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 7, 2007
The premier Swedish dark fantasy quarterly, Minotauren, where yours truly has been a columnist for the past year, is going into an extended hiatus. A fat triple issue to cover 2006 will be distributed in the near future, and then it's goodbye for a while. Subscribers will be compensated. The…
January 7, 2007
Linnea, one of the Salto sobrius regulars, asked two questions today on the Swedish archaeology mailing list that would be in my archaeology FAQ if I had one.
Who owns an archaeological find made by a member of the public?Is it legal to sell archaeological finds?
Here's how things work in Sweden,…
January 6, 2007
My wife just hit me with some pretty heavy surrealism, suddenly handing me a foot-long yellow can of spicy Turkish chicken sausage.
Her mother is visiting with us. The other day, this lady had an appointment with her acupuncturist (no, of course I don't, don't blame me). And apart from the…
January 6, 2007
"With a bit of luck, random sequences of letters and figures may form intelligible words and phrases. The most well-known formulation of this fact is the image of the monkeys and typewriters: if you let monkeys hammer for ever on typewriters, then they will eventually write every possible sequence…
January 5, 2007
The winter issue of Fornvännen (2006:5) came from the printers yesterday. Some of the boxes were all wet after some talented individual had put them in a puddle, but most were fine. Here's the contents.
Andreas Nordberg and Roger Wikell of Stockholm present observations from unexcavated 1st…
January 4, 2007
Dear Reader, the new blog has received its first Google hit, less than a week after coming on-line. And what did this web surfer search for? Bikinis? Big Danish bog booty? No: "Aardvarchaeology". It's already a household name.
January 4, 2007
Grrlscientist is showing this gorgeous picture of a snake that one of her readers sent her. She's actually running sort of a photo publishing service, giving her readers' photography a bit of exposure. I've got to try this myself.
Dear Reader, if you have taken a really good archaeology photograph…
January 4, 2007
I usually divide my evenings between the computer and a book, interspersed with the occasional fondle-raid on my wife. Here are a few recommended reads from the past year.
How and Why Lisa's Dad Got to Be Famous. Michael Allen 2006. Charming short novel about the insanity that is reality TV.…
January 3, 2007
A rescue excavation at Torreby on the smallish Danish island of Lolland has turned up two wealthy inhumations of the 1st century AD. One is an adult female with silver and gold objects including a finger ring, two S-shaped bead-string hooks, a pear-shaped filigree pendant and a "beaker", as well…
January 3, 2007
The first type of megalithic tomb occuring in Scandinavia is the dolmen, a table-like structure built of huge stone slabs and covered with a barrow. They were built in the Early Neolithic, c. 3600-3300 cal BC, and then re-used for centuries afterwards as other megalithic tomb types came and went.…
January 2, 2007
Dear Reader, let me tell you about my on-going research.
Written history begins late in Scandinavia. The 1st Millennium AD is an almost entirely prehistoric period here. Still, Scandinavian archaeologists have long had a pretty good general idea about late 1st Millennium political geography. The…
January 1, 2007
Back in September, R.U. Sirius's podcast turned me on to an intriguing new book. It's named The Visionary State, a big, thick and pretty coffee-table book, with text by Erik Davis and countless jaw-droppingly beautiful photographs by Michael Rauner.
Formally speaking, the book is a piece of…
December 31, 2006
I miss the porn surfers. Around my old blog, you could always faintly hear the sound of one hand typing. But these hairy-palmed people haven't made the jump to ScienceBlogs yet.
I could write a serious entry about how Muslim veils are analogous to bikini tops, and they would come running in hoards…
December 31, 2006
As a Christmas present for my eight-year-old son, I bought a miniature hammerworks and had the rubber gaskets (Sw. packningar) on my old steam engine replaced. The gaskets dried out years ago, so it's never been possible to get the vapour pressure up in it. To my knowledge, Samuel had never seen a…
December 30, 2006
Here's my reply to the reader's question about the effects of being harshly criticised by a colleague you respect.
I was a highly independent grad student. Some might say obstinate and unruly. This was due to a combination of my personality, my tender age and the science wars of the 1990s. I came…
December 29, 2006
Jeez, so much to learn, so many tweaks to do at the new site!
I've turned off comment authentication since people were having trouble with TypeKey. Comment away!
The RSS feed isn't publicised yet, but it works: http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/index.xml (Thanks, Johan Jönsson!).
I'll be…
December 29, 2006
Back before Christmas, as I was waiting for Scienceblogs to open its doors for me, I checked out the people already inside. Specifically, I wanted to know what sort of scientific backgrounds they had, and what their Technorati rankings were. How would I fit in? Was I a minor player?
In mid December…
December 29, 2006
Here's one for Peezee.
Like many Chinese Swedes, my mother-in-law hails from Qingtian in Zhejiang province. Though located in a rich coastal province, Qingtian is a pretty poor place, high up in the hills, with little arable land. Marginal farmers are susceptible to wanderlust, and so Qingtian's…
December 29, 2006
Dear Reader, I'm really thrilled to be on Scienceblogs! You see, I'm the first second or third scholar from the Arts wing that Seed's let in here. Archaeology was long seen as an adjunct to historical research, which is why it's classed as a humanistic discipline and not a social science. We…