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
August 31, 2015
I 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…
August 17, 2015
Late 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…
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…
August 11, 2015
I'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…
July 31, 2015
Jrette 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
July 4, 2015
Balancing 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…
June 29, 2015
This 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…
June 18, 2015
I 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…
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…
June 16, 2015
Issue 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…
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…
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…
May 18, 2015
Last 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 …
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…
May 14, 2015
After 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…
May 9, 2015
The 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…
May 7, 2015
When 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…
May 4, 2015
I 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…
April 24, 2015
My 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…
April 23, 2015
A 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…
April 22, 2015
Afternoon 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…
April 18, 2015
In 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,…
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…
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…
April 6, 2015
Update 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…
April 4, 2015
Got 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…