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 | June 24, 2014 Stensö castle, trench C, the part along the perimeter wall. Note the ashlar.
Drove down to Vikbolandet on Sunday night with my excellent colleague Ethan Aines from Stanford, and we were met at expedition HQ by seven of my Umeå students from last autumn semester. Very pleased to see them again! They've just finished their second term and several are scheduled to go on to the third. So I'll be seeing them in the halls in September when I take on my second batch of Umeå freshmen, and if I'm lucky I'll get to supervise a few of them for their BA theses. Everyone's being charming and nobody…
aardvarchaeology | June 22, 2014It's Sunday morning and I'm getting ready for four weeks of excavations. I haven't done any digging since the Pukberget cave dig in 2011, and my last multi-week dig with a big team was at Sättuna in 2008. So it's high time, and I'm excited. Getting stuff from my study, packing stuff at home, buying some extra tools and a lot of food.
My crew of ten will be assembling at a farm-labourers' dorm in Östra Husby starting tonight, and tomorrow we break turf at Stensö castle ruin as the first archaeologists to dig there. Most team members are first-year students from Umeå whom I taught during the…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2014 No chair could cast a shadow like this
Many graphic designers like to cut out objects from photographs and give them a digital drop shadow on the page. Here's an example of why this is often a bad idea. Since it's working with a 2D image, the drop shadow algorithm has to assume that the object has no depth or surface contour. In the example above, we have a 3D chair that's been given a shadow that would only be realistic if the object had been a 2D picture of a chair cut out of a piece of flat cardboard.
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2014Core po-mo science studies professor says roughly "You don't get to choose your own reality and laypeople don't know better than scientific consensus about factual issues."
Rode a Bombardier CRJ 900 from Copenhagen to Warsaw and then the competing model Embraer 170 from Warsaw to Munich.
Five years ago I cut saplings and tree branches to give me a view from the kitchen window of Jrette in the playground. Now she's long past needing that kind of oversight and new saplings form a solid wall of greenery outside the window.
My new project deals with early 20th century street lamps. I can debunk…
aardvarchaeology | June 12, 2014A few months ago I registered on Elsevier's clunky old on-line manuscript submissions site and submitted a paper to Journal of Archaeological Science. It got turned down because the two peer reviewers disagreed on whether it should be accepted or not. No biggie: I resubmitted elsewhere. Today Elsevier Science & Technology Journals spammed the address I submitted from with an offer of language revision!Need help getting published? Elsevier Language services can help you
Dear Dr. Martin Rundkvist,
Could expert language editing improve your chances of getting published?
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aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2014 Part of my subscriptions list in Podkicker
I give these podcasts $5-8 monthly. Only the HPLLP has a pay wall.
The Drabblecast -- Norm Sherman produces strange stories by strange authors for strange listeners.
The Geologic Podcast -- George Hrab on skepticism, music and more.
The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast -- Chad Fifer and Chris Lackey on pre-WW2 horror fiction.
Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff -- Kenneth Hite and Robin Laws wax eloquent and eclectic on gaming, fiction, history, occultism, books, movies, and the list just goes on.
I've also been a paying member of the Planetary Society…
aardvarchaeology | June 9, 2014Sweden doesn't have much of a written record for the Viking Period. We have most of the rune stones but hardly any of the sagas. And thus among Swedish Viking scholars it is not uncommon to be rather poorly read, like I am, in the eddas, the sagas and the other written sources of the period. The Viking Period is pretty much prehistoric archaeology to us.
Still, even in Sweden you can't study the period without picking up a few fragments of the written lore. And in my reading, one of the best passages I've come across is this description of Viga-Glum's reaction to trespassing neighbours from…
aardvarchaeology | June 6, 2014I've blogged before about becoming an archaeological dad, when new work built upon and superseded stuff I did in the 90s. Now stuff I did in the 00s has become, if not history, then at least museology, in the pages of Dr. Carl-Johan Svensson's PhD thesis in didactics (freely available on-line as a 2.4 MB PDF file). He presented his thesis yesterday at the School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University.
Ten years ago I was involved a drawn-out and pretty violent public dispute about the policies of the then director of the Museum of Swedish History – which is misnamed because its…
aardvarchaeology | June 2, 2014These are the work balls I'm currently juggling. All fun stuff!
Prepare for a month's excavations at two sites near Norrköping starting 23 June.
Finishing touches to Bronze Age book manuscript and illustrations.
Publish Aska in Hagebyhöga geophysics paper.
Manage Fornvännen's manuscript influx.
Edit a book by a retired heritage management official.
Schedule landscape history course in Växjö during September.
Schedule freshman archaeology in Umeå during September through November.
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2014My buddy Anton dug for two summers at Denisova Cave during high school!
Any Tolkien fan can tell you that orks are not safe to be with. That's why I'd never ever trust any of my coworkers around a dairy farm.
Annoying how the liver, the spleen and the kidneys all do a bunch of functionally unrelated things. Sloppy design. Almost makes me doubt the Biblical creation narratives.
Yay! Been asked to return for the third year running and teach landscape history to international exchange students in Växjö during September.
Turns out archaeagenetics is not archaeogenetics.
Who is that, playing jazz…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2014My excavations this summer will target the ruins of two Medieval castles near Norrköping. Christian Lovén and I have selected these two because unusually, both have curtain walls (Sw. ringmur) but do not seem to have belonged to the Crown. The High Middle Ages in Sweden are poorly documented in surviving written sources, but in one of these cases we actually have a pretty good idea who built the castle and when.
Landsjö in Kimstad parish enters the record in about 1280 when an old woman writes her will. She's Kristina, daughter of a certain Faste who had borne a plant device on his coat of…
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2014Back in 2012 we had a look at the first novel written in Swedish, 1666/68's Stratonice by Urban Hiärne (1641-1724). He went on to become a high-ranking doctor, founded a hydrotherapeutic spa resort, was instrumental in putting an end to the Swedish witch hunts and fathered 26 children by his three wives. But before all this, at the suggestion of professor Olof Rudbeckius Sr., he also found time to write the first original play performed in Swedish: Rosimunda. This was student theatre, with a cast of young noblemen, put on to entertain the 11-y-o future king Carolus XI at Uppsala Castle on 15…
aardvarchaeology | May 16, 2014Learned a joke from a German on Twitter. It works in English as well. Q: What do you call a Nazi sitting on a high voltage cable? A: National resistance.
Played "Hoochie Coochie Man" to Jrette to explain where the anonymous piano riff she uses as a ring tone comes from. And mightily did she groove to it.
My wife asks me how come I'm familiar with a certain sociologist she's reading for her second degree. "Because I have annoying colleagues who cite sociologists needlessly all the time."
When I copy or move information from one document to another, I usually put the goal document to the right…
aardvarchaeology | May 10, 2014Spent Wednesday through Friday in Estonia at the kind invitation of Marge Konsa and the Institute of History and Archaeology in Tartu. Gave a lecture on computer-aided statistics for burial studies (here's my presentation), then went to Tallinn, where Jüri Peets and Raili Allmäe showed me the finds and horrifically battle-damaged bones from the two 8th century Swedish mass burials in ships at Salme on Saaremaa. Also had time to meet with my grad school buddy Marika Mägi and do a lot of sight-seeing. Pics on Flickr!
The vibe in Estonia is optimistic and self-confident. Plaques about EU funding…
aardvarchaeology | May 5, 2014I put Tove Jansson's Moomin character the Muddler, Sw. Rådd-djuret, into a presentation. It's about multivariate statistics for archaeologists, and I accompany the picture with the following quotation.How could you forget about the Muddler when you launched the ship, Sniff said accusingly. Did he ever get his button collection back into order?
Oh yes, many times, said Moominpappa. He came up with new button systems all the time. Sorted them according to colour or size or shape or material, or according to how much he liked them.
Amazing, Sniff said dreamily.
--- Tove Jansson 1968, The…
aardvarchaeology | May 2, 2014The Christian Democrats dropping under the 4% cutoff for Parliament is a thing devoutly to be wished for in itself. But also, I just realised, if they do, then their votes will evaporate, losing the Right coalition a considerable part of their current majority.
I feel really bad for people who don't know what CTRL-Z and ALT-Backspace does.
Elsevier's manuscript submission site is old, creaky and slooow.
TV chef reminds me that I like forehead, not fringe.
Solsbury Hill that Peter Gabriel sang about has a big hillfort on top. This is pretty badass: a local amateur archaeology association has…
aardvarchaeology | April 29, 2014The 12-15th centuries are reckoned as Sweden's Middle Ages. Politically, it was a highly volatile period, where the average tenure of a ruler was less than 11 years. One trait that can look modern to a present-day observer is that some of these tenures were divided up into several separate terms interleaved by other rulers. The man who managed most terms – four of them – was Karl Knutsson.
Karl was born in 1408/9 and first ruled Sweden/Finland from age 29/30, becoming elected Steward of the Realm in 1438 after taking part in Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson's uprising against the king of the…
aardvarchaeology | April 25, 2014Fornvännen 2013:3 is now on-line on Open Access.
Morten Axboe and Magnus Källström on a classic find of runic gold bracteates from Trollhättan, recently expanded by a metal detectorist who would have been better informed about how to go about things if Swedish law had encouraged responsible metal detector clubs.
Lennart Bondeson et al. on a recently found and previously unknown type of penny from the time of King Canute, probably struck for his rebellious Danish viceroy Ulf jarl – who was also his brother-in-law. Lennart is an extremely well-informed and responsible detectorist.
Kenth Hansen…
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2014I want my spell-checker word list to reside in the cloud so that I won't have to start from scratch, adding names of Swedish provinces and archaeologists to the list, separately for each computer I work at.
I'm tired of Star Trek and Star Wars. Let's forget about them. The Space Odyssey took place 13 years ago. I want new scifi! 2010s scifi.
I ask this senior male scholar for the name of a qualified woman under 40 to review a book. He replies that there is none in his country. Hey man, at least you could have said ”I personally don’t know of such a person, but, you know, I’m getting old”.…
aardvarchaeology | April 11, 2014Since late ’09 my main research project has concerned the Bronze Age in the four Swedish provinces surrounding Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren. I've looked at the landscape situation of the era's deposition sites, which is pretty much where you find bronze objects. Yesterday I finished the first draft of the book (except the descriptive gazetteer, into which I still need to stick a few bits). And so here it is (300 kB PDF file)! The title is:In the Landscape and Between Worlds. Bronze Age Deposition Sites Around Lakes Mälaren and Hjälmaren in Sweden.
I would be very grateful for comments,…