February Pieces Of My Mind #2

The 1844 bridal chest that my great granddad donated to the Nordic Museum in 1940.

• I’ve decided that although immigration and refugees are important political issues, I’ve been reading too much about them lately. Redistribution of wealth and flattening the pyramid is even more important. Because wealth equals power.
• I don’t give a damn about the US primaries.
• A brother of Queen Euphemia of Norway was Bishop of Cammin, whose cathedral is famous for a Danish casket from about AD 1000, decorated with Mammen style animal art.
• The surname Garfunkel means “carbuncle, garnet” and is thus comparable to Edelstein, Rosenstein etc.
• I’m sending 18 copies of my 2011 book on late-1st millennium elite sites for free to a UK network of PhD students. Did I mention that my dad was in marketing before he retired and became a carpenter?
• Everybody outside Africa has a single-digit percentage of Neanderthal and/or Denisovan DNA. Doesn’t this mean that only sub-Saharan Africans are fully H. sapiens sapiens? Odd species definition that leaves out the majority of the population. But then I suppose those guys don’t count as separate species. They’re extinct regional populations within H.sap. Which still makes e.g. Carolus Linnaeus not fully H.sap.sap.
• Tin foil hats are Aluhüte in German!
• Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for my career if I had just shut up from day one. It’s hard to gauge what’s the better strategy, being a polarising figure in your field or a complete unknown. But then I remind myself that there’s more outcome measures than one: I wouldn’t have enjoyed my first quarter-century in archaeology half as much if I had spent it shutting up. There are lots of tenured archaeologists who are basically unheard of outside their own campuses, and where’s the glory in that? Also I can’t concede defeat until some time in 2019, when I enter the fourth quartile for age at tenure in my field.
• 29-y-o woman found dead in the woods outside Stockholm three months after going missing. And six months after the police started investigating a report of aggravated harassment against her. So fucking sad, every fucking time this happens. )-:
• Saw this beggar in the street whose method was to kneel silently with bowed head and clasped hands. And I thought, hey, that’s one of those statue posers only without the grey paint.
• The seminal stoner rock band Kyuss was named for a creature in the Fiend Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
• Iron Age and Medieval archaeology is a completely different game now thanks to Danish metal detectorists and the Internet. If I start collecting data on, say, a class of brooches, they will find new specimens and publish them on-line faster than I can register them. It’s a fire hose. Find categories that showed up once a decade now occur once a week!
• New record for me: the book I published last spring has been reviewed in four journals so far. Two favourable, one negative and one review that I’ve only read the first page of so far. And Germans keep ordering the book!
• The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a voluntary documentation service that allows UK finders to submit information about archaeological objects without losing ownership of them. One day some of these finds will rattle around the antiques market, decontextualised. And then it will be possible to send a picture to the PAS and ask future software to check if the object is in their database, by image comparison.
• Have you lived much in any place whose name contains the letter sequence LTSJÖB?
• Holy shit, I just remembered. I was TWENTY-ONE when I was admitted to the PhD programme. Many of the freshmen I teach are older than that.
• The Chronicle of Erik is named for Duke Erik who died in the dungeon after the Banquet of Nyköping in 1318. The Songs of Euphemia are named for his mother-in-law. Together they form the first longer narrative texts in Swedish.
• It doesn’t surprise me when modern French spelling preserves Medieval pronunciation. But I find it highly odd how often Medieval French spelling corresponds with modern pronunciation. What happened to their orthography?!
• In order to assert myself in my role as familial tyrant, I shall now hang some laundry to dry.
• Jrette asked me to help her study for a test on the Abrahamite faiths. Soon asked to be excused because of info overload. Turns out she just wanted brief definitions of terms. OK, sorry…
• Turned the page in the S.J. Gould collection I’m reading and came across an essay titled “Justice Scalia’s Misunderstanding”. What Scalia misunderstood in this particular case was that he thought evolution describes how life originated, when in fact it describes how life diversified into species. As in ”Origin of Species”.
• Sun’s up before me! We’re back on the right side of the year again!
• I know that it’s a biased sample. But the metal detectorists I follow on-line just love to show each other pictures of their finds, even many years after they’ve handed them in to a museum. It’s the opposite of nighthawking. These guys are competing over who gets to go to Copenhagen for the annual Detectorist Oscars. Dayhawking!
• My maternal grandma’s dad brought this chest from Scania when he moved to Stockholm.
• Ten years ago I was at this sink cleaning Pre-Roman pottery and burnt daub from Howard’s and my own dig at Skamby. Now I’m cleaning High Medieval pottery from Stensö Castle in the adjoining parish.
• Amazing that there’s only one shot in The Hateful Eight where Kurt Russell fiddles with his facial hair.
• This old lady is visiting the office and has sprayed the coat room down with her perfume. It’s heavy and floral and, to me, it signifies great grannie. Strange to think that those perfumes must once have been typical of young nubile hotties.
• I’m weaving between feeling like I already have a steady uni job and feeling like I’ll never have a steady uni job.
• Kobb’s tea is labeled “Non-EU agriculture”. When is the state of Assam joining the Union?
• Status: photographing and classifying Medieval pottery while listening to loud trippy music.
• When I was in 1st grade and got ahead of the class my teacher let me play this educational game with cardboard tiles. It was called Palin.
• Learned something yesterday at Tösse’s cake shop. A pinch of salt in your hot chocolate makes it so much better!
• How about if we had these public mournings for a writer / musician / filmmaker once they haven’t released anything new in ten years? Memorialising Harper Lee in 2016 is ridiculous.
• Haruspex Murakami.

Early Red Ware from Stensö Castle, c. 1250-1350.