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
May 7, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, runes, Minnesota, kensington, middleages; arkeologi, runor, medeltiden, usa.]
The Kensington runestone is a 19th century fake from Minnesota. It purports to be a monument left behind by a Scandinavian expedition in the 14th century, but uses anachronistic turns…
May 6, 2007
I'm a big fan of Pandora.com, a smart on-line radio station. It first asks you to name a number of songs, albums and artists that you like -- you can actually start with a single song. Then it figures out (with the aid of a huge database where music has been classified in detail according to a…
May 6, 2007
Wednesday 9 May will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Anthropology 2.0. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Marc Hebert ASAP. (Yes, you can submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs…
May 6, 2007
[More blog entries about memory, psychology, loss; minnet, psykologi, förluster.]
Here's a thought that's been floating around my head for a while. Let's look at the world as a stage play. Turns out there's a difference between a) our memories of dramatic events, b) our ideas about scenery and…
May 4, 2007
First there was Orkut. Then Friendster. Then MySpace (ugleee). Now, lured by my homie Howard Williams and sundry SciBlings, I have registered on yet another social networking site: Facebook. I am currently a sad presence there with hardly any friends. Feel free to befriend my digital…
May 4, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, religion, vikings, vikingperiod, Scandinavia; arkeologi, religion, vikingar, vikingatiden.]
Thursday morning I stopped by the Royal Library in Stockholm and read a paper by Johan Callmer in the great big symposium volume concluding the Vägar till Midgård…
May 3, 2007
As I've mentioned before, quartz is a tricky material to make tools of. Quartz-tool production waste is very common on prehistoric sites in most of Sweden where flint is rare.
I just thought I should share one of the least attractive entries in the inventory of the Museum of National Antiquities in…
May 3, 2007
Using my friend Stefan's home-made illuminated drawing pulpit (tried & true), I've traced a photograph of the new-found Kaga foil-figure die to make it easier to understand the motif. The drawing will appear in a short paper in the summer issue of Fornvännen.
May 2, 2007
[More blog entries about jewellery, archaeology, Sweden, migrationperiod, darkages; smycken, folkvandringstiden, arkeologi, Linköping.]
A few weeks back, myself and the Gothenburg metal detectorist team found some fine things in Kaga parish, Östergötland, as recounted here. One is a piece of an…
May 1, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, history, Scandinavia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway; arkeologi, historia, Skandinavien, Danmark, Norge, Sverige.]
Archaeology consists of a myriad of weakly interconnected regional and temporal sub-disciplines. My work in Östergötland is largely irrelevant to a…
April 30, 2007
Atheist bloggers have long had the Carnival of the Godless to publicise their work. Then came MoJoey's Atheist Blogroll. And now there's the Humanist Symposium carnival, whose first instalment came on-line the day before yesterday. If God hadn't wanted you to have contact with other atheists, then…
April 30, 2007
Since the 1980s there has been a post-modernist movement in Western European archaeology where a strong influence from lit-crit, sociology and Continental philosophy has been felt. This has led, among other things, to radical relativism in some scholars, and to a tendency for archaeology…
April 28, 2007
Just a note about yesterday's metal detecting at the Baggensstäket battlefield. We worked for less than four hours, but I got lucky and ran into the burnt remains of wooden fortifications on a seaward slope. Loads of nails and spikes in one place, and thanks to the fire, some were in pristine shape…
April 28, 2007
Yay, Aard's finally got a Google PageRank! Instead of rising gradually over the past four months, it's been zero until it suddenly jumped to six out of ten.
The hapless porn surfers are already arriving in droves. Welcome guys! "Teeny teeny porn porn sex sex big booty", everyone!
April 27, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, business, obituary; arkeologi, uppdragsarkeologi, dödsruna.]
Dr. Roger Blidmo died of a heart attack yesterday. I just talked to a long-time employee of his who confirmed the rumour. The guy was only 56. My heart goes out to his family.
Roger was one of…
April 26, 2007
As you may have noticed, founding father Kambiz has been very busy lately, and his brainchild the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival has not quite received the attention it needs. Now, I'm not as good as Kambiz at web design, but I'm OK at long-running repetitive administrative tasks. So I've joined…
April 26, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, history; arkeologi, Nacka, historia.]
Long-time Dear Readers may remember the visit I paid last May to the wooded Skogsö hills where the Battle of Baggensstäket was fought in 1719. Bo Knarrström, Tomas Englund and the others on their project team are…
April 26, 2007
OMG, how stupid! And I ain't foolin'.
The other day my SciBling Shelley at Retrospectacle got nastygrammed by Wiley InterScience for reproducing part of a figure from a paper in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture! Shelley had provided due reference to where she had found the figure…
April 25, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, vikingperiod, vikings, Denmark, Germany; arkeologi, vikingar, vikingatiden, Tyskland, Danmark.]
I made one of my infrequent visits to the University of Stockholm campus today. After getting my PhD in 2003 I was really tired of the place, and I've pretty…
April 25, 2007
I've just sheepishly realised that I did something wrong four months ago when I installed the script code for the hit counters I use for this site. Forget anything I may have said about this blog's readership. It's way, way higher than I thought. In fact, it pretty much doubled the moment I moved…
April 24, 2007
[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, vikingperiod, vikings, gaming, amber; arkeologi, vikingar, vikingatiden, Småland, spel, bärnsten]
As told here before, in 2005 I was lucky enough to take part in unearthing the first set of amber gaming pieces to surface in Sweden for over a century.…
April 23, 2007
As reported here before, a month from now there's an interesting symposium in Estonia under the heading Rank, gender and society around the Baltic 400-1400 AD. I'm not going, but for those interested I append the list of participants and papers below the fold. I like to know a little about who's…
April 22, 2007
For a few weeks, I've been slowly, slowly learning my way around the Open Source operating system Ubuntu Linux. Lots of things work just fine. Indeed, they work incredibly well considering that I downloaded an entire operating system with office software for free from the net. But every now and…
April 21, 2007
Ubuntu Linux is a free Open Source operating system with office software, intended to empower the Third World by freeing it from dependence on Western software companies. It shares its name with a humanist ideology promoted by people such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. The software is also…
April 20, 2007
Browsing through the reviews section of the current issue of Antiquity, I came across a confusing and irritating piece (behind a paywall) by one Dr. Charlotte Whiting. She works for the Council for British research in the Levant and is based in Amman in Jordan. Her review article treats three…
April 19, 2007
Last week an anthology I've edited was delivered from the printers.
Scholarly Journals Between the Past and the Future. The Fornvännen Centenary Round-Table Seminar. Stockholm, 21 April 2006. Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser 65. Stockholm 2007. 109 pp. ISBN 978-91…
April 19, 2007
Many senior Swedish archaeologists are afraid of metal detectors and uncomfortable with the idea that the public might have access to such machines. Likewise with information about the locations, or even the existence, of newly made metal detector finds. "Keep it quiet or you'll attract looters."…
April 18, 2007
As reported here before, the Medieval church of Älvestad in Östergötland, Sweden, burned down on 29 March. On 12 April I visited the site and took some pix. I was somewhat heartened to see that what has been destroyed was largely a product of radical 18th century re-building. The remaining 12th…
April 17, 2007
This entry was first published over the cell-phone network on my old site, without pix, on Friday 13 April.
I write this sitting on a rock outcrop just east of the great barrow of Disevid in Heda parish. It brandishes four great old oaks at me as it sits across a little marsh with a small stream…
April 17, 2007
This entry was first published over the cell-phone network on my old site, without pix, on Thursday 12 April.
This morning we wrapped up our 20 person-hours in Varv, joined by regular Dear Reader Lars Lundqvist. The weather was great, but we found nothing older than the 11th century. A fragment of…