sweden
aardvarchaeology | April 7, 2011
Touching down at Minneapolis airport shortly before 19:00 last night, my wife and I were met by the charming Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich from the Anthro Dept. They got us installed at our hotel and joined us for dinner at the food court of the monstrous Mall of America. (There's a theme park inside it.) Then to bed.
This morning we negotiated the ample, varied and sugar-rich breakfast buffet here at the Fairfield Inn, and then went to the light rail station. We're in the second-generation periphery of Minneapolis near the airport, outside the old industrial fringe. The roads are 6-lane…
aardvarchaeology | January 18, 2011
The current issue of Vanity Fair (#606, February 2011) has an interesting piece on the collaboration between Wikileaks, the Guardian and other old media. On page 110 we're told that Wikileaks is "partly hosted on a server in Sweden that is lodged in a former nuclear bunker drilled deep inside the White Mountains". This confused me for a moment, since there is no mountain range of that name in Sweden. Then I realised the journalist's error and laughed.
The server plant alluded to in the article is indeed in an area known as Vita bergen, "the white mountains". But it's not a mountain range. It…
aardvarchaeology | December 13, 2010A re-run from 12 December 2006.
Tomorrow's the feast-day of St Lucy, and my son's school started off the celebrations a day early. So this afternoon, along with a lot of other parents, I had saffron buns and watched kids in Ku Klux Klan and Santa outfits form a long line and sing Christmas carols. One end of the line was mostly a few bars ahead of the other.
As a pretty recent tradition, the morning of 13 December is celebrated in Sweden with quite a bit of ceremony. It involves white-robed, predominantly young female carolers led by a candle-crowned girl, performing a specialised repertoire…
aardvarchaeology | October 10, 2010Recently I wrote about some policies advocated by the Swedish anti-immigration party (SD) regarding public funding of the arts. I remarked that the party's suggestions show that their members do not have much education regarding the arts or public debates in the field during the past decades. "They are after all a party for the blue-eyed, blue-collar, disappointed, rural, jobless man."
One of the comments to this intrigued me. Said Robert Pearse,
As opposed to the consciously multi-ethnic, university-educated, self-satisfied, city-dwelling, rich?
My, I haven't seen such a display of elitism…
aardvarchaeology | September 23, 2010Immediately after the Swedish election the SD anti-immigration party made a major proclamation advocating policies copied from 1930s Germany - pertaining to the public funding of the arts.
Since the end of the war, the driver of a car is no longer known as an Autoführer, "car driver" in German. He's an Autofahrer, a "car rider". Other words have proved impossible to rehabilitate. A prominent one is völkisch, meaning "national", "ethnic", in some situations "folksy". The Nazis loved folksy culture, music with a lot of tuba and Glockenspiel, traditional songs, leather shorts, hats decorated…
aardvarchaeology | September 20, 2010Sweden held a general election yesterday, and it did not go the way myself and other lefties would have liked. Parliament has 349 seats, and 175 is thus a majority. Before the election, the various right-wing and centrist parties held 178 seats. Now they hold 192. But the conservative voters have not only become relatively more numerous: they have also diversified in their sympathies, propelling the brown fringe of the right-wing block into Parliament in the shape of a new populist anti-immigration party, the Swedish Democrats.
The Swedish conservatives are basically like the US Democrats.…
aardvarchaeology | September 9, 2010Through my reading I was reminded of two Scandinavian early-12th century queens whose careers are pretty amazing. Though originally probably unrelated, they became kin by marriage in several ways.
~1085. Margareta Ingesdotter born, daughter of King Inge I of Sweden. (Birth year unrecorded.)
~1100. Ulvhild HÃ¥konsdotter born, daughter of the Norwegian nobleman HÃ¥kon Finnsson of the Thjotta family. (Birth year likewise unrecorded.)
1101. As part of a peace agreement between the Kings of Sweden and Norway, Margareta marries King Magnus III "Barefoot" Olavsson of Norway. Thus her cognomen…
aardvarchaeology | April 19, 2010Because of blogging and my involvement in the skeptical pro-science movement, in recent years I have come into close contact with Americans as never before in my adult life. More than half of Aard's readers are in the US. It's almost like when I met my wife and suddenly learned lots about China.
A couple of things recur in people's commentary here, largely on religious and political issues. My outlook is clearly quite exotic to many Americans. I view mainstream US politics as half of a full political spectrum, where voters really only get to choose between two different brands of conservative…
aardvarchaeology | February 26, 2010
I'm happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his "technical work", which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many people. Aard is my attempt to do the essay side of what Gould did. The new paper "Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia. Ãrsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period", though, is definitely a piece of my technical work…
aardvarchaeology | January 28, 2010As part of the reading course I've set myself on Bronze Age sacrificial finds, wetland archaeology and landscape studies, I'm reading a new book whose title translates as "Swedish bog cultivation. Agriculture, peat use and landscape change from 1750 to 2000". It's about various ways that Swedes have tried to make use of wetland in the past centuries. The sites I'm studying are mostly in wetlands, and mostly they have been identified when finds have surfaced during the kind of projects the book covers. Its main focus is on the Swedish Bog Cultivation Society, that operated from 1886 to 1939.…
aardvarchaeology | January 5, 2010Everybody knows that English has borrowed the words ombudsman and smorgasbord from Swedish. But did you know that rutabaga is another Swedish loan? And that it was borrowed from a rural Swedish dialect, not standard Swedish?
"Rutabaga" is an American word for the kind of turnip known to Englishmen and Australians as swede. Indeed, the plant hybrid probably once arose in Sweden. In standard Swedish, though, it's called kÃ¥lrot, "cabbage root" -- which is botanically speaking exactly what it is. "Rut-" in "rutabaga" is simply rot, "root". Bagge ("-baga") means "ram", and my speculation is that…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2009The autumn-term closing ceremony in Swedish schools is traditionally held in a church. The country was solidly (if lukewarmly) Christian until quite recently, and Christmas is of course nominally a Christian holiday. But Muslim immigrants have become more numerous from the 80s on, the Swedish Church separated from the state in 2000, and so it is no longer uncontroversial to bring entire school classes to church.
My son's school, when informing us parents about the ceremony planned for last week, emphasised that though the whole thing would take place in a church, no Christian message would be…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2009
Names are one of the things that separate historical and archaeological thinking from each other. History is full of people of whom little is known beyond their names and perhaps a royal or ecclesiastical title, yet still they are considered to be historical personages. Meanwhile, a dead person found in a nameless prehistoric grave can never attain the same historical stature regardless of the objects preserved with the body and the scientific data extracted from the bones.
This fixation with names was once a characteristic of art historians as well. One of the differences between Medieval…
aardvarchaeology | December 1, 2009AIDS was discovered in gay men and the virus is more easily transmitted through anal than vaginal intercourse. For this reason, gay men (defined as "men who have sex with men") have long been forbidden to donate blood in Sweden. Likewise, people who go to bed with a new hetero partner must wait three months before donating blood again.
Now the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has decided to change the rules. A bit. Gay men are now allowed to donate blood. If the last time they had sex with a man was more than a year ago. So you're only allowed to donate blood if you're gay in the…
aardvarchaeology | November 9, 2009
In addition to the archive reports on my two seasons of fieldwork at the Late Medieval and Early Modern harbour of Djurhamn, I have now published a paper that discusses and interprets the results. It's in a symposium volume from the Royal Academy of Letters, edited by my friend Katarina Schoerner and bearing the name SkärgÃ¥rd och Ãrlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgÃ¥rds tidiga historia. ("Archipelago and naval warfare. Case studies in the early history of the Stockholm archipelago"). Other contributors are Jonathan Adams, Kajsa Althén, Jan Glete, Sven Lilja, Peter Norman, Mary Pousette,…
aardvarchaeology | November 6, 2009
I've been publishing stuff in Fornvännen since 1994. But making a vanity search in the journal's on-line version, I found that I am not the first Rund??ist in Fornvännen's history. My family name was mentioned once in those pages before I showed up.
In 1935, Bengt Hildebrand published a bibliographical essay in Fornvännen titled (and I translate), "Notes on the bibliography of Swedish numismatics and archaeological historiography". It covers writings about coins and the history of archaeology. And on page 285 we find mention of one G.H. Rundquist who had published a "Catalogue of the coin…
grrlscientist | October 31, 2009tags: piano stairway, Sweden, behavior, social experiment, streaming video
This video documents an interesting social experiment in Stockholm, Sweden, where students changed stairs into a piano, and compared before-and-after video of stairway use to escalator use. Brilliant!
aardvarchaeology | October 19, 2009The Swedish Research Council just released the list of researchers who are getting funding this year. The following archaeological projects are on the list.
Ingela Bergman: Trade, trade routes and Sami settlements -- socio-economic networks in northern Sweden AD 1000-1500.
Gunilla Eriksson: Individual relationships -- cultural diversity and interaction in Neolithic Poland.
Henrik Gerding: Lateres coctiles -- the early use of fired brick in Europe.
Ulf Hansson: "The Linnaeus of Archaeology" -- Adolf Furtwängler and the great systematisation of Classical Antiquity.
Ragnar Hedlund: Propaganda…
aardvarchaeology | October 13, 2009
Last night somebody googled the phrase "martin rundqvist republikan" and ended up here on my blog. Note the K: this person probably didn't wonder if I'd vote for Sarah Palin. They wondered what I think about the Swedish constitution, which provides the country with a decorative king. Outside the US, "republican" means "anti-monarchist". And yes, I am an anti-monarchist. I think it's a disgrace that the Scandy countries, which are among the world's strongest democracies, are still symbolic monarchies. And I think it's deeply wrong that the hapless royals are born into their golden cage.
But…
aardvarchaeology | September 28, 2009
In 1995 a gold hoard was found at Vittene in Norra Björke parish, Västergötland. Its contents had been amassed over two centuries, and it was committed to the earth in the 3rd century AD. A fine book on the find and subsequent settlement excavations has recently been published and is available in full on-line.
Below is a picture of the Vittene hoard. Above is a picture of a replica of the hoard made of marzipan and gold leaf by Sören Elmqvist for the 1995 Christmas market at the county museum.
Thanks to Niklas Ytterberg for the tipoff.