Aardvarchaeology
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 | May 7, 2015When I tell people I'm an archaeologist, they often ask ”So have you dug at Birka?”. As of yesterday I can finally proudly reply ”yeah, a bit”.
”Birka” is a Latinate attempt to write Biærkey, ”Birch Island”. It's an island in Lake Mälaren, two hours by slow boat from Stockholm. For a bit more than 200 years starting in the mid-8th century, it hosted the first town on Swedish soil, established there as a regulated international trading post under the protective (and probably tax-grabbing) hand of the Kings of the Swedes. This immortally classic Viking Period site has huge cemeteries, a huge…
aardvarchaeology | May 4, 2015I keep getting ads for "Game of War". They seem to be mixed up with ad clips for a game likely to be called "Gratuitous Breasts".
Sw. massiv means "solid, unmixed, not hollow". Eng. massive is almost exclusively used to mean "big". For decades I thought this was sloppy / slangy / colloquial. Today I looked it up and learned that though massive can at a pinch mean "solid", its main dictionary sense is "big". I'm Swenglish.
Travelling an overnighter to give a talk. Bringing no luggage. My presentation is on a USB stick and my entertainment is in my phone. The largest item I'm bringing is a…
aardvarchaeology | April 24, 2015My house is near an LSS housing unit. Lagen om stöd och service till vissa funktionshindrade, "The Law of Support and Service for Certain Disabled People", mainly caters to the needs of people with autism and the like. In 6½ years on Boat Hill, the young people living there have never caused us any trouble at all.
But I still cringe a little when I recall my phone conversation with the man who runs the municipality's LSS housing units. I called him because I was curious about who the young folks living next door are, what diagnoses they have etc. I made it very clear that I was not afraid of…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2015A colleague of mine has left contract archaeology to work for the police as a civil utredare, that is, someone with a university degree who works on crime cases despite not being a policeperson. He told me a pretty neat story about Gubbligan, the Old Man's Gang.
The OMG were three professional bank robbers who never settled down. In the 00s they were in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and still they kept committing armed robberies across southern Sweden. The police were onto them and had begun to tap the gang's cell phones. This way they learned that the OMG had an arms stash out in the woods, where…
aardvarchaeology | April 22, 2015Afternoon tea with my friends Åke and Petra inspired me to re-run this post from March 2010. Professional dendrochronology is still almost entirely a black-box in-house endeavour, that is, it is still not great science. Field archaeologists: when you saw your wood samples for dendro, get two samples and send one to the amateur community! They practice open data sharing. Check out Åke & Petra's web site!
How long ago was the time of Emperor Augustus? Most educated people, including professional historians and archaeologists, will reply "about 2000 years" if you ask them. But a considerable…
aardvarchaeology | April 18, 2015In the second novel-length third of Stephen Jarvis's hefty Death and Mr Pickwick, artist and caricaturist Robert Seymour starts in earnest to put ideas together for the Pickwick Papers. Yes, that's right: here (as maybe in reality) it is the illustrator who comes up with the concept for the book, but being dyslexic and proud he doesn't want to write it himself. Narrative pictures with brief “letterpress” text added by someone else afterwards is an established form at the time. Charles Dickens finally makes his entrance on the novel's stage, first as as “Chatham Charlie”, then under his pen…
aardvarchaeology | April 17, 2015 Baptismal font, c. AD 1200, Näs church, Jämtland.
Been wondering about psychopaths. Having empathy of course de-motivates healthy folks from murderous cruelty. But why would absence of empathy motivate murderous cruelty? Are most psychopaths in fact not interested in such acts?
This is pretty neat: I bought a hat in London and wore it for a few days, and now that I'm back in Stockholm, I still have the hat!
Last Monday was the 8th anniversary of me switching from Windows to Linux because of Microsoft's "Genuine Advantage" scam.
Heh. This hatter's web site has "quaffed" for "coiffed" when…
aardvarchaeology | April 15, 2015 The Archangel Raphael. Recently uncovered mural in Kil church, Närke. C. 1250.
Today's my 16th anniversary as editor of Fornvännen! Issue 2014:3 is now on-line on Open Access.
Ole Thirup Kastholm on dugout canoes from before AD 1 on the Scandinavian peninsula.
Ole Stilborg on Late Bronze Age pottery from Östergötland.
Peter Tångeberg on recently uncovered Medieval murals in Kil church, Närke.
Påvel Nicklasson on early 19th century archaeological innovator Sven Nilsson’s female correspondents and on hints that Nilsson may have turned to folk magic when seasick.
Olof Holm on Iron Age metal…
aardvarchaeology | April 6, 2015Update 10 April: It pays to report problems like the one described below to Google's customer support. Seven weeks ago I discovered the problem. One week ago I reported it. Today the problem was suddenly gone, probably because Google updated the two ebooks involved and pushed new versions of the files to my phone.
I usually shop around for a good price when I buy e-books, and lately Google's bookstore has received my custom. It's not a very high-profile store – you see, this isn't the well-known Google Books, where they offer scanned paper books in your browser. This is something called,…
aardvarchaeology | April 4, 2015Got back last night from a six-day stay in London with wife & daughter. YuSie had rented a flat in Southwark for us via Air BnB, so we had a good base of operations. I fell ill with a bad cold halfway through our stay, which explains the complete lack of museum visits and rock gigs, but I still managed to do some fun stuff. (Left to their own devices, it turns out, the ladies will sleep late, eat big meals, shop for clothes and ride buses for fun.)
Outsiders in London portrait photo exhibition in the crypt of St Martin in the Fields. Lovely work, interesting subjects, and I had a long…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2015In Roald Dahl's last book, Matilda (1988), we are invited to laugh at the main character's parents. They hate books, love TV, dress tastelessly and subsist on microwave TV dinners. Yet only when I saw the musical at the Cambridge Theatre in London this past Tuesday, where the mother additionally practices competition ballroom dancing and both parents speak in a broad Cockney accent, did I realise what the whole thing is actually about.
It's an opportunity for us middle-class bookworms to laugh at a tasteless working-class family who's come into a bit of money (through the husband's fraudulent…
aardvarchaeology | April 1, 2015 At concerts these days people wave their phone flashlights instead of cigarette lighters during the slow numbers.
I broke the rice cooker's handle. Then I fixed it. Jrette smiled and called this macho display. I replied that I wasn't actually using my willie for the work and that breasts wouldn't get in the way.
Me: Can I put the manual for your thermos flask in the recycling? Wife: No, I want to read it first. Me: You never allow me any kinky pleasures.
I just joined the St. Eric Society, also known as the Stockholm Historical Society. Don't know why I haven't done so decades ago.
Charli…
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2015Dear Reader, it is with great pleasure that I announce the PDF publication of my fifth monograph,* In the Landscape and Between Worlds. The paper version will appear in April or May. Here's the back-cover blurb.
Bronze Age settlements and burials in the Swedish provinces around Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren yield few bronze objects and fewer of the era's fine stone battle axes. Instead, these things were found by people working on wetland reclamation and stream dredging for about a century up to the Second World War. Then the finds stopped because of changed agricultural practices.
The objects…
aardvarchaeology | March 21, 2015Ken & Robin have an interesting discussion in the most recent episode of their podcast, on childhood fears. Specifically, they talk about childhood responses to horror stories and movies. I was inspired to write about my own childhood horrors.
Luckily there were no actual horrors in my childhood. Nobody around me was violent or insane or very ill or destitute or hooked on drugs. The years of low-intensity schoolyard bullying was painful but nowhere near my breaking point. Still, I was really scared of some stuff, starting with Selma Lagerlöf.
Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf is one of the…
aardvarchaeology | March 19, 2015Oh fuck. I just installed the operating system update/trojan that makes this particular Samsung smartphone model slow.
I wonder how classical liberalism views labour unions. On the one hand, the right to form one is clearly a civil liberty. On the other hand, it can be seen as what Smith called a "conspiracy of businessmen", or in modern parliance, a price cartel.
Jrette approvingly recommends me to check out pics of curvaceous model Denise Bidot. I have to tell her that though Bidot is indeed beautiful, I'm not quite comfortable looking at pics of her in Jrette's company.
Movie: Pride. Heart…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2015Stephen Jarvis's upcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick is a sprawling book, in terms both of its 800-page girth and of its structure. I've read the first third and decided to write about it now before I forget the details.
There's a present-day frame story about the narrator writing the book, commissioned by an old man obsessed with Late Georgian London's printmaking and periodicals. This story only adds up to a few pages strewn through the first third, but there are weird things going on in it. Why does the narrator suddenly bring up his anorexic mother? I'm more curious about where this is…
aardvarchaeology | March 5, 2015Having read yesterday's entry about what I need to get hold of before I can dig a site, Apel Mjausson asked me on Facebook, "How do you decide where to dig? Sweden is lousy with unexplored sites. Are you following a specific story, looking at place names, take nominations...?"
Disregarding sites I've been paid to dig and sites I've only metal-detected,* my motivations have been as follows. To begin with, I only ever dig sites that I judge likely to produce something publishable and exciting. (And sometimes I lose on that gamble).
At Barshalder in 1997 I dug two graves because at my advisor's…
aardvarchaeology | March 4, 2015I've headed my own research excavations since 1996. Now I'm preparing for four weeks of fieldwork during the upcoming season. I operate as an independent scholar in this context, and none of my excavations have been prompted by land development. Here's what I need to get hold of before I can break the turf or metal-detect the plough soil on an archaeological site in Sweden.
Contacts/notoriety. I couldn't get much of what's listed below without contacts/notoriety in the business.
Funding. Most of my research money comes from small private foundations in annual instalments of about $3,600 (€3,…
aardvarchaeology | February 28, 2015I thought my pet was a meerkat, but it was in fact a mere cat.
Movie: Wild Tales. A collection of unconnected short wry films about revenge. Grade: pass.
Eagle-eyed Roger Wikell found something that looked like a duplicate entry in my database. A flanged axe found at Vappeby hamlet by someone named Winberg, and a flat axe found at Väppeby hamlet by someone named Vinberg. Turns out they are different axes found by different people, one at Vappeby in Torstuna parish and one at Väppeby in Kalmar parish. Phew!
Reading Stanislaw Lem's 1959 novel Eden. His big point is that aliens, their structures…
aardvarchaeology | February 18, 2015Boomer neighbour calls me and tells me his water meter reads "420". "You're such a stoner" is what I avoid replying.
Every year my employers each send me a piece of paper telling me how much they've told the tax man that I've earned. A few months later, the tax man sends me a piece of paper telling me how much my employers have told me that I've earned. In a quarter century of managing my own money, I've never had any use whatsoever for the first piece of paper. In recent years I've begun sticking it straight into the recycling bin.
When the kids in the Minecraft videos that Jrette watches…