Martin Rundkvist
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
Posts by this author
September 4, 2012
Taking a hint from George Hrab's stage show, I asked my landscape history students to write me a question each anonymously on a small note. Or rather, I asked them to ”Tell me something that surprises you about the Swedish landscape you've seen so far”. This turned out to be a good teaching tool. I…
September 3, 2012
Facebook is swamped with pictures of cats at shelters that face imminent euthanasia. Meanwhile, the World Wildlife Fund has an ad on the Tradera auction site that says "Soft, Orange and Homeless" and invites me to support orangutan shelters.
There's a reason that these campaigns don't feature fish…
September 1, 2012
The dust has settled after Sb's migration in late May from Moveable Type to Wordpress. I'm glad we switched, but we lost a lot of traffic in the process. Mainly it seems to be due to changing URLs (the web address of each blog entry) that threw the search engines off and lost us RSS subscribers. In…
August 29, 2012
My cousin Annika kindly forwarded me this postcard from a budding archaeologist just out of high school and on his first dig. I translate:
*
Hazor-Haglilit July 15th, 1990, 12:05 [Sunday]
Shalom!
Mainly I'm digging. At the same time we exchange some language teaching – my new Israeli acquaintances…
August 28, 2012
The people behind the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone made an odd design decision. They got rid of the standard fastening point for a strap. And the backshells on the market don’t have a fastening point either. But I really want a strap to be able to pull my phone out of my pocket and to keep from…
August 27, 2012
Fazer's old packaging
Fazer has removed the cartoon East Asian from one of two versions of the packaging for their chocolate-covered puffed rice. Only the conical straw hat remains, an "abbreviated motif" as Karl Hauck would have put it. Tørsleff still has the guy on their gel agent. Gabob…
August 26, 2012
In this guest entry, my friend Milka Zelić reports on the gritty realities of public transport in Slumberland:It wasn't enough that I had a rough time at work last night. When I finally got to bed I ended up working a second shift.
Because of construction work on the subway a temporary ticket booth…
August 25, 2012
I've blogged before about authors who write fiction in the first person past tense but clearly have no idea of in which situation or at what point in time their narrator resides while telling the story. This is one of the problems with David Tallerman's 2012 novel Giant Thief. But what made me quit…
August 24, 2012
Martin Carver in the editorial to the current issue of Antiquity:If the PhD is an apprenticeship, why does it include no formal training in fieldwork—our method of recovering primary data? Quite apart from the fact that the world is already full of academics who don't know how to dig (but think…
August 22, 2012
Here's an interesting legal conundrum. The pseudo-archaeological power duo Bob Lind and Nils-Axel Mörner have been excavating without a permit again (as confirmed to me by the County Archaeologist). But the site they have chosen is a disused quarry of indeterminate age. Though protected by the…
August 21, 2012
Kai gave me this lovely piece of old Scientology propaganda. The 1968 book Scientology: A History of Man is a re-titled edition of something L.R. Hubbard completed in 1951-52 and disseminated under the title What To Audit. After the formerly secret teachings about Xenu the evil space emperor etc.,…
August 20, 2012
My professional goal since undergraduate days 20 years ago has been to divide my working hours between indoor research, fieldwork and teaching. And so I applied for my first academic job in June of 2003, shortly before my thesis defence. When I saw the list of applicants (this stuff is public in…
August 19, 2012
Early this morning this little guy found a really good crack in some wood where s/he could sleep during the day. Unfortunately the crack turned out to be the space between the gate to our yard and the door jamb, so all day the sleeper has been see-sawing to and fro as we have opened and closed the…
August 15, 2012
I read a recent report from the Swedish Institute of Futures Studies titled Humanisterna och framtidssamhället, "Humanities Scholars and Society in the Future" (freely available as a PDF). I found some but not too much of the usual unrealistic sloganeering about how useful the humanities are to…
August 9, 2012
I don't like the loud rattle of dice or the way they careen across the table, scattering game markers and ending up on the floor. And so I've been thinking about buying a dice tray. With low walls and a soft interior surface, it solves both problems. When my friend Foaad gave me a huge gift…
August 7, 2012
My musical taste spans half a century, but like many people I have a particular soft spot for musicians of my own age and the albums they made during our 20s. I really love 90s neo-psych. It was disconcerting when these musicians started putting out divorce albums (of Montreal's brilliant 2007…
August 6, 2012
The Curiosity rover / Mars Science Laboratory has landed safely on Mars and is returning data! So now we have two rovers on Mars again, Opportunity and a new one of unprecendented size and instrument sophistication. Curiosity has a laser gun that allows it to measure emission spectra at a distance…
August 5, 2012
Spent a week gloriously off-line at my mom's glorious summer house in the archipelago. Oh the joy of reading 300 pages for fun in one day without feeling the need to check e-mail! Here are the books I read:
Invented Knowledge. False history, fake science and pseudo-religions. Ronald H. Fritze 2009…
July 28, 2012
Last week my dad and his wife took us to Tärnskär, "Tern Island" again like three years ago. This time we looked closer at the lovely glacial abrasion features on the island's higher end.
July 24, 2012
Reading Anund & Qviberg's new guide book on Medieval Uppland, I came across a great religious legend: "The Grateful Dead". (The band got its name from a dictionary entry on this family of stories.) The earliest version of the legend is found in the German Cistercian prior Caesarius of…
July 22, 2012
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones's first gig, at the Marquee Club in London. Journalist Hanspeter Kuenzler and Bavarian e-book publishers The eBook People GmbH celebrate the occasion with a massive illustrated two-volume biographical anthology in English on the band.…
July 16, 2012
Tomas Romson asked me a good question. Why do archaeological layers form in such a way that older things end up buried below newer ones? The answer is, because people and natural processes deposit dirt on the ground. Using a word borrowed from geology, we call the study of such layers stratigraphy…
July 13, 2012
Yesterday Jrette, her buddy and I went down to Ströja in Kvillinge outside Norrköping and had a look at the mead-hall excavation I've blogged about. Arkeologikonsult's Björn Hjulström very kindly showed us around. The site will become an Östergötland classic, not only for the 6th century manor hall…
July 12, 2012
Black Keys – Brothers (2010). Soulful vocals and psychedelic guitars.
Brimstone Solar Radiation Band – Solstice (2005). Melodic Norwegian psych.
David Bowie – Low (1977). Soul rock interleaved with ambient instrumentals.
Howlin' Rain – Magnificent Fiend (2008). Soulful vocals and psychedelic…
July 11, 2012
I have four pleasant things on my desk at the moment:
Finally my first uni job! Humble but very important to me. I've been asked to teach Swedish landscape archaeology to exchange students in English for about 100 hours during the autumn term. Start 4 Sept.
A commission for an encyclopedia article…
July 9, 2012
Sweden's traditionally divided into 25 landskap provinces. They live on in people's minds despite having been superseded by a new län division in 1634. The boundaries of the landskap go way back into prehistory, and so they don't respect the country's cities much, these generally being much later…
July 6, 2012
My book Mead-halls of the Eastern Geats appeared last September. On p. 9 I wrote:Splendid single finds, though never surveyed comprehensively, offer a rough idea of where elite settlements might be sought. But little is known about individual elite settlements in 1st millennium Östergötland. Not…
July 5, 2012
This musical style was invented by the Pixies in the mid 80s. Their early work was a main source of inspiration for Curt Cobain of Nirvana. Now Cage the Elephant have recreated the early Pixies style from its blueprints and written a song about Cobain's birthplace in Washington state. I like it!…
June 29, 2012
Major excavations are taking place in Old Uppsala because of railway work. Old Uppsala was a political, religious and mercantile centre from about AD 600 to 1274. In fact it may be termed the central place of the Swedes – tribe and kingdom – during those centuries.
My friend, author Kristina Ekero…
June 28, 2012
Vår Gård in Saltsjöbaden is a conference venue and training centre whose history illustrates political trends in Sweden over the past century and more.
1892. The Thiel brothers, two of Sweden's wealthiest art patrons, buy a property by the sea in the new fashionable resort of Saltsjöbaden and build…