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.
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Posts by this author
Spring is late this year in Sweden, and the weather has been dreary. But now things have perked up, and suddenly I felt the itch to get out and check out some sites before the leaves and grass sprout in earnest and ruin visibility. So Sunday night I hurriedly checked through my database of Bronze…
This past weekend the Swedish Skeptics celebrated our 30th anniversary with a two-day conference in Gothenburg. It included the annual business meeting of the society at which I was reelected as chairman for a second year. And at dinner, I sang a song about how I view my role in the society, and…
In England and other countries, churches have long been deconsecrated and used as shops and for housing. In Sweden, this has previously only happened to nonconformist chapels - quite frequently, actually. But now, the first Church of Sweden church with a churchyard has been sold.
Örja church near…
This 1976 piece of public sculpture is at the playground next to my house. It's titled Del av helhet - helhet av del, "Part of whole - whole of part", referring to its modular makeup.
I haven't really paid any attention to it since Juniorette became old enough to go out and play without grownups.…
Early 20th century, a newlywed couple celebrates their wedding night at a hotel. In the morning, the young man chivalrously pricks his finger with his pen knife and smears some blood on the bedsheet.
50 happy years later, the couple returns to the hotel to celebrate their anniversary. And in the…
I listened to BBC Click about the future of publishing and had the idea to look at a couple of parameters in my reading habits: where I get the idea to read each book-length text, how I get hold of them and what form they take. Here's about the past year, April 2011 through March 2012 (38 books).…
Livescience.com asked me a bunch of question about the Ales stenar stone ship on the occasion of Mörner & Lind's new bizarro paper. They didn't use much of what I wrote, so I'll put it up here.
LS: What is the most remarkable thing -- physical, historical or otherwise - about Ales Stenar?
MR:…
Fornvännen is not only a paper quarterly on its 107th year, but also an Open Access journal that appears for free with a 6-month delay. The autumn issue for 2011has just gone live! All papers have English abstracts and summaries.
Påvel Nicklasson on 19th century zoologist and pioneering…
Perennial Aard favourites N-A. Mörner and B.G. Lind have published another note in a thematically unrelated journal. It's much like the one they snuck past peer review into Geografiska Annaler in 2009 and which Alun Salt and I challenged in 2011. The new paper is as usual completely out of touch…
Eurasian Jay, Garrulus glandarius, Sw. nötskrika, "nut screecher". Photographed in Fisksätra 6 April 2012.
In order to find her easter egg, my daughter first had to solve a +1 transposition cryptogram with appended translation table. It gave her the location of a note with a +9 cryptogram where she was given the offset but had to write her own translation table. This led to a +9 cryptogram that resolved…
Aard super-regular Birger Johansson very kindly sent me a bunch of supernatural detective novels by Mike Carey, the Felix Castor series. I'm on the second one now (from 2006) and enjoying it a lot. The stories are a bit too long and meandering for my taste, but I love Carey's dry wit and fine grasp…
For forty years I've been one of the most fortunate people I've ever heard of.
Starting from the global perspective, there is of course hardly a single country on Earth where people live under such good conditions as in Sweden. This goes for all of us here tonight. If we had ended up somewhere else…
I've written before about the prolific and many-talented Norm Sherman: a podcaster, multi-instrumentalist, song writer, singer and comedian with a truly unique voice. Several unique voices actually, thanks to his ear for accents. He occupies a position in geek-orientated on-line music and…
Junior's been through an extended period of various lighter ailments that have affected his school attendance record (but not his grades) considerably. I believe this may be partly due to his sedentary lifestyle. He's thin as a rake, like his old man, but also like his old man he's not exactly…
"The river channel at Must Farm, with bronze age fish traps and weirs, logboats and many bronze objects. The roddon is raised land formed from old river silts."
I wrote in January about the Must Farm / Flag Fen Bronze Age dugout boats at Peterborough, England when Current Archaeology covered them…
I got a letter with criticism from a man who believes in electromagnetic hypersensitivity and thinks I should too. Most of the letter is the Galileo argument, where the letter writer refers to an anthropologist whose ideas were, in his view, once highly respected until they were taken apart by…
I had some bad news about two Boomer dudes that I know and like(d): one died of lung cancer the other day, and the other was diagnosed with leukemia. But apart from that I had a pretty good weekend:
Played Eclipse again, got royally whipped.
Gave a talk and did some debating at a skeptics' event…
I've been following Californian rock singer and guitarist Ethan Miller off and on since Comets on Fire's 2002 album Field Recordings from the Sun. I love his singing and psychedelic song writing. And so recently the song "Nomads" from the 2008 album Magnificent Fiend (with Miller's current band…
Adipocere / corpse wax:
a wax-like organic substance formed by the anaerobic bacterial hydrolysis of fat in tissue, such as body fat in corpses. ... a crumbly, waxy, water-insoluble material consisting mostly of saturated fatty acids. Depending on whether it was formed from white or brown body fat…
Jules Verne, Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie.
Salade paysanne. Lardons, enfants de la patrie! Restaurant Les Pierres qui Roulent, "The Rolling Stones".
Electrical filling stations are quite common in Paris.
Carnyx trumpet, c. 3rd century BC, found in 2004 in a richly filled votive pit at a…
Above-ground atomic explosions and reactor leaks during the past century have produced a pretty funny atmosphere full of exotic heavy isotopes. In radiocarbon calibration this error source is called "bomb radiocarbon". A few years ago it was suggested that a person's age might be determined through…
Yesterday I went to Jutish Viborg by train, plane and bus. This took a bit less than eight hours. Exiting Aalborg airport into the icy sleet I managed to walk straight into the glass wind breaker outside the turnstile, banging my forehead and knee. Everybody around studiously avoided noticing my…
Played Eclipse for the first time with my new Muscovite friends Anton & Maria and frequent guest Swedepat. This Finnish 2011 boardgame has become a runaway international hit and is currently ranked #7 on Boardgame Geek. It's about interstellar colonialism: good fun, very neatly designed, and…
Shortly after Fornvännen 2012:1 reached subscribers on paper, issue 2011:2 has now been published on-line. Get thee there, Dear Reader, and read for free (not dearly)!
Joakim Wehlin on why some of Gotland's mightiest Bronze Age monuments were built next to the island's single megalithic tomb of…
Juniorette: "So Thomas had his semla cream bun and he said he liked it, but later he threw up."
Me: "Thomas? Is he a new boy in your class? Haven't heard of him before?"
Juniorette: "No, he's not annoying. Not very."
The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities is over 250 years old and consists almost entirely of professors of the humanities and social sciences. But don't let that fool you into thinking that it's a sleepy organisation. For one thing, the Academy is a signatory of the 2003…
There are some good archaeology-themed boardgames out there. None depict archaeology as an activity directed towards the gaining of knowledge. Let's look at the top three on Boardgame Geek.
Tikal has a pretty absurd premise. A number of archaeological expeditions reach an area of jungle-covered…
Somehow I suddenly remembered the Sesame Street album I loved when I was a kid, 1977's Signs!. And sure enough, all the songs are on YouTube now!
For the past two weeks I've been hearing more and more birdsong. The bullfinch is singing his characteristic snowmelt ditty, and the woodpecker is making territorial drumrolls. Some other species of small bird is having these noisy cocktail parties where they fill a tree and chatter for hours. But…