Aardvarchaeology – by Dr. Martin Rundkvist – Scandinavian archaeology, history, skepticism, books and music

Music School’s Emergent Property: Academic High Score

Listening to the Snedtänkt podcast about the Adolf Fredrik music school* in Stockholm. From age 10, my kids went to our home municipality’s version, Nacka Musikklasser. I believe that it had an enormous beneficial influence on their future lives. But it’s not about the music. The most important thing about these schools is not that you get to sing a lot. Most kids just stop singing the moment they move up to high school.

To get into music school you need to pass a simple audition for hitting notes and keeping time. No other demands are made. But here’s the really important thing about music school: you only get taken to that audition if your parents are highly motivated. Most parents aren’t even aware that the option exists. Functionally, music school is a socially accepted, even celebrated, way of putting your kids in a class where every single child has academically motivated parents. If my kids had instead gone to one of the closest schools to where myself and my son’s mom live, then the academic level and general order in those classrooms would have been pretty bad. Instead they spent six years with kids whose parents aren’t just academically motivated, but in many cases downright cut-throat careerist in their expectations.

On the personal level, I am enormously pleased that this was my kids’ school experience. As a technocrat who views politics as a game of Sim City though, I’m not sure that this loophole is good for the general collective health of the system.

* Felix explains: a secondary school with extra music classes.

May Pieces Of My Mind #1

Järfälla Church: check out the pyramid erected in 1762 with no fucks given right next to the chancel.

To make a quick buck, people are putting illustrated books together with generative software and selling them cheaply on Amazon. Including mushroom picking guides. This might kill everyone around a dinner table.
My laptop does this idiotic thing. I turn it off from within the operating system, then flip the screen onto the keyboard — and the machine decides, “Hey, he’s going somewhere, I need to stop whatever I’m doing [turning itself off] and go into sleep mode! Which consumes battery charge!”
Yay! Owner and cultivator of an important site have proved friendly and open to a visit by my fieldwork team after this year’s harvest!
Praising someone for being skilful is better than for being talented, because it acknowledges the work they’ve put in.
My friend is a physiotherapist. One of her patients is 104 years old and worries about her daughter who has senile dementia.
I am quite unusually happy today, feeling a particular love for my family, friends & colleagues, work & hobbies. It’s hard to beat the effects of three cups of tea, a sunny day and a scenic hike.
I have seen the leaves of 53 springs sprout on the trees. Fifty-three. WT actual F.
Scotland’s population is about 5.5 million.
About those Roman bronze openwork polyhedrons. The methods we would typically use for investigating their function are: 1) find context (structures and find combinations), 2) period imagery (if any), 3) signs of use wear. We never start by making up a way in which it is possible to use them.
When I was a little kid, I believed that the redheaded girl on Scooby Doo was named Daffy.
Gotta love the Danes. Last year there was an archaeological conference in Korsør titled: “If you let me see yours, I’ll let you see mine… 1st Millennium Weapons and Riding Gear”. Somehow I can’t really see this happening in the US.
When I was young I had a lot of disagreements with slightly older colleagues about what archaeological research should be like. I don’t know who was right, but I do know that almost all of them have long since stopped publishing any research.
Somebody should write amateur erotica about the members of Guns ‘n’ Roses. Slash fiction.
I opted out of a conference dinner for the first time in almost 30 years of conferences. They are expensive, service is slow, I never make any useful extra contacts during the meal, and I always leave first of all. I look forward to a really good kebab instead.
(For the small but vocal contingent of insane people who take an interest in my personality, I should explain that I am neither autistic nor an introvert. I am a loud used-car salesman type and the hub of a large social circle of nerds. I love spending activity-based time with my friends. Let’s go hiking, then play boardgames! Just not sit down passively for hours with drinks. I can do that if everybody reads a book.)
One of the strangest coincidences in entomology is that the Common Cockchafer’s Swedish vernacular name ollonborre translates as ‘bell-end driller’. Do not name your daughter Melolontha without considering the matter seriously first.
Zubaida Solid of Siena Root has a really commanding stage presence, looking serious and a little mournful. Her voice and vocal range are huge though she herself is a slender young person. She does this thing I’ve never seen before where she’ll hit important notes really loudly off-mike and still be heard by the audience in a small venue, then angle the mike in and blow everybody’s minds with the sudden volume spike. This band is live groove magic!
A concept that fascinates me: etymological continuity in names and words for fictional beings. Nerthus and NjorðR are the same name. The alfR of mythology and Tolkien’s elves share a label. But since these beings don’t actually exist, it is meaningless to say that there is a single individual or group of beings behind the various forms of the words. There is no empirical reality to check against, unlike for instance when a botanist suggests that a species should be split.

LinCon 2024

After skipping LinCon 2023, I went back to Linköping for my tenth convention over the past Ascension weekend. As usual I played some boardgames (Barcelona, Evolution) and attended the auction. But also I heard a lecture by Swen Österberg on the 40-year history of LinCon.

Most importantly to me, I game-mastered at the convention for the first time: three four-hour sessions of Swords of the Serpentine. This is a 2022 tabletop role-playing game about solving mysteries in a fantasy version of Venice. All fifteen participants were great to game with and we had a lot of fun together! I hope to game master at more conventions in the future.

Here are my impressions of LinCon 2022.

April Pieces Of My Mind #3

Apparently Uncle Vladimir has found some sensational new source material that demonstrates that the Katyn Massacres were’t perpetrated by the Russians, after all! I guess the official Russian acceptance of responsibility in 1990 was simply incorrect.
I know several guys who have had way more sex than many famous rock stars. These men have probably outfucked Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones by a lot. Their method? I bet you’d like to know… OK, here’s the trick: instead of dying at 27, you get married, and then you enjoy conjugal relations with your lady wife a couple of times a week for several decades!
Call me an extremist, but I really don’t think Semitic-speaking monotheist civilians in the East Mediterranean should be mass-murdered by terrorists or the military.
The Palm Tree Building in Łódź opened in 1956 and preserves trees that had previously grown in the private green houses of industrialists and Czarist officials. The glass building has repeatedly been expanded to accommodate growing trees, until nothing remains of the 1950s structure. But the tallest trees are still in their original places.
My friend asked me to play boardgames on 1 May. Unusually for me, I had to reply “Sorry, I’ll be protesting against the government most of Wednesday”.
Dude contacts me because he’s watched a YouTube clip and has picked up some folk pseudohistory about his home area. Shows me his family tree which has him descending from a fictional regional ruler. When I tell him I think that’s just imagination, he asks me to explain why I “assume” so. “Hello professional research scholar, please deliver a detailed critique of the amateur theory I believe in.” I just blocked him, can’t be bothered, not my job.
Bong is a Swedish brand for canned soup. Can you smoke a bong when it’s filled with pork & pea soup?
For all of you who play a lot of the 1984 video game The Ancient Art of War, here’s an exploit. Military units have a fatigue number that is independent of their size. When you combine two units, they all get the fatigue number of the first unit you specify. So prior to a battle, just drop off one guy as a unit of his own. Send the other 39 into battle, which makes them fatigued, then add them back to the single guy’s non-fatigued unit. Boom, everybody’s fresh again.
My buddy donated his Landrover to the Ukrainian army. The other day they sent him a picture of what it looked like after a Russian drone hit it. Everybody travelling in the car survived, thanks to a quick manoeuvre that caused the thing to explode under the Landrover, not inside it. But the driver suffered several broken bones.
Got five gigs lined up in May: Siena Root, Acid King, Norlin & Teglund, Mick Harvey, Year of the Goat.
Having listened to a documentary about Salman Rushdie, I feel moved to express what I believe is the majority position in Scandinavia. To whit, that all gods and devils are fictional characters, there is no afterlife, and you might as well pray to Bilbo Baggins.

April Pieces Of My Mind #2

Here’s how a 1st millennium back-yard iron furnace works. It’s like grilling bacon (ore) until all the fat (silicate slag) has dripped away, and continually adding more bacon until you have a hefty chunk of solid meat protein (iron). The grill consists of charcoal. A puddle of grease (slag) is left behind at the bottom of the furnace. The reason that the protein chunk doesn’t sink into the grease puddle is that it’s relatively cold in the grease collection pit. Each droplet of grease solidifies as it lands. Eventually you get a thick layer cake of solid grease, whose viscosity is high enough for it to support the weight of the protein chunk.
So pleased that three of my young excavation participants from fieldwork in recent years have a) gotten good jobs in archaeology, b) joined the exclusive club that I like to call Chinese Spouse Fandom.
Even if you and your friends don’t play music, you should take professional band photos now and then and release them.
Listening for years to Fredrik Strage’s interview podcast, I have been struck by how self-perpetuating rock’n’roll mythology is. Rock gods almost universally report that they didn’t enter rock mainly because of a passion for music, but because Kiss blew their minds with their image when they were twelve. “I had to learn to play the guitar because that was the only way to become a rock god.”
The public tends to believe that archaeologists want to excavate interesting sites that come to their attention. This is true in many cases. But almost no archaeologist has a paid job that lets them excavate interesting sites that come to their attention. This is confusing and frustrating to the public.
Submitted a pretty gruesome journal paper titled “Human skull manipulation in Vendel-Viking Period Sweden and Denmark”.
Ladies, beware! If he says he wants to clothe you in silks and velvets, then he isn’t your generous passionate lover. He is a gay fashion designer!
Hey gender studies scholars! I’ve cycled into town while listening to a podcast about 1920s horror fiction, I’ve attended an art-historical guided tour of a cinema, I’m having a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of extremely decadent chocolate mousse cake named “Elliot”. And I am ready to do an in-depth interview about traditional cis-het Swedish masculinity!
In 2019, J.E. Macedo de Medeiros defended his PhD thesis in archaeology at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg. He was so confident of the importance of his work that he titled it Hoard finds of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages: a process-logical paradigm shift (my transl.). Five years later, no such shift has to my knowledge taken place.
I had to check. You have to cross at a minimum three national borders to travel from Iran to Israel. This threat of war is like if Portugal were menacing Switzerland.
For a fine example of Swedes not being able to say ‘dj’, listen to the excellent 1992 hit song “Stone Me Into The Groove”. “Oh, my saviour, my friend, yust take me away”
I don’t know about other scientists and scholars, but man, I love my source material / study objects. I’m a pro, not an amateur, but sometimes I feel more akin to those who approach archaeology for love, in their spare time. Amator in Latin.
Hopefully there will be a NASA rover on the south pole of the Moon less than a year from now.
One of the many ways people mystify me is in their need to get out of their heads. It’s spring cleaning day in our housing area. In shrubberies within 100 m of our house I found packaging for alcohol, nitrous oxide and tramadol. I think everybody should just read a book instead.
I met a man the other day who told me he worked as a “backender”. I was confused: surely this is the opposite of “boob man”?

My Medieval LARP Upbringing

Reading a new book about investigations in Medieval churches, I suddenly recognise a correspondence in my childhood. I spent much of it a) singing in the choir of Saltsjöbaden’s extremely lavish and archaic church, b) reading mid-to-late 20th century fantasy fiction, c) role-playing in fantasy worlds.

I recently visited the church basement for the first time and found that it is a bare, functionalist cast-concrete and rebar structure from the 1910s. And when I try to read fantasy fiction now, it’s obvious to me how it has been glued together (not always very skilfully) from fragments of the historical Middle Ages.

I became an archaeologist because I grew up in a 20th century stage set that reimagined the Middle Ages, although founded on a concrete structure that looked like a subway station.

Favourite Living Authors

Someone on a podcast mentioned favourite living productive authors. Here are mine. I wonder who I should read that’s born after me, after 1972?

Bill Bryson (b. 1951)
Lois M. Bujold (b. 1949)
Michael Chabon (b. 1963)
Corey Doctorow (b. 1971)
Elizabeth Hand (b. 1957)
Kenneth Hite (b. 1965)
Jonathan L. Howard (b. ?)
Mary Roach (b. 1959)
Kim S. Robinson (b. 1952)
Jon Ronson (b. 1967)
Andy Weir (b. 1972)

April Pieces Of My Mind #1

I like to combine visits to my university in Łódź with side trips to see the country. Last year I was in Lublin and Kraków. A few weeks from now I’m going hiking in the great old-growth forest of Białowieża National Park!
Just a reminder: the Epoch Times news organisation and Shen Yun travelling shows are propaganda outlets for Chinese Scientology. The conflict between Falun Gong and the Chinese Communist Party has no good guy, only two bad guys.
Prepping a conference talk about metal-detecting in Sweden. Considered titling it “Swedish metal-detecting is slowly starting to rock”.
Does my paper about Viking skull manipulation include the section header “Talking Heads”? Of course it does.
If a news item mentions that a man is 26, it can be good or bad. But no man described as being 52 in a news item is ever good. He’s either bad, dead or horrendously wounded.
I don’t understand why Darth Vader’s girlfriend is named PubMed.
Polish orthography, how a certain vocal sound is represented with Latin characters, is highly consistent. I found it to be the easiest part of learning Polish. After all, I’m a native speaker of a language that thinks stjärt and höskörd is reasonable spelling. Polish, Swedish and German agree that compounds should simply be written as one word, no space or hyphen. Add this to Polish orthography though, and you end up with words that will hit an everyday English-speaker like a kick in the groin: WCZESNOŚREDNIOWIECZNYCH: “Early Medieval” (plural, genitive case)
My son sent me a song he’s just written with mythological lyrics about a hero who fights the Sun Shader, gets his head knocked off, searches the world blindly for his head, and finally steals the Sun Shader’s head as a replacement. ❤
It’s 2004. Someone gives you a non-OCR:ed scan of an article in Polish that is highly relevant to your work. It’s effectively a set of photocopies. You don’t know any Polish. What do you do? It’s 2024. Someone gave me a non-OCR:ed scan of an article in Polish that is highly relevant to my work. It’s effectively a set of photocopies. I just screenshotted it one column at a time and pasted it into Google Translate, and now I’m reading it in my native language.
Maybe creativity is like a really flaky LLM that tries and fails to spout conventionalised averages of whatever it has been fed with.
My kids are first-generation digital natives. Wonder for how many more generations there will be a digital world to be a native of. I don’t worry about humanity going extinct. But it isn’t looking so great for the techno-capitalist complex’s long-term survival.
Jrette is headed for engineering school in Lund. So I’m thinking about a Scanian project so I get to go there a lot, look at finds at the university’s Historical Museum, have lunch with my kid. Might extend it to Zealand as well, it’s not far.
My attempts to keep track of who’s Black and who’s Jewish and who’s Black and Jewish in Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue read like a deranged Nazi’s kill list.
Hint of subcultural/class-related homogeneity in my RPG gaming group: the members have a total of seven children, named Samuel, Samuel, Signe, Signe, Emilia, Heidi and Ossian.
I knew that the name Oscar is from McPherson’s fake Scottish folk poetry. Today I learned that Selma is too. Both names have been common in Sweden.
Historical correctness of the material culture in Verhoeven’s 1985 Flesh+Blood, ostensibly set in 1501: forget about it, they didn’t even try.
Anybody feel like gyring and gimbling? In the wabe?
Bought two climbing roses, planting soil and barn manure. Swapped out a lot of the old soil in a big planting basin on the street gable end of our house, planted the climbers, transplanted three shrub roses that have been eking out stunted & undernourished lives on much worse soil around the house. Now I have FIVE ROSE BUSHES just outside the yard gate to look at every morning for seven months until the frost sets in. Been waiting for this for ages!
Reading the enormously long short story anthology The Weird is really relaxing because it liberates me from two of my reading hangups. 1) There’s no way I will finish it anytime soon, so there’s no reason to press on with it. 2) The stories are unconnected, so I don’t forget bits of the context if I leave it untouched for a week or two.
I’ve seen many, many artist’s reconstructions of excavated burials. I don’t recall ever seeing a fat corpse in them.

Tired Of All This Red Tape

I’ve been directing excavations for 27 years. But am unhappy today with the Swedish institutional and legislative system around field archaeology. It is geared toward strict administrative control, toward site preservation, and toward high-quality recording of sites that cannot be avoided during railway and highway projects. All good. But it tends to react with bafflement or even hostility to anyone who wants to make discoveries beyond the quotidian.

Very little archaeological fieldwork in this country is driven primarily by scientific curiosity. Makes me long for the days when Professor Montelius would just show up at the railway station, hire a few farmhands and head straight for the coolest site in the parish. I file my fieldwork reports exceptionally fast and immediately make them globally available online. I ask for no red carpet. Just let me do my thing, because I deliver.