyrite tiles scavenged from Roman ruins and re-used as portable altar slabs in 11th century Scandinavia, I was reminded of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. It's a really good story about relics, up there with the cross of Jesus…
November 23, 2007
Yay, for once somebody at Sb except me is writing about European archaeology! SciBling Chris at Highly Allochthonous offers a long thoughtful writeup of a recent geology paper on the post-glacial flooding of the Black Sea basin and its possible effect on neolithisation. With a beautiful colour map…
November 23, 2007
A royally furnished inhumation cemetery of the 7th century has been excavated at Loftus in Teesside, north-eastern England. The finds are sensational as they hail from the "final phase" of furnished burial, when England had already been re-Christianised and grave wealth was in steep decline. Among…
November 22, 2007
The other day, I started writing my Östergötland book in earnest, and I'm really enjoying myself. Here's a snippet of today's work.
The oldest known territorial unit in Östergötland is the härad district (etymologically, "army council"), of which the province originally had eighteen. This…
November 21, 2007
Blog carnivals!
The twenty-eighth Four Stone Hearth is on-line at Hot Cup of Joe. Archaeology and anthropology to a most awe-inspiring extent.
The next open 4SH hosting slot is already on 5 29 December. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an…
November 20, 2007
Fornvännen is one of Scandinavia's main scholarly journals about archaeology, Medieval art and adjacent disciplines. Its first volume appeared in 1906, and for the past several decades it's been issued quarterly. I've been an avid reader since 1990 and one of the journal's editors since 1999.
I'm…
November 20, 2007
For a Swede, I believe I have an unusually small environmental footprint as my income is low and my habits relatively ascetic. But compared to most people in the world, anyone with half my standard of living is of course a huge culprit. The only thing I might brag about is having relatively few…
November 19, 2007
Two months from now I'm going to spend a week on the US East Coast, attending two conferences and doing some sightseeing.
From 18 to 22 January I'll be in the Chapel Hill/Durham area of North Carolina for the 2nd Science Blogging Conference, where I'm co-chairing a session on blogging about the…
November 18, 2007
Dear Reader, have you lately heard much merry folk rock with apocalyptic lyrics about the coming of the Antichrist over London?
My dear friend Asko is, among other things, a war gamer, a geocacher, an antiquarian amateur, a fiction writer and a musician. Hear him play the bass on releases by 90s…
November 18, 2007
Dear Reader, it's been a while since I asked you to press any buttons. If you like Aard, and haven't already done so, would you please do me the favour of pressing a button in the left-hand column, right below my profile? Good grades make blogger happy! Thanks.
November 17, 2007
Archaeologists have an extremely strange worldview. We never simply see what's going on around us right now: we keep thinking about what a place would have looked like hundreds of years ago, or what it will look like in the far future. The Onion has a great piece on-line about just that: "Crime…
November 16, 2007
I'm on a guest blogger roll. Here's something about 11th and 12th century metalworking finds from Sigtuna near Stockholm by my friendly colleague Anders Söderberg. He and our mutual friend Ny Björn Gustafsson are making sense of stuff that usually ends up with burnt daub in large anonymous sacks…
November 16, 2007
Maritime archaeologists have found what may be the first Viking ship, or at least some wreckage, in the Lake Mälaren area. A T-sectioned multi-meter timber looking a lot like a keel lies half-buried in the culture layer on the lakefloor just off the proto-town of Birka on Björkö.
Thanks to Hans of…