Archaeological Fatherhood

Burnt Mound Near the Sea

Not Resting Place of the First Finns

Information Longevity Talk in Gothenburg
On Tuesday 17 November 17:30 I'm giving a talk as part of Mathias Klang's information security course at the University of Gothenburg. The theme is "Årtusendenas glömska: arkivsäkring i det riktigt långa perspektivet", which may hint to the intelligent reader that I'll be speaking in Swedish. I'll cover ways that information has survived fr

Anthro Blog Carnival
The seventy-ninth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Anthropology.net. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to Colleen at Middle Savagery. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. The next vacant hosting slot is in less than four weeks, on 2 December. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

Archaeological Namesakes
I've been publishing stuff in Fornvännen since 1994. But making a vanity search in the journal's on-line version, I found that I am not the first Rund??ist in the Fornvännen's history. My family name was mentioned once in those pages before I showed up. In 1935, Bengt Hildebrand published a bibliographical essay in Fornvännen titled (and I translate), "Notes on the bibliography of Swedish numismatics and archaeological historiography". It covers wr

The Rundkvists Have Taken Their Swine Flu Shots
My family and I just came home from our local vårdcentral, the public medical centre, where we've taken our shots for epidemic H1N1/09 swine flu. It cost us nothing and we waited for only about 15 minutes. We got something called Pandemix, which appears to be Pandemrix mixed with another vaccine. They're not sure if a second shot will be needed or not, but if so then we will take it at the same time as I get my annual non-swine flu shot. Juniorette cried a little after the jab but calmed down after eating two saffron buns. She then went with her mom to swimming class.

Dating the Looting of Ancient Tombs
Finland has a lot of cairns, usually sitting on hill tops near the sea. Unlike a mound, the cairn consists only of stones, and so it lets rain water percolate through. This messes up the contents of the cairn. Bones and burial goods are rarely preserved, and it seems that the ancient Finns didn't stock their cairns with a lot of interesting stuff to begin with anyway. This makes individual cairns difficult to date, though seen as a class their chronology is fairly well understood. Despite the fact that few Finnish cairns contain anything interesting or valuable to a layperson, a lot of them have central depressions indicating that people have delved into them some time after thei