archaeology
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2008Dear potential academic employers,
I know you are all secretely competing for who will have the pleasure of giving me a forskarassistent assistant professor's position, to see me fire the imaginations of a new generation of students, to see me produce awesome research in great quantities and present a charming face for your department toward the media and the public.
I know you've just been joking with me for the past four years, receiving my job applications and saying, with a merry twinkle in your little eyes, "Oh no, the loveable little rascal may have 115 published pieces of work and the…
aardvarchaeology | February 25, 2008
The Skalk article I mentioned the other day (with the rubber goat) tells the story of an unusual find made in northernmost Jutland in the summer of 2005. Peter Jensen was stripping some land of topsoil for gravel extraction when, from the vantage point of his machine, he spotted something interesting on the ground. Jensen happens to have much experience of machine operation at archaeological digs. It turned out that he had managed to identify a pit in the subsoil filled with thousands of amber beads: an Early Neolithic votive deposit datable around 3500 cal BC.
Most votive amber deposits…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2008
I'm a big fan of Danish archaeology. In my opinion it is the best in Scandinavia, both regarding the sites they have and what they write about them. This love of Danish archaeology has been a strong incentive for me to learn to read Danish easily, though I still have a very hard time understanding it when spoken. (Rumour has it that Danish babies learn to speak on average several months later than other European ones, simply because it's so hard to discern any words in their parents' fond gurglings.)
Swedish and Danish aren't really separate languages in the sense that e.g. French and German…
aardvarchaeology | February 22, 2008Here's a really good primer on the institutional landscape of US archaeology by Michael Dietler. Some of the perspectives he offers are just mind-boggling.
"There are at least 450 colleges and universities in the United States that offer a B.A degree in anthropology ... . Of those institutions, 98 universities offer PhD programs in Anthropology" [which includes archaeology].
Imagine a country where an archaeology PhD has hundreds of potential academic employers, all of them speaking the same language... If I looked at the nearest 450 undergrad programs measured radially from my home, I'd find…
aardvarchaeology | February 16, 2008Thad at Archaeoporn and Alun at Archaeoastronomy have alerted me to an upcoming new journal: the Past Discussed Quarterly.
"PDQ is a journal designed to provide a bridge between blogging and academia. It will provide stable citeable references for selected weblog posts focussed upon or of interest to the pre-Renaissance past. It is compiled from articles submitted by bloggers on a quarterly basis."
And imagine me thinking that P.D.Q. were just the initials of classical music humorist P.D.Q. Bach, and that the acronym meant Pretty Damn Quick.
[More blog entries about archaeology, journals;…
aardvarchaeology | February 14, 2008
The thirty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Our Cultural World. Archaeology and anthropology be da shit, trudat!
The next open hosting slot is on 9 April. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me. No need to be an anthro pro.
Also, don't miss the brand-spanking-new Skeptics' Circle.
gregladen | February 13, 2008Bats; Signaling in the Rain Forest; Sumatran Tiger Body Parts; Humans in the New World 20,000 years ago.
Bats are funny. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. There are two kinds of bats, microchiroptera and megachiroptera. The micros are smaller, the megas larger, by and large. and the micros have bat-sonar, while the mega's don't The micros tend to eat insects, the megas tend to eat fruit. Micros are more global in their dsitribution, mega's are more tropical.
It is not the case that all of the evidence regarding bat evolution clearly indicates that the common ancestor of both kinds of…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2008Good news from Uppsala: after the end of the year, there will be only one PhD student in archaeology left in that august academic city. This is the result of a simple reform enacted ten years ago by Minister for Education Carl Tham: since that date, no student may enter a PhD program at a Swedish university unless she has funding. The reform was a non-event in well-funded economically productive subjects, but it hit the humanities like a bomb. PhD student seminars started to melt away as people graduated or gave up.
But, as I said: good news. It's neither in the best interest of students nor…
aardvarchaeology | February 11, 2008Post-modernist hyper-relativism unexpectedly rears its ugly dying head in the form of a call for papers from one Tera Pruitt for the otherwise respectable Archaeological Review from Cambridge. Note the scare quotes around the words truth and valid claims.
Call for Papers (April 2009 Issue)
Beyond the Facts: Invention and Reinvention in Archaeological Practice
The Archaeological Review from Cambridge invites papers on the theme of invention and re-invention in archaeology. The past quarter century has seen a rich academic debate about the nature of archaeological interpretation. Post-modern…
aardvarchaeology | February 7, 2008I got another job rejection letter today. Five out of 79 applicants (6%) got research positions in Linköping, 2.5 hours by car from my home. The five are two chemists, one neurobiologist, one environmental scientist and one gender studies scholar. At least I wasn't beaten by any colleague.
What bugs me is the way they trimmed those 79 candidates down to eleven that were interviewed. One criterion was that they only contacted people who have already had post-docs. This biased the selection heavily toward well-funded disciplines where post-docs are plentiful. It's much easier to get one in…
aardvarchaeology | February 6, 2008
As chronicled here in many entries over the past months, computer consultant, New Age author and homeopath Bob G. Lind has carved out his own niche in Swedish amateur archaeology with controversial interpretations of Scanian archaeological sites Ales stenar and Höga stenar. Another Bob Lind is a famous US folk singer. Yet now I've learned that Bob G. Lind is a singer and a song-writer too!
My Malmö colleague Ingela Kishonti has kindly sent me scans of the cover and labels of a 45-rpm vinyl single that Bob G. put out in 1978 on NCB/K.M.C. Records. (This does not appear to have been be the…
aardvarchaeology | February 5, 2008
Spent the day walking around Djurhamn with my colleague Kjell Andersson of the Stockholm County Museum, searching for visible field monuments and generally scoping the area out for our coming investigations. We found no new features belonging to the 16th and 17th cenury harbour, but we identified some good areas for further metal detecting and test pitting.
Also, I added two sites to my growing collection of abandoned club houses and tree houses (of which I have spoken before here, here and here). Note that one has the remains of a PC, an old 386 or 486 judging from the empty processor…
aardvarchaeology | January 31, 2008
A miniature face on a gilded cast copper-alloy display buckle, 5th century AD
One of the many things us Swedish archaeologists envy our Danish colleagues is their numerous large and well-preserved finds of Iron Age war booty. Clearly people in modern-day Denmark had the custom of sacrificing war booty in holy lakes, and when they silted up and became bogs the anaerobic environment preserved many objects perfectly. Generally, the finds seem to be the campaign gear of invading armies, dominated by weaponry but also including tools, personal items and even a number of boats.
Sweden does have a…
gregladen | January 31, 2008
Proposals to give the latter part of the present geological period (the Holocene) a new name ... the Anthropocene ... are misguided, scientifically invalid, and obnoxious. However, there is a use for a term that is closely related to "Anthropocene" and I propose that we adopt that term instead.
The pithy title of the paper making this proposal is "Are we now living in the Anthropocene" (sic: no question mark is included in this title, enigmatically).
It is not an entirely stupid idea. The paper argues that there are major changes of the type often used to distinguish between major…
aardvarchaeology | January 30, 2008The thirty-third Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's. His blog is, err, like, laden with archaeology and anthropology.
gregladen | January 25, 2008
Did humans wipe out the Pleistocene megafauna? This is a question that can be asked separately for each area of the world colonized by Homo sapiens. It is also a question that engenders sometimes heated debate. A new paper coming out in the Journal of Human Evolution concludes that many Pleistocene megafauna managed to go extinct by themselves, but that humans were not entirely uninvolved.
The paper by Pushkina and Raia ("Human influence on distribution and extinctions of the late Pleistocene Eurasian megafauna") examines sources in the literature and a number of databases for Eurasian…
aardvarchaeology | January 23, 2008
Descending toward Ft Lauderdale airport this morning, I was shocked by the expanse of suburban sprawl stretching to the horizon below me. A huge drained swamp, all flat, covered by an intricate pattern of canals and streets and plots with low single buildings, broken only by a few golf courses and one or two cluster of skyscrapers. And nothing in sight older than a few decades. I suddenly realised that the reason the cities in Sim City look so artificial is that they model actual American urban areas. Nothing in this area has arisen organically. Everything has been planned, block by block,…
vhughes | January 23, 2008
Page 3.14 interviews are back! Somehow it's taken many moons for veteran SciBling Martin Rundkvist, of Aardvarchaeology, to answer our barrage of questions. The Swedish archaeologist (pictured at right with his daughter) made headlines recently when he discovered, while metal-detecting on the island of Djurö, a 92-centimeter, 16th-century sword. Much more below the fold...
What's your name?
Martin Rundkvist
What do you do when you're not blogging?
Four days a week, I'm a threadbare gentleman scholar doing research in the 1st Millennium AD archaeology of Sweden. One day a week, I'm the…