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 | August 31, 2015I spent last week in Denmark at a friendly, informative and rather unusual conference. The thirteenth Castella Maris Baltici conference (“castles of the Baltic Sea”) was a moveable feast. In five days we slept in three different towns on Zealand and Funen and spent a sum of only two days presenting our research indoors. The rest of the time we rode a bus around the area and looked at castle sites and at fortifications, secular buildings, churches and a monastery in four towns. Our Danish hosts had planned all of this so well that the schedule never broke down. Add to this that the food and…
aardvarchaeology | August 17, 2015Late Iron Age settlements are full of copper alloy objects, making them the preferred site category of metal detectorists. High Medieval castle sites, on the other hand, are quite poor in these often distinctive and informative finds.
The picture above shows all the copper alloy and lead that my team of ~15 found in over two weeks of excavations at Landsjö castle this past July, screening the dirt and using a metal detector in our trenches. Only seven objects! We collected 133 pieces of iron in that time, of which 77% are sadly nails in various states of completeness and thus not terribly…
aardvarchaeology | August 15, 2015 Sailing the skiff my dad built for us when I was a kid felt surprisingly familiar even after 30 years.
For the first time I got an ebook instead of a paper book to review for Aard. I like it. Less pressure to push through and read + review a boring book when all they've given me is a copy of a file.
Jehovah's Witnesses really have a self-defeating theology. Their cap on the number of people who go to heaven is already way below the global number of members. And of course it gets worse over time.
Chocolate makers want to make the whole world Lesbian with secret candy additives! It's right…
aardvarchaeology | August 11, 2015I've been a blood donor for over twenty years. The other day a doctor called me and asked me if instead of my normal quarterly donation, I'd be willing to give a few extra hours of my time along with a chunk of white blood cells. I said yes.
There's this transplant patient at a hospital in Stockholm. Like all such patients this person, let's call her Joan (I have no idea what her real name is), is on immune suppressant drugs to keep her body from tossing out the transplanted organ. She now seems to have contracted a difficult infection. Unfortunately she's developed antibodies against run-of-…
aardvarchaeology | July 31, 2015Jrette wandering around watching TV on the iPad, overturning and breaking things in the kitchen. *sigh*
Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
Jrette stole my zombie novel -- Carey's 2014 Girl With All The Gifts -- and proclaimed it to be the best book she's read in ages. Now I am bookless.
Mistakenly read two global catastrophe novels in a row. Now everything around looks temporary.
Jrette is twelve today! I asked her if she doesn't find the Vampire Diaries scary. "I would, only with a dad who's a scientist, I'm not afraid of supernatural things."
Pittentian in Perthshire is a fine…
aardvarchaeology | July 20, 2015 A Vaisala RS92 probe has dropped onto Landsjö Castle in the past year. No mark of ownership, but it probably originates with the Swedish Weather Service in nearby Norrköping.
I tried to call my son. No reply. I tried to call my boss. No reply. This must mean that I have no responsibilities until they call me.
Learned from Melvyn Bragg's programme today that Frederick the Great of Prussia was most likely gay and his brother, the exceptionally successful general Prince Henry, was openly so.
Never noticed before that "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" has this really basic drum machine.
There's a guitar…
aardvarchaeology | July 18, 2015 2014 trenches A-E and rough locations of 2015 trenches F-H.
I write these lines on the day after we backfilled the last two trenches at Landsjö, packed up our stuff, cleaned the manor house, hugged each other and went our separate ways. It's an odd feeling to take apart the excavation machine while it still runs. It's been four fun and successful weeks!
Since my previous entry, written on Monday evening, we've done only three days of further excavation. Our main findings, to the extent that I have any comprehensive overview of them at the moment, relate to the culture layers sitting…
aardvarchaeology | July 14, 2015 2014 trenches A-E and rough locations of 2015 trenches F-H.
Like Stensö, Landsjö Castle has half of a rare perimeter wall and is known to have been owned by a descendant of Folke Jarl – or rather, by his daughter-in-law, the widow of such a descendant. Last year we found that the high inner bailey has a previously unseen southern wall with a square tower at the east end, and we found five coins of AD 1250-75 in a deep layer that seem likely to date the castle's construction phase. But unlike Stensö, in three strategically placed trenches we found no trace of the missing bits of the…
aardvarchaeology | July 6, 2015
Archive finds strike me as a weak kind of empirical discovery. OK, so you've found a piece of writing that had been forgotten. Now you're writing a paper about it. How long will it take before your paper is forgotten? When will it be found again, as an archive meta find? Or conversely: is any piece of extant writing really in a state of forgottenness? On a planet with 7 billion people, is there an important difference between no living person knowing about a piece of extant writing -- and seven specialists knowing about it?
As in any strong democracy, you have the right to voter…
aardvarchaeology | July 4, 2015Balancing available labour and a pre-decided excavation agenda against each other is not easy, particularly when you're doing investigative peek-hole fieldwork on a site whose depth and complexity of stratification you don't know much about. At Stensö we had two of three trenches and all five test pits backfilled in time for Wednesday lunch's on-site hot dog barbecue. Ethan Aines, Terese Liberg and three students stayed on to finish trench F, while myself, Mats Eriksson and six students moved to our new base at Landsjö Manor.
Trenches D and E and the test pits produced no big news after my…
aardvarchaeology | June 29, 2015This year's first week of fieldwork at Stensö Castle went exceptionally well, even though I drove a camper van belonging to a team member into a ditch. We're a team of thirteen, four of whom took part in last year's fieldwork at the site. All except me and co-director Ethan Aines are Umeå archaeology students. We're excavating the ruin of a castle that flourished in the 13th and 14th centuries. This year we have a very nice base at Smedstad, let to us by the genial B&B host Hans-Ola. But we cook our own meals, each day having its designated cooks and dishwashers, and in the evenings we…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2015I got access to email through the SöderKOM BBS in 1994. In early 1995 I got a dial-up connection to the Internet via Algonet, an ISP started by my childhood buddy Ragnar. And in June of that year I put up a web site. It was a hand-coded static HTML page. A clearly recognisable version of it is still on-line after 20 years! But I haven't updated it since 2009.
My site was one of the first to mention archaeology in Swedish, so for many years it had an absurdly high search-engine rank despite its rather modest contents, beating out the National Heritage Board and most of the country's…
aardvarchaeology | June 17, 2015 Despite the chaos of our kitchen renovation, I have managed to build myself a little reading nest.
Gotta love German. Try saying it out loud: "Die Beobachtung ferner Quasare, das holografische Prinzip und der Quantenschaum der Raumzeit".
Resolutely put away my phone in order to read a book instead. Then remembered that the book is in the phone.
Ever wonder what the scarf-wearing Somali girls are going to do with their lives? Judging from two of Jr's classmates in junior high, they're going to be software engineers.
The question of archaeology's practical usefulness should be treated as an…
aardvarchaeology | June 16, 2015Issue 2014:4 is now on-line on Open Access.
Otto Blehr on Stone Age elk hunting in northern Sweden.
Laila Kitzler Åhfeldt on the terminology used by 11th century rune masters to denote their own work.
Pia Bengtsson Melin on High Medieval magic rings.
Timo Salminen on a 20s & 30s debate over whether the Corded Ware megaculture reached Finland via Sweden or directly from the Continent.
Reviews.
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2015 New Thing -- great Stockholm funk band!
Here's what I did for fun this weekend.
Went to local bands night at Göta Källare (where I saw the Super Furry Animals and the Soundtrack Of Our Lives back in the day), saw two excellent acts: Slow Fat play soul and New Thing play funk.
Went for a long bike ride with my wife, had ice cream, logged three geocaches.
Played Glory to Rome with friends in the Octagonal Sauna because of the endless kitchen renovation at my place.
Started Iain Banks's 1986 novel The Bridge.
What did you do, Dear Reader?
aardvarchaeology | June 1, 2015 Tree house ruin, Saltsjö-Boo
Listening to the classic rock station in the car, I turned it off in the middle of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Under The Bridge". Two days later I turn it on again and find myself in the middle of their "Scar Tissue".
Heh. American podcaster talks about someone named Rothschild (pronounced "roared-shilled"), consistently pronounces it "rots-child".
Norwegian reggae: Bo Mærøy and the Whalers.
I love Google Inbox’s snooze feature. Takes a huge load of stress off to be able to decide at what date and time I want to attend to a given letter, and then just forget…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2015Last year I headed four weeks of excavations at two previously unexplored castle ruin sites near the Swedish city of Norrköping: Landsjö in Kimstad and Stensö in Östra Husby. Finds and written sources suggest that both were built and inhabited in the 13th and 14th centuries. All known owners were members or close relatives of the powerful Ama family. Now Ethan Aines and I have finished the archive reports, available here on ScienceBlogs [Landsjö and Stensö] and on Archive.org. Rudolf Gustavsson's osteological reports (in Swedish) are included. Comments and questions are most welcome! We will…
aardvarchaeology | May 18, 2015
Here's my translation of a classic 1979 revue routine by Hans Alfredson and Tage Danielsson. Kramfors is a town of 6000 inhabitants in central Sweden, near the 62nd parallel.
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TD: New religions keep popping up like mushrooms, and now it's time for the – ubiquitous in entertainment these days – Religious Corner. Sitting next to me is a fellow man [HA: “Flatterer”] ... a co-slipper on the endless unsanded sidewalk of life. And I would like to ask you a straight and direct question: do you believe in God?
HA: No, in Lind. Robert Lind in Kramfors.
TD: Is that someone you know?
HA: No, but I…
aardvarchaeology | May 14, 2015After some instruction I've given Jrette & buddy free range with the little row/motorboat. They're having lots of fun, learning lots and are clearly pleased with themselves.
Eider males swimming around in a little posse going "woo-OOO, woo-OOO".
The villain in the endless Neal Stephenson novel I'm reading is named Abdallah Jones. This causes the Counting Crows song "Mr. Jones" to play on repeat in my head.
Jrette and her buddy are filling out a questionnaire about bullying for a Master student. Jrette keeps saying stuff like "but that's a different category" and "proofing error". Buddy,…
aardvarchaeology | May 9, 2015The final third of Stephen Jarvis’s upcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick continues in the same rather kaleidoscopic fashion as before. The asides and Chinese boxes are innumerable. We never do get an important female character. The frame story is never developed much. In fact, the book only really has Robert Seymour the artist and Charles Dickens the writer, plus innumerable minor characters, and an agenda.
Jarvis's main points with the novel are that a) Seymour deserves credit as co-creator of Pickwick's first two or three chapters, b) Dickens deserves blame for dissembling and not sharing…