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
March 22, 2007
My buddy Lars Lundqvist, long-time regular Dear Reader and contributor of excellent archaeopix, started a blog three weeks ago: Arkland. It's in Swedish, it's finely illustrated, and it's mainly about Swedish archaeology. Yes, this is the guy who did all those cool digs at Slöinge, Vittene and…
March 21, 2007
Dear Reader, watch me toot my own horn (yes, I have a very supple spine).
Technorati doth heed prayer. Or at least it heeds "support tickets". So now this blog is visible again on the top-10 archaeology blogs (currently #3 with 187 linkers) and skepticism blogs (currently #9). Netwide.
March 21, 2007
As reported profusely in the mainstream media, the Chinese government is investing in iffy African regimes to secure access to the troubled continent's raw materials. For years, Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe has for instance received Chinese tech and training to control information flow: phone…
March 20, 2007
Survival of the Sickest is a collection of eight pop-sci essays on medicine from an evolutionary perspective. It does not present any single cohesive line of argument, but the book's title refers to one of the main themes: the idea that common hereditary diseases would not have become widespread…
March 19, 2007
An important skill in archaeology is what my friend and mentor Jan Peder Lamm calls fragmentology: the ability to identify objects when all you have is small pieces. The only way to learn this well is to look at a lot of objects. So here's a fragmentological exercise for you, Dear Reader: of what…
March 19, 2007
I no longer listen much to the synth pop I loved in my teens. The artist that has perhaps dropped most dramatically in my affections is Jean-Michel Jarre, largely because I really dug him once. But I still listen to one of his albums with great pleasure: 1984's Zoolook.
This disc sounds as if the…
March 18, 2007
Dagens Nyheter reports that the Stockholm University Library has seen some pretty bad vandalism. Yesterday morning it was discovered that someone had disconnected the drain-pipe from an upstairs washbasin and opened the taps to the max. Several cubic meters of water flooded out during the night…
March 17, 2007
My kids see a fair share of lukewarm religiosity with their grandma and teachers. At home, they're taught that there are basically two types of characters:
Real people who merit empathy and solidarity, such as themselves,
Fictional ones that you can make up stories about, such as Spiderman, the…
March 16, 2007
I got Dick, babies.
Having failed to find any of the suet necessary to make the British dessert Spotted Dick, I settled for a surrogate. The third butcher I talked to told me that he had beef tallow for sale that he usually uses to make black pudding. I bought half a kilogram of the waxy yellow…
March 16, 2007
Regular Dear Reader Christina lives in a small town in western Canada, where there are "lots of nice rock art and arrowheads and Indians (though they don't want to get excavated for political reasons) ". Here's a cool snippet from a letter she sent me.
"Speaking about books and the local library, I…
March 15, 2007
There's childhood and youth and young adulthood. And then comes middle age. I've been wondering when my Middle Ages are going to begin. I've left the Iron Age of my youth, for sure, and I have a feeling that my Roman Imperial times are drawing to an end. So, the other day, I found the answer.…
March 15, 2007
Dear Reader, please let me remind you of the Hopeful Buttons to the left under my profile. One will exalt this blog in the eyes of Technorati, the second will allow you to heighten the esteem in which the blog is held by a Swedish ranking engine, and the third will let you look at stuff I would…
March 14, 2007
Carne vale is what you say to your usual meaty diet when the fasting of Lent sets in. Science fans do it at Tangled Bank 75, other skeptics at Skeptics' Circle 56.
I wonder if they say chili con carne vale in Mexico.
March 14, 2007
It's a posthole! It's a rubbish pit! It's an elk-trapping pit with the remains of a wooden catch box at the bottom! No -- it's a hearth. A Four Stone Hearth! The eleventh carnival in the series, to be precise. And it's all about humans. As the poet put it,
"Now I'm the king of the swingers
Oh, the…
March 14, 2007
Scandinavians are unusually cool about nudity in certain well-defined situations. The Finnish sauna is a well-known example. Within Swedish families, nudity is also commonplace, while many other nations feel that allowing your kids to see you starkers is tantamount to sexual molestation. (Which is…
March 13, 2007
Dear Reader, are you at heart a shady character? Have you seen the seamy side of things? Is your outlook bleak? Is your appearance disreputable, your gaze shifty, your shirt unwashed, your hair style bedraggled? Are you familiar with spleen, anomie and ennui? Is your mother worried about you?
I…
March 13, 2007
Spotted Dick is a traditional British dessert. I must have it.
More exactly, I must make it. And to that end, I must find suet. I was twice thwarted in this on my lunch hour as I asked at reputable Stockholm butcher's counters. Neither had it, one didn't even know what it was, both referred me to…
March 12, 2007
At short notice, I've taken on hosting the next Four Stone Hearth blog carnival (about anthropology in the widest sense, including archaeology). It's supposed to come on-line on Wednesday. The carnival's home page currently doesn't reflect the change in scheduling, so you'll simply have to believe…
March 11, 2007
A new peer-reviewed intercontinental multidisciplinary journal has just been announced: Journal of the North Atlantic (JONA). Apart from my discipline, JONA will also cover paleo-environmental reconstruction and modelling, historical ecology, anthropology, ecology of organisms important to humans…
March 10, 2007
The spring issue of Antiquity, a journal for which I am proud to act as a correspondent, has come on-line and is being distributed on paper as well. It has a lot to offer those interested in Northern European archaeology: papers on the construction date of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, England; on…
March 10, 2007
Wednesday last I asked Aard's growing ranks of regular Dear Readers to say "Hey" and introduce themselves. And the response was great! Many, many thanks for all the appreciative comments.
My purpose in asking this was twofold: a) I wanted to get to know you guys better, b) I wanted to know how I…
March 9, 2007
Somebody once said to me, "You archaeologists don't really know anything, do you? I mean, it's just guesses, right?". Well, sometimes I do despair about archaeology as a science. Can we actually know anything about what life was like for people in the deep past? Are we doing science at all or just…
March 8, 2007
I sometimes run appreciations of little-known blogs here. By no stretch of the word can Pharyngula be called little-read: it's one of the top-few-hundred blogs on the entire net. But today is P.Z. Myers's 50th birthday, and that's cause for rejoicing!
Dear Reader, let's say you happen not to know…
March 8, 2007
Here's a pretty far-out news item from Dagens Nyheter.
"A 58-year-old Dutchman had one ear and his nose bitten off by another man and a school had a power outage due to a brawl in Växjö on the morning of Thursday.
Shortly before three in the morning police were called to break up a fight in Växjö…
March 8, 2007
I just realised that the lyrics of this traditional Swedish children's song read just like the recounting of a hallucinogen experience or a psychotic episode. Imagine a goggle-eyed grizzled old hippie buttonholing you at a vegetarian restaurant and forcing you, giggling, to listen to the story of…
March 7, 2007
The stats for returning readers have taken a healthy jump from about 35 daily in November through January to about 45 daily in recent weeks. I like that a lot! Dear Returning Reader, please take the time to comment on this post, say something about yourself and tell me what kind of blog entries you…
March 7, 2007
Gruff Rhys, front man of trippy Welsh popsters The Super Furry Animals, released his second solo album back in January, Candylion. (Here's the promo site.) Its mellow quirky tunes will appeal to fans of the Furries. I particularly like the title track, "Beacon in the Darkness" and the hummable "…
March 6, 2007
I've been blogging here for over two months now, and Aard is steadily working its way upp the Technorati ranking scale. But Google hasn't taken any notice yet: it still considers the authority of this site to be a 0 on a scale of 10. Meanwhile, my old hibernating blog appears to become more and…
March 6, 2007
A burgeoning community of atheist bloggers has come into being since Mojoey published his Atheist Blogroll. The many blogs publishing that list has done a lot for Aardvarchaeology's Technorati ranking. I haven't got a blogroll, mainly because it saves me from having to add courtesy links all the…
March 6, 2007
I'm generally no fan of "contemporary archaeology", where 20th century sites are investigated and interpreted. If you want to know what those people did, ask them or read the local paper. But Claes Pettersson at the Jönköping County Museum has written a piece in this genre that I actually like a…