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
February 13, 2007
Just a brief note to tell you that Sweden's a decent place to live apart from the paucity of daylight in the winters. I suggest that everybody move here.
I knew before that Sweden's the world's strongest democracy according to The Economist, that it has among the highest standards of living in the…
February 12, 2007
The Sage of Brooklyn, Jim Benton, returns with a guest entry after months of blogging silence. This piece originally appeared as a two-part comment on Debunking Christianity.
I am both an agnostic and an atheist. You see, I make a distinction between a 'deistic God' (i.e, a 'Creator') and a '…
February 12, 2007
Repatriation and reburial are large concerns these days for museums with a colonial past. Human remains looted from Aboriginal Australian cemeteries were for instance recently repatriated from a Swedish museum. But not only indigenous peoples in the usual sense of the word are making demands. The…
February 12, 2007
Saw three art exhibitions Sunday with the ladies of my family.
The Culture House, Kulturhuset, in central Stockholm shows US photographer Sally Mann's work, mainly selected from three collections: 1980s pictures of her kids (very controversial in the US back then because of child nudity, an issue…
February 11, 2007
Readers of my blogging over the past 14 months will have come across many references to, and tidbits from, the work with the archive report for 2005's Viking Period boat grave excavation at Skamby in Östergötland. Howard Williams and myself directed the excavations of the first boat inhumation in…
February 9, 2007
The incomparable net-head archaeologist Ulf Bodin directs the highly successful work to put the collections of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm (Statens Historiska Museum) on-line. Off and on over the past year, I've worked through the scanned catalogues of two centuries, searching…
February 9, 2007
A new Swedish study on rats suggests that there is a physiological reality behind the idea that relatively innocuous cannabis may act like a gateway drug, leading on to heavier drugs.
Soon-to-be-graduating doctoral candidate Maria Ellgren of Karolinska Institutitet has documented a significantly…
February 9, 2007
The other day, I collected the larger finds from 2005's boat grave excavations at the conservator's studio. Among them are 23 amber gaming pieces, of which I have now taken nice photographs. The pieces' median dimensions are about 35 by 24 mm.
If it weren't for these gaming pieces, the boat grave…
February 8, 2007
Robert Schneider, one of my favourite neopsychedelic musicians, has a new album out, this time with his main band again, The Apples in Stereo. His previous album Expo was issued in 2005 with The Marbles and is an excellent synth-driven yet lo-fi effort. Before that he did two non-psych albums in…
February 7, 2007
A buddy of mine sent me a reminder today of why I am happy to not be a contract archaeologist. It's twelve below zero centigrade around here, and still a number of unfortunate Linköping colleagues are out digging. And they're not digging Tut-ankh-amen's tomb today either: apparently they've been…
February 6, 2007
In recent years I've been involved in some archaeological fieldwork at Skamby in Kuddby parish, Östergötland, Sweden. I like to get a handle on the names of places where I work, what they mean, how they used to be pronounced in the Middle Ages. I was particularly interested in learning about…
February 5, 2007
Here's a must-read for anyone interested in the integrity of science, in the face both of post-modern hyperrelativism and of politically motivated distortion. It's a succinct op-ed in the L.A. Times co-written by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, and Alan Sokal, the man who…
February 5, 2007
Many people who excel at something do so by concentrating on a few tightly defined areas of interest. A colleague of mine once explained to me that she has a narrow-gauge mind (Sw. smalspårig). I like that expression a lot: this woman hasn't got a one-track mind (Sw. enkelspårig), nor a narrow mind…
February 4, 2007
I love my kids and a lot of that affection spills over on their friends as well. But I'm not the kind of dad who finds children's games very entertaining. I rarely even pretend to enjoy them. In my opinion, the best baby sitter is another child of about the same age.
So I'm not the kids' play mate…
February 3, 2007
Dear Cultists, welcome to the Temple of Godlessness that is Aardvarchaeology. I will be your High Priest this evening, introducing the latest and greatest blog writing on the subject of Above Us Only Sky. Sisters and brothers, let us pray.
Austin Atheist sets the spotlight on an atheistic writer…
February 3, 2007
For about a week, the relentless riff from ZZ Top's 1973 hit song "La Grange" has been playing in my head. Such a great, great song, not least the powerful and exact drumming. And the vocals are really funny, with the singer sounding like a right old lecher.
So I got the album, Tres Hombres, and…
February 2, 2007
With mounting frustration, I'm watching an attempt to secure adequate health care for an elderly relative turn into something that looks a lot like a failed foreign aid project.
My friend's grandpa lives in the old country, let's say Malaysia. The heptagenarian is getting doddery and forgetful, so…
February 2, 2007
Sun Spurge
My friend Dr Jens Heimdahl is a Renaissance man. He's a quaternary geologist, an urban archaeologist, a palaeobotanist, a talented painter and a writer of essays on weird literature. He's co-translated Lovecraft's novella The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath into Swedish and illustrated it…
February 1, 2007
One thing I've never fought about with my ex-wife nor my wife is money. This is no mean feat asBoth ladies are somewhat Bohemian souls with a taste for fine shoes and ladies' fashion.I have never made much money myself.I have a child with each of them.The secret, apart from the basic requirement…
January 31, 2007
The excellent Markus Andersson has made a cemetery map out of the field measurements me and Howard Williams and our collaborators took at Skamby in Kuddby parish the summer before last. This is the prettiest of Östergötland's three boat inhumation cemeteries. We excavated grave 15, as I have…
January 31, 2007
Mike Parker Pearson and team have excavated part of a huge Neolithic settlement at Durrington Walls above the Salisbury plain, not far from Stonehenge. Finds are abundant and suggest that the place was a seasonal ceremonial feasting site. Says MPP, "We're talking Britain's first free festival. It'…
January 30, 2007
Dining with polyglot friends (he's a Sinologist who also works with Georgian and Basque and speaks a bewildering variety of Asian languages, she interprets Mongolian and speaks the most exquisite Swedish), my wife and I learned something about Mongolian cuisine and cursing.
Mongolia has kind of a…
January 29, 2007
Marika Mägi, my old co-student from grad school, is head of the archaeology department at Tallinn university in Estonia. She's organising a conference titled Rank, Gender and Society around the Baltic 400-1400 AD on 23-27 May in Kuressaare on the island of Saaremaa. Interested scholars are welcome…
January 28, 2007
On Thursday 1 February at 18:30 I'm giving a talk at the Town Museum of Norrköping. The subject is my ongoing research into the political geography of late 1st Millennium Östergötland, or simply put, My Quest for the Ancient Kings. Entry is SEK 60. Hope to meet blog readers there!
[More blog…
January 27, 2007
Dear Reader, I've just passed a lovely hour skiing on the golf course, and I am very happy.
It's -6 centigrade, loads of snow and Mr Sun is shining from a blue sky, accompanied by his pale-countenanced Sister Moon. People and dogs were out in force and we all smiled at each other as we met in the…
January 26, 2007
As I've observed before, enlisting bloggers to do marketing offers some interesting possibilities and limitations. Unlike the case with mainstream media, you can choose exactly which person will receive an advance copy of your product (preferably someone who will like it), and the blogger is likely…
January 25, 2007
Most archaeologists work with rescue excavations for land development, "contract archaeology". And because of the Field-Archaeological Paradox, operative in all Western countries with strong legal protection for archaeological sites, they get to dig a lot of really nondescript things. It's not Tut-…
January 24, 2007
One of the founding fathers of Norwegian archaeology and place-name scholarship was Oluf Rygh (1833-1899). In 1875, he became Scandinavia's first professor of archaeology. One of the most enduring parts of his legacy is his 1885 book Norske Oldsager, "Norwegian Antiquities" (re-issued in 1999).…
January 23, 2007
John over at Stranger Fruit had a post recently on his most popular entries. Summing up, he found that controversial issues in science and religion drew the most attention. I've had a look at my Google Analytics as well, checking out the data for my old site since the present one has been on-line…
January 21, 2007
I am an admirer of all things psychedelic in art and music. My wife recently bought a second-hand copy of Disney's animated feature film Dumbo -- dubbed in Finnish of all languages. But we're a multilingual family and the kids are used to someone always gabbling incomprehensibly, so they didn't…