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

March Pieces Of My Mind #3

I’m happy to have a pretty serious magpie nest outside my kitchen window.

Today I learned that the first eukaryotic cell was an archaeon that incorporated a bacterium — what we call the nucleus.
I have a debate piece out about metal detectorists as citizen scientists in Sweden’s foremost pop-sci magazine.
Found the description of a pre-generated Coriolis player character oddly relatable: “Exiled Archaeologist and Captain. Truth is the greatest of all things. You have dedicated your life to unravelling the mysteries of the Third Horizon. You may not always have made friends, you have used some unconventional methods, but what counts in the end is the result. And in that regard, no one can beat you. Now you head a group where everyone shares your outlook. Now nothing can stop you.”
Your arm is homologous to a bat’s wing. Tardigrades / water bears are microscopic animals, probably a sister group to arthropods (insects, crustaceans etc.) and velvet worms. Now here’s a fact that will mess you up for the rest of the day. An entire tardigrade is homologous to an arthropod head and the tip of its butt. Tardigrades have gotten rid of the entire thorax and abdomen. Imagine just your head and your butt walking around on your beard.
Both of my daughters are acting in amateur stage plays this spring. The older one’s in a Stockholm production of The Detention Squad, a Breakfast Club update. ❤️
“Urgent” by Foreigner from 1981 is a song about a happy booty-call relationship, sorry, an arrangement.
“You will all go directly to your respective Valhallas / Go directly, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars” /Tom Lehrer
Received a draft of some marketing copy for a talk I’m giving. It was dull. I added one sentence: PAGAN GRAVES, NUNS AND A ROYAL GIFT IN THE FORM OF A LION MAY BE EXPECTED. Would you like to hear my talk now?
Things that Medieval Scandinavian kings sent as diplomatic gifts to foreign rulers: a) A whale skull, b) A Sámi man
On a whim, in June 2021 I wrote to a publisher about an advertised Lord Dunsany translation project of theirs that had stalled, and which I offered to take over. I had no idea that less than five years later, one of my most realistic paths for a professional way forward and some kind of recognition would come out of that contact. Not out of my ass ton of fieldwork and academic publications.
I sat in the dark on a Viking Period burial mound, hoping to hear the tawny owl’s mating call. I sat for 15 mins and heard only a quiet klicking from a nearby power line. Then as I cycled home, I heard a mallard duck lose his shit over something.
The white-tailed sea eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla, Sw. havsörn) is no longer a threatened species in Sweden! They were on the brink of extinction 50 years ago from pesticides. Preservation projects brought them back by means of feeding with unpoisoned pork as the worst chemicals were outlawed.
Once when I taught at this small-town university I came across an old man who was treated with an odd deference by the faculty, like a major authority. He had ended his active career teaching undergrad courses, and been afforded a Festschrift. But he was completely unknown in the wider Swedish archaeology landscape. His entire academic output up through 2026 is 23 titles, mostly short papers and notes. Turns out he had been director of the county museum. A locally powerful scientific nobody.
A retired colleague and buddy of mine told me I have to be Sw. snällare to get a job. I think he means more diplomatic, not less mean, because I’m never mean. I’m just not willing to be polite about stupid and ridiculous statements if the person making them has power. I’ll be diplomatic around students who say daft things. Not professors or the directors of organisations. I make a point of mocking those.
Lord Dunsany: 84 library copies in 10 months. Edith Nesbit: 60 library copies in 8 weeks. Looks like Nesbit is going to pass Dunsany some time in early April. Being a lifelong fantasy geek, I didn’t realise how obscure Dunsany is to Swedish readers. But a lot of Boomers and Gen-Xers here know exactly who Nesbit is!
I just named another Coriolis NPC after an Armenian Olympic medalist.
Contract archaeology should not be its own main target audience. Any output from contract archaeology that only interests its own practitioners is a waste of resources.
Movie: One Battle After Another (2025). Core conflict: old militarised-police colonel wants to join white supremacist freemasons. But first he has to check whether he has a black daughter, and if so, have her killed. Grade: good!
Cheer up! At least you haven’t got an entertainment residency contract at a Las Vegas hotel!
Movie: Project Hail Mary (2026). Provisional member of a space mission wakes up from cryo sleep alone, has to figure out the main task, encounters a helpful alien. Grade: good!
A Moon base. Crewed missions to the Moon twice a year. Nuclear electric propulsion to send a drone fleet to Mars. NASA’s announcements are completely unrealistic. No funding. None of this is going to happen. They are humouring the whims of a narcissistic Boomer with senile dementia. And making fools of themselves and their flaky empire. 🙄
Interesting aspect on massage-parlour prostitution in Stockholm. The police report that many parlours also run illegal gambling for women, and that the ones who end up in debt provide a continuous source of coerced sex labour. That’s quite a business model. 🙄
Flipping through my recently acquired copy of Barton’s Dungeons and Desktops (2008), I recall playing a pirated floppy of the 1983 PC port of Oubliette. We had no manual, but I figured out a lot of the spell names by looking at the executable in an obscure sector editor called IBM Media Magician. The KONARBONA spell turned away enemies. I used Media Magician to find the gnome’s name in King’s Quest I as well.
Sorry, protestors, I know you mean well. But your problem isn’t the nutcase in chief. It’s his 77 million idiot voters. It’s the fact that your one viable “progressive” option, the Democratic Party, is virulently right-wing on a European scale. Your country is simply fucked, and it’s a major problem for the whole world.
Beaujolais used to be a really big deal in mainstream Swedish media in the 80s and 90s. Even I who didn’t and don’t drink was keenly aware of Beaujolais. These days I never see it mentioned.

March Pieces Of My Mind #2

The ZZ plant suddenly blooms!? *Zamioculcas zamiifolia*, native to East Africa.

I know an old jazz musician who lives in Balling, Jutland. Little Richard has told us that by golly, Miss Molly sure likes to ball. I just wrote to my friend and told him that I believe both Mr. Richard and Miss Molly would enjoy Balling.
Today’s afternoon snack: Yunnan tea and glutinous rice dumplings filled with sugar and sesame seed. Mark my words, this is how an unsuspecting young Swedish man eventually ends up after leaving a party in 1999 together with a pretty Chinese girl!
The LLM epidemic is not just a financial bubble. It’s a mass psychosis as to the capability of the technology, quite apart from the financial aspects.
My music randomiser served up “When The Stars Go Blue”, and I wondered idly, what’s Ryan Adams been up to lately? He released his 33rd studio album last year.
Isterband is tubular haggis. Pölsa is freeform haggis. Fight me.
Re-reading Peake reminds me of the long-forgotten feeling of delving into complicated older English prose far above my level of reading comprehension as a boy. I remember it not being easy, but fun enough, and it sure was an education!
Having a hard time getting your nonsense poetry into print? Do what Mervyn Peake did! Write a really good, grotesque and absurd novel and just paste the poetry into it with some flimsy excuse for why it’s in the story! ❤️
My wife got a medal for her volunteer work teaching immigrant ladies and children to swim!
Soft plastic handles are planned obsolescence in kitchen utensils. Don’t buy that shit.
Reading about celebrities who mix the strongest uppers with the strongest downers, a.k.a. speedballing, and have heart attacks. This does not seem like a good idea to me. I am instead going to continue to mix tea and milk.
Listening to a documentary about unfortunate idealists who bought an old rural care home near Stockholm in 1997, renovated it for communal living and capped the looow selling price of apartments — while housing prices rose 20% annually in the area. Everyone bought super cheaply. Everyone had a huge economic incentive to change the commune’s bylaws and cash in. Chaos ensued.
Suddenly remember how for middle-school algebra, I made a confused and abortive attempt to get the GW-BASIC interpreter to solve equations for me. As I remember it, I thought that functions such as LET X=Y*3 could have anything to the left of the equals sign. I was ~13.
I bet I’d make a pretty good hiking hostel receptionist. Sadly nobody seems to be hiring senior Humanities academics for that kind of role.
My book of Edith Nesbit translations is doing great at the public libraries! 47 copies registered in only six weeks. The Lord Dunsany book hasn’t even got twice that number after ten months.
Reading about a young fellow with autism who made 28 failed applications to undergo basic training in the Swedish armed forces. The Equality Ombudsman is suing the military on his behalf and ready to take the case to the Supreme Court. Because he was denied on the grounds of autism. I think anyone who applies more than twice should automatically be ineligible, autism or no autism. It has always been a core recruitment task to weed out the over-enthusiastic.
Haha, remember the job I interviewed for in Norway two months ago? They went against the evaluation committee’s recommendation and hired their local buddy with a middling CV who already had a part-time teaching gig there. Scandy academic hiring practices are mostly local friendship corruption. In Sweden 60-70% of everyone with the professor title is still at the department where they received their PhD. A large majority.
When buying WordPerfect in 1987 for my desktop PC whose only link to the surrounding world was a 2400 bps modem and a copper telephone wire, I don’t remember having any feeling that the Wordperfect Corporation wanted to spy on me, sell my personal information, enshittify the software and fund global fascism. Maybe there is a market for similar products today as well.
It’s 2026. The UK removes the last hereditary seats from its parliament.
Sure, you can try to use our smart TV to spy on us in our home. But first you’ve got to plug it into the power socket, which is almost always disconnected.
Saw Fjärde Väggen, a really funny meta play by Rumle Vierth Lemhagen, staged to good effect with an unpaid amateur ensemble. I’ve seen far less interesting plays with professionals. That piece should be picked up by some pros, and RVL should write more plays.
The Beatles’ twelve albums were released over a period of seven years and two months. Imagine a band that had done what they did for pop music from January 2019 until today. I often don’t even take note of a good band before they have disbanded.
RPG misunderstanding yesterday. The 2nd group consisted of bright and sweet teenagers who seemed unfamiliar with the concept of hex crawling. At least the most vocal group member was expecting a convention scenario that could be solved. Not four hours exploring a sandbox. They were visibly frustrated halfway through the sesh. Of course, I had a finale prepared that I planned to activate ten minutes before the end of the schedule slot. I pressed that button very much earlier.
Two RPG sessions ago, Åsa’s Near East space-opera intelligence officer died in a gunfight against religious fanatics. I just made a new character for her and named her after the first Armenian woman Olympic medalist, Nina Muradyan.
You know clickable links on web pages that open in a new tab? I am full of apprehension every time I right-click on one of those and tell my browser to open it in a new tab. What does it mean to open a web page in a new tab in a new tab? These are the harrowing threat situations I navigate among.
Following along after the yarrow and the orpine, now the larkspur is also poking tiny shoots out of my new planting bed! ❤️
Movie: The Booksellers (2019). Documentary about New York’s rare book sellers and collectors. Grade: good!
Interesting perspective in the movie: widespread Internet access has made collecting rare books far less popular, and it can now support far fewer professionals. Because everything’s become so easy to find. Collecting was mainly about the hunt. J. Briggs in her standard 1987 biography of Edith Nesbit could not find copies of several books of hers. Now they’re all in WorldCat and on bookselling web sites.
There’s a distinct subtype of the earliest group of these stone axes that seems to have no chronological significance. Small research finding just now: throughout the group’s lifetime, these axes with an oval-cross-section butt are the coastal variety. In the maritime society of the Late Bronze Age, travel and communication along the coast was much easier than inland and uphill onto the Småland highland.
Suddenly remember this plane crash that had a technical cause. And the pilot could be heard praying desperately on the cockpit recording while trying to get the controls to respond. But because he was praying in Arabic, they investigated it as a possible terrorist suicide. 🙄
First long bike ride of the year! One hour in the sunshine to Troll Stream Bakery. ❤️
A magpie pair are renovating the big nest in the park rowan outside our kitchen window.
The e-mail-shattered remnants of Swedish Mail can’t afford to pay mailmen to deliver mail to individual houses in our housing area any more. Part of the reason is that much of it is large mail-order packages these days. So they’ve just told us that they expect us to put our mailboxes in one spot at the boundary line of the area, like how it’s done in peripheral summer house areas.
Failed my haemoglobin count, am in no shape to donate blood. I’ve been hovering around the lower cutoff for 30 years. Back again in August!
Can’t wait to vote the catastrophic Kristersson government out of office. Imagine the party of big capital being dependent for every single decision on the party of racist small-town working men. Ineffectual, corrupt and anti-humanistic.
The game master in the Space Opera RPG (1980) is called the StarMaster.
There’s an Aircraft and Vehicle Rental table in Space Opera 1980. It includes a HoverLorry, a Heavy GravSled and a CargoSub. I ask you, does your modern sci-fi RPG of choice allow player characters to rent a cargo submarine? No? Then can it really be called a complete RPG?

Back On Hot Springs Island Again

I ran six RPG sessions on Hot Springs Island with my home group in mid-2024. In recent weeks I’ve run three additional sessions at mini-conventions in Norrtälje and Vallentuna. And I’ve made a couple of observations.

You shouldn’t be afraid to let the NPCs leak a lot of lore to the PCs. If it’s at all reasonable that someone knows something and wants to talk, go ahead and let them talk about it. It’s really the only way to transmit some of the book’s unwieldy bush of stories to the players.

The random encounter tables are starting to look a lot less fun and random to me. They can be summarised with the words “You startle a large animal that tries to avoid you”.

Here’s why. The designer has underestimated the bell-curviness of 3D6. Such a die roll comes out at 9 to 12 at a 48% probability. 18 out of 25 hexes in this hex crawl are some kind of jungle. If you roll 9-12 there, you will only encounter six wildlife species, none of which hunts human-sized prey or otherwise wants to interact: deer equivalent, giant venomous centipede, boar, giant rat, giant bat, large venomous snake.

I’m going to house-rule this moving forward: in the jungle, 9-10 gets adjusted to 8, and 11-12 gets adjusted to 13.

But still, the convention players and I are having a lot of fun with the setting. Well worth the PDF price!

March Pieces Of My Mind #1

I had a good idea for a business. Clients can hire me as a professional cynic. I’ll tell them in convincing authoritative tones that whatever they believe most sincerely in is actually pointless, banal, a misunderstanding or simply factually incorrect. I teach that whatever you may feel, you never break through to any deeper level of understanding. There is no enlightenment, no spiritual rebirth, no transcendence. Just particles in space.
This woman’s accent is so thick that I thought she said “You should die old” when she said “You should dial…”
The bronze statue of footballer Z. Ibrahimovic in Malmö was badly vandalised by people who a) loved his former club and were angry that he had left for Italy, b) hated immigrants. I don’t like it either. Because I don’t want spectator sports to be visible in the public space. I would prefer a statue of the footballer’s mom.
People’s perception of threat levels, famously, vary. And they co-vary with political affiliation. I’ve lived for 30 years in a heightened-crime multiethnic tenement suburb. My kid’s former classmate was convicted as accessory to an inept drug gang murder in the mall parking lot. Someone blew up a front door five houses over from mine. But unlike the fascists and conservatives, I’m not worried at all. Crime is a societal problem, but I feel safe.
The student musical we watched had a strange script. Started out establishing that it was about a literary rivalry between Henry Miller and the up and coming Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway then immediately got arrested for littering and sentenced to community service in a fish cannery. The rest of the play was almost entirely about the workers at that factory.
Saw a Playstation 5 for the first time at my daughter’s house. I didn’t even realise that it was a gaming console. That thing is the shape and size of a space heater. The computing power inside must be tremendous when they haven’t been able to miniaturise it further. In fact, it probably works as a space heater too!
I’m at the age where educated people “crown their careers”, as the Swedish expression goes, by becoming bosses of something or other. Archaeology-adjacent boss jobs tend to be wildly unattractive admin positions. Sure, they’re pretty well paid, but they don’t involve doing any archaeology. So it doesn’t bother me that my research background doesn’t qualify me for those jobs. My problem is that employers see me as over-qualified for jobs where you get to do anything fun.
Movie: Frank (2014). Hopeful young musician joins an oddball band, records an album with them in an Irish vacation home, travels with them to the SXSW festival. But are they brilliantly avantgarde? Or dysfunctional and mentally ill? Or both? Grade: OK.
Apparently “Dubai influencer” is a well-known media type. I had no idea. I would much prefer to live in a world where none of these existed.
Every spring I move snow and ice from the shady part of our little yard to the sunny part, in order to get rid of it faster.
Tech school daughter has been tasked with writing a marketing plan for an existing product. It’s a water bottle with a scented pad for your nose, to make you think that you’re drinking Coke or whatever. I just think this sounds like a complete joke.
Learned after years why the librarians make this half-hearted move to stop me from getting my books from the wait shelf to the lending counter. It’s because the names of other lenders are visible on paper slips in books. And after the Rushdie murder fatwah, that became a serious issue. I might harrass someone for borrowing a book about Medieval agricultural archaeology! 😄
The Writers’ Union is offering way more opportunities for professional engagement than archaeology does, 33 years into the latter career.
You’re a 62-y-o metal guitar virtuoso, you’re known for being irritable and having a very high opinion of yourself, and you book a gig in Moscow while Russia pursues a multi-year war of aggression in Europe. There are many ways to look at this. Perhaps the most apt one is that this is a senior Spinal Tap moment.
Pleased and surprised to learn that Chinese people are the ninth biggest immigrant nationality in our municipality.
Making phone calls to pitch a couple of talks to venues in towns around Lake Mälaren. One about 17th century travel writer Nils Mattsson Kiöping, one about Stockholm’s pre-1640 town plan.
Imagine a leader who said “Thank you big money donors for getting me elected. I have no ambition to be reelected four years from now. I am going to run this country entirely according to my party’s core ideology, and ignore you guys and your wishes. Fuck you all.”
Got a job offer from a night school, Sw. studieförbund. Unlikely to be many hours a month, but still.
Is everyone using their Microsoft Encarta CD-ROMs a lot these days?
I’ve been game-mastering several times a month for 5½ years now, and tonight was the first time a player character got killed. The players got into a gun fight in a heroically reckless manner, an opponent got lucky with his dice, and the critical hits table in Coriolis 2016 occasionally delivers lethal outcomes. Abidah, Near East space opera secret agent, we barely knew you!
“So now, you could spend the morning / Walking with me, quite amazed / As I am unwashed, and somewhat slightly dazed” D. Bowie
Someone is going to nuke something in the Near East, and insane US theocrats will be like “Well, that didn’t bring about the Second Coming, clearly we need to nuke some more”. 🙄
It makes me happy that my friend’s yappy dogs recognise me on sight and relax when they see who’s arriving. “Friendly laid-back human, offers scritches & cuddles but not food.”
Yesterday a non-member of the Swedish-Chinese community told me, a member since 26 years, sternly not to ask a Chinese person about their background because it was othering. 😄
Found a continuity error in Peake’s Titus Groan, ch. “Titus Is Christened”. Fuchsia’s aunts are speaking to her, with Clarice leading and Cora filling in asides like an echo. Then suddenly it’s the other way around in a way that does not look intentional.
Tried to read Ingvild Rishøi’s short stories, but they are not for me. I don’t enjoy reading about people who feel inadequate and act irrationally or have trouble deciding what to do at all, even if they are skillfully depicted. I get impatient with them, “Oh FFS, pull yourself together”.
First tulip spears are poking the tiniest bit out of the new planting bed. It will be an experiment in fallow deer repellent efficacy.
Friends of mine have moved to Linköping. There’s a huge unkempt two-storey rosebush on the front facade of their house. We’ve arranged for me to come down in two weeks and trim it into shape for them.
I practise Epicurean volunteering. I volunteer my time, but only for projects that offer community with other people and fun shared activities. There’s any number of much more important but onerous, embarrassing and boring charity activities I could volunteer for.
Here’s a random quotation from Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger (1977). In his 1976 book The Sirius Mystery, Robert K. G. Temple “… is not aware that NUit and ANUbis, two figures he specifically links with Sirius, are still very much alive among those magical lodges currently working the Aleister Crowley system of contacting Higher Intelligence.”

February Pieces Of My Mind #3

In 2015, five Swedish universities partnered up in an enormous, still ongoing research initiative called the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program. For an acronym, they chose “WASP”. This is mind-blowingly clueless, because it makes them sound either like racists or like an 80s metal band.
Stayed awake all afternoon thanks to Camellia sinensis, then slept for half an hour on the bus.
I did not foresee that the ignorance and stupidity of voters would become one of the main governing forces in world politics. I was way past 40 when I stopped believing that smart, educated people would always prevail in medium-to-high-functioning democracies. I am deeply disappointed and disgusted to be living in such a stupid timeline.
Saw a headline: “The Ancient Roman Dodecahedron: The Mysterious Object That Has Baffled Archaeologists for Centuries”. I’d like to correct this, please. The Ancient Roman Dodecahedron: The Rare Object That Almost No Archaeologist Has Cared About One Way Or The Other for Centuries.
Sent a pitch letter to four publishing houses for a pop-sci book with a tentative title that translates to “In the time of the longhouses and hilltop cairns”. Wish me luck!
I need to talk less about the archaeological job market. I just come across as bitter & despondent and bring people down. Better talk about my recent successes as a fiction translator, while studiously avoiding to mention that this job is completely unsustainable as a source of income.
I often leave enjoyable gigs after 90 mins. That’s long enough to be listening to one band.
My old dad’s smartphone setup has made me conscious of a really common accessibility failure. Most phone app developers don’t seem to check what happens if you run their software with a really large default system font, because your vision is impaired. I can tell you what happens. Buttons and input boxes end up outside the screen, or in really bad cases, on top of each other.
Movie: Companion (2025). A weekend at Sergey the Rich Russian’s secluded lakeside house goes violently sideways after it’s revealed that one of the guests isn’t quite as advertised. Grade: good!
OK, so you’re not going to give me any of the few exceptional jobs in my profession. Well you know what? Nobody is in the least interested in giving me an ordinary everyday job either. Because they take a quick look at my CV and see someone who’s worked all their life to become exceptional. But me, I’ve still got to pay the mortgage.
Look at the rationality of market economics. Core computer components are getting expensive. Because machine-learning companies have created an increased demand. Not because the companies are making any money from selling machine-learning apps. They get their money from venture capital. But VC knows that they will never make money, and is just speculating on an investment bubble. And that’s why used laptops are expensive now.
Sweden’s ambassador to Somalia threatened the director of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency there with losing her job unless she made foreign aid money available for bribing Somali officials. Why? To make them willing to receive Somali nationals expelled from Sweden by our fascist-controlled government. She refused and was expelled.
I just joined Författarcentrum, a speaking gig broker for writers. 37% of the members got at least one gig last year. Of course, the members vary wildly in terms of fame and name recognition, so my chance is probably way lower than that. Worth a try!
The UN’s migration authority IOM reports a record-breaking number of drowned and missing on the Mediterranean so far in 2026.
I listen to Depeche Mode’s “A Question Of Lust” for the first time in decades. And I’m astonished to realise that there’s an unabashed Phil Spector drum arrangement on the song! Wall of Sound! 60s swimming pool echo! I never knew as a teen.
I had buddies once who joked about who would be the first to go to bed with someone born in the ’80s. The youngest person born in the ’80s is currently 36.
What was the name of the planet in Elite that offered edible poets?
Academia: There’s no job for you in eight countries. Also Academia: Here’s a new book chapter that cites one of your books and two of your journal papers!
I need to read a 1953 paper in a journal named: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe. At the Royal Library today I realised that I had mistakenly ordered up some ’50s issues of a journal named: Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe. Apparently stone tools were considered natural science in Jena.
There is nothing in my calendar between 31 May and Election Day 13 September.
Talked to someone who works in contract archaeology. She called me “highly specialised”. Hello? I’ve published work from 4000 BC to AD 1900 with wildly varying themes. But maybe she meant that doing research outside of contract digs is itself a specialisation.
Ladies! A good thing about being married to a precariously (un-) employed academic in his 50s who’s barely had a steady job this millennium is that he is not going to look at you and say “Baby, I’m bored, I’m taking off now with that divorced 40ish physiotherapist”. He’s going to say “Baby, now that the kids have moved out you are the single constant thing in my life and I would be completely unmoored without you. Let’s go to bed.”
Each young member of my tribe gets sent out into adult life clutching a Le Creuset cast-iron stew pot. Thus they recognise each other, and form homes together with an extra stew pot.
Another Chinese person has interpreted me as a shy, quiet man, reports my wife. When in fact I’m extremely loud and talkative… But I don’t know Chinese.
82-y-o lady is annoyed that there’s no books in our multi-ethnic tenement suburb’s public library by two canonised Swedish writers who died 86 and 114 years ago.

Been Charting A Career Course

It’s been a year since I lost my Polish research position to the profound economic impact of the Ukraine invasion, and I’m still on the dole. Yesterday I received another rejection for a uni job. It’s time to take stock and chart a new course. Rather than do it in my diary, I’ve decided to put it here, in the event that someone might be interested.

I’ve got a big fat research portfolio with strong bibliometry, a strong record of directing research-motivated fieldwork (an important distinction), a decent teaching record, a solid popular outreach record (hey, you should read my blog!), and a few years’ experience working part-time at a local museum. Here’s what I’ve learned in 13 months of applying for advertised positions.

I’ve only found four university positions advertised in eight countries that I felt were realistic to apply for: in Poland, Norway, Germany and Denmark. I got one interview and no job.
The certificate of full professorial competence that I received in a Danish recruitment process in 2024 has, though it really cheered me up at the time, proved worthless in four countries. Including Denmark!
Both of my job applications with local museums led to interviews, but both museums then hired people with more experience than I of that kind of job. Sensible, in my opinion.
I have nothing of any perceived value to offer on the main normal labour market for archaeologists across Scandinavia, which has to do with roadworks. We call it contract archaeology – you may remember the deprecated term rescue excavations. If they hire someone who’s 53, then it’s someone who has already worked for years or decades in highway archaeology. (But the Ostlänken megaproject may make them desperate soon.)
Ten applications got me one interview with a County Archaeologist for an admin job. She, to my surprise, ended up hiring a young buddy of mine with roughly the same slim experience of contract archaeology as I have. But sure, his experience is much more recent, and he’s much more likely to stay on with them.
My teaching experience is worthless to high schools. Many many many applications tell me this, because this is how I fulfil the dole office’s demands each month.

The conclusion I draw from this is that it would be useless to continue applying for jobs in academia, in contract archaeology, in county admin and in high school. To my surprise, I find that the field where I am the least unemployable is actually in local museums, jobs not involving field archaeology. But those are super rare and I can’t sit around waiting for the next ad.

So I figure my best chance of a source of income moving forward isn’t actually even on the labour market. I need to go back onto small grants, the private foundations that are happy to allocate €5,000 now and then to a productive scholar with a proven track record. Their problem is that they have to give people money before they know if those people will create anything worthwhile. Some of these foundations have known for 30 years that I’m a safe bet.

February Pieces Of My Mind #2

I wonder what’s loose inside my laptop when it suddenly decides that yep, the network hardware and the track pad exist again! Seems so strange that these random pieces of the machine are glitching off and on.
“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.” William Gibson 2014, The Peripheral, Ch. 81.
Parties always put way more names on their ballots than they are likely to get seats. Partly to replace representatives who quit during the years up to the next election. But mostly to show everyone that the party has a lot of dependable people to choose from. I was honoured to be asked yesterday if I’d have my name on the Left Party’s ballot in Nacka municipality. I told them I’d be happy to be in the padding section near the bottom if they need me. My third time!
I’ve been thinking backwards about American nature. “People in an alien environment among plants and animals we didn’t evolve along with.” I’m in fucking Sweden, Northern Europe. Try showing a birch, a Scots pine, a magpie, an elk to an early hominid. It will not nod in pleased recognition.
A local historical society asked me to give a talk at their ABM. It’s a two-hour drive. They offered one fifth of the Writers’ Union’s recommended minimum fee. I turned them down. Sure, I can do that kind of thing mostly pro bono while a salaried academic. To a job seeker though, it’s really just an insult.
There’s an uncomfortable tension in that Humanities departments need big grants to survive, but the individual scholar doesn’t need a big grant to produce work that gets accepted by top journals.
The bus driver was friendly and talkative. He was fond of combustion cars and did not believe any global warming is going on. “They taught us in middle school that CO2 is a cooling compound that forms extremely cold ice. How can that be a warming gas?” Everybody gets to vote.
Back in Växjö, where at long last I got my first teaching gig in 2012. Haven’t been back since my last lecture here in the autumn of 2014. At the time I would have been pleased to learn that the next time, I’d be here for Bronze Age finds data collection.
My head literally exploded in a figurative sense!!!
I’m thinking that if you really have to choose, it’s better to have lots of friends who want to spend time with you having fun, but not a single professional contact that offers you a job, than the other way around.
If you need a metric as to whether someone has an ear for language and reads a lot, ask them if they think automatic translation is good enough for fiction now. Anyone who answers yes has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.
It’s fascinating and instructive. When people saw that LLM chats appeared to understand instructions and always responded comprehensibly and with good grammar and spelling, they assumed that the replies would also be correct or at least well sourced. When in fact autocomplete has no such concept as correct or well sourced. This of course means that it’s useless to scholarship. I can’t use an LLM to interrogate a dataset, because I will have no idea if the results it reports are correct.
Listened to Snedtänkt. Filmmakers Alexandersson & De Geer discovered that in the 70s and 80s, the Swedish state film support bodies checked whether you made a TV series or feature film after they gave you a grant. But nobody was tasked with checking if your work had anything at all in common with the pitch you submitted when you applied for the money. They could do whatevs. 😄
Another one of my recurring thoughts. If you’re running a Swedish excavation unit, it is extremely unwise to hire a small finds specialist for your fieldwork reports. Because the person at the County Archaeologist’s office who signs off on your reports, letting you move on to the next project, knows nothing about finds, and can’t tell if that chapter is any good.
Our youngest is rehearsing a musical comedy while at tech school in Lund. The director and one of the actors are daughters of women who performed in the original staging of the piece in 1999. ❤️
Yay! My second fiction translation, Edith Nesbit’s ghost stories, got top marks from the Library Service! Just like my previous one of Lord Dunsany!
Movie: Amour Apocalypse (2025). Depressed, lonely, climate worrying man falls in love with the tech support lady at the firm that made his new daylight therapy lamp. Grade: good!
I was quite old when I realised that your electricity bill goes down if you thaw out frozen food in the fridge rather than on the kitchen counter or in a frying pan.
It’s a great relief to me that my younger daughter is doing a degree in industrial engineering and speaks three major world languages. She will always be employable whereever she ends up. Even in really scary refugee scenarios.
If you’re only going to listen to one single AC/DC track, then this is the one. “Whole Lotta Rosie”, live in Glasgow in 1978. Absolutely mindblowing!
Hey young peeps! I’m happy to report that the changes your lover undergoes over the decades are mainly visual. And you already know that it’s not mainly a visual pastime.
Nope, nothing about Northern Europe in the February issue of Antiquity. People keep expecting me to be interested in the archaeology of South America and New Zealand. It’s like telling a literature scholar who works with Latvian poetry that there’s a new interesting paper about Paraguay’s three most famous novelists.
When Robert Anton Wilson was dying and couldn’t afford hospice care, there was a charity collection. A lot of people sent $23.
Had some leftover fishy flour from frying fish. And some leftover sardines. Invented sardine pancake.
Learned another fascinating fact from an aside on the Common Descent podcast. Everywone knows that humans don’t just have a random, adequate sprinkling of teeth. Anatomically normal ones have 4 x 8 = 32 named tooth sockets. Get this: the thousands of little bristles on an insect are like that!
I love how my dusky-complexioned neighbours from southern parts get pink noses in the winter. ❤️
“Nannie Slagg entered, bearing in her arms the heir to the miles of rambling stone and mortar; to the Tower of Flints and the stagnant moat; to the angular mountains and the lime-green river where twelve years later he would be angling for the hideous fishes of his inheritance.” M. Peake 1946, Titus Groan, Ch. A Gold Ring
Democratisation is a shaky concept these days in art and science. It’s when you can afford an eight-channel recording device and volunteer on a bird-ringing project. It’s not when you can prompt the plagiarism server for a picture and question vaccines or climatology in a Facebook group.
Prior to the 1970s, games-master meant gym teacher in UK English.
Yay! The Writers’ Union just booked me to give a talk to the members about my recent work co-authored with A. Wramler on what the neighborhood where the Union’s HQ is located looked like before the current town plan was laid out in c. 1640.
One lifelong academic priority of mine has been to mock Humanities scholars who exaggerate the political importance of their chosen fields. They’re often Bourdieu fans. Fascist regimes enable successful fascist scholars in our obscure disciplines. Not the other way around. We are the tail, not the dog.
Received proofs of the big paper on animal art that I spent most of last academic year on. With Luciano Pezzoli’s amazing illustrations! This is in Praehistorische Zeitschrift. I think it has the potential to be used a lot moving forward.
Found the hyphenation “anal-ogous”. It’s a German journal…
Tech school daughter invited us to a formal student dinner after her musical theatre performance. Three-courses. Starts half an hour before midnight. “Thanks but HELL NO” was my reply. I would just find a quiet corner right away and fall asleep. 😄
Interesting ethical conundrum. Is it OK to buy decontextualised Scandinavian-made Viking Period coins online and write scholarly journal notes about them? The editors of the very solidly established journal Nordisk Numismatisk Unions Medlemsblad think it’s OK. I’m not so sure. When I edited a journal, my policy was to not publish anything where the author had bought his source material.
My oldest played me her new 5-minute audiodrama about cooking a meal for your casual hookup date! ❤️❤️❤️
Oh Mike Oldfield, you brilliant nerd. On “To France” he moves one note of the synth bass to the right-hand channel with regular intervals.
Musical idea: record a cover of Kraftwerk’s long song “Autobahn”, add lyrics about bird conservation projects, call it “Audubon”.
When you’re dealing with digital images, dpi (Dots Per Inch) is a completely meaningless metric. Because you can imagine that your digital 500 by 500 pixel image is an inch wide, or a mile wide. It’s still exactly 500 by 500 pixels. When talking about image file resolution for printing purposes, the number you need is never dpi. It’s width in pixels.
Weather forecast suggests that a week from now, Fisksätra will get at least three days of above-zero temperatures and rain. Might be the start of meteorological spring, though on average it starts around 7 March here.
It’s -8°C here, but the sun is up early again. And there’s this bird chirping in our yard, a little song that sounds a lot like this guy / gal expects spring soon. ❤️
Written a pitch letter to publishing houses for a popular book on Swedish Prehistory & Middle Ages. Feeling good about what I have to offer.

Academic Hiring Is An Extreme Buyer’s Market

Academic hiring is an extreme buyer’s market, where employers can afford to offend people really badly at their convenience.

I recently had a good experience in a Norwegian recruitment process that hasn’t been finalised yet. But let me tell you about my dialogue with a university in another country.

Uni N.N.: Hello world, here’s an opening for a senior academic in South Scandy archaeology, no particular speciality. Feel free to apply!

Me: Thanks, here’s my application that I spent several days writing!

Uni N.N. after a few months: No thanks, you’re not on the shortlist. Goodbye.

Me: I’ve published research for 30 years and worked at six universities, and you treat my application exactly like you would if I had worked full-time at McDonalds for all this time? I think you should give me a transparent and meritocratic explanation for why I’m not on the shortlist.

Uni N.N.: No, sorry, we got too many applications, we haven’t got time to evaluate them all properly.

Me: OK, so you haven’t got time to tell me why I did not get an interview. Instead, please then tell me the criteria that you used for the shortlist, the ones you didn’t put in your highly unspecific job ad. Were you actually looking for some chronological, regional, methodological speciality?

Uni N.N.: Sorry, not going to tell you. Goodbye.

February Pieces Of My Mind #1

Had to abandon the Proton online word processor and spreadsheet after a long honest try. They’re just so bad.
Big museums used to collect information on archaeological finds in other hands, both private and public. Sometimes even copies of objects, and I don’t mean sculpture that could be exhibited as “art”. (There’s no such thing as art. There’s only archaeological finds that haven’t entered the ground yet.) Today I’m looking through old card files on Bronze Age finds in other hands. I wonder when the decision was made to stop updating them.
In Sweden, public bodies can pay someone to make a colourful painting for them. If it’s labelled as “art”, then it’s more expensive and the buyer is legally prohibited from making any demands on what the painting should depict. If the same painting is labelled as “decoration”, it’s cheaper and you can instruct the painter in detail. But public bodies are required to buy “art”. I’m an archaeologist. I work with wordless things. I think this is a ridiculous distinction.
Thinking about the pathetic Pickup Artist movement where insecure men try to manipulate women into one-night stands. And I realise that I’m not the right person to judge these clowns. Because, and I’m saying this in the most conceited tone possible, women have made it quite clear to me ever since I was 15 that they kind of like me. Why would I try to manipulate them? I never needed a PUA manual.
Blue sky and a bit of daylight left at 16:30! Stockholm has survived another dark season!
What if they achieve artificial intelligence, it’s a clear thing, only it’s low artificial intelligence, like a normal three-year-old human. You can talk to it, it asks endless questions, but it’s never going to be smart enough to be useful, certainly not to build better versions of itself and spark the Rapture of the Nerds.
I still practice something I learned from a PC Mag column around 1990: If it fits, put your entire email message in the subject line, and leave the letter space empty. This cannot be replaced with a chat service, because they don’t have a useful paper trail and archiving system.
Had tea with a 60ish journalist who told me she’s writing a book about climate emergency protestors. Interested in organic farming. She was intrigued to hear about the Society of Creative Anachronism, about the Tolkien Society. Seemed completely divorced from nerd culture. Then she told me she’d spent years of her rural youth in Västergötland playing AD&D!
It was astonishing to me to learn that reading a piece of writing out loud from the page in a comprehensible and engaging way is a skill. And it’s a skill that some extremely intelligent and accomplished people lack. And they don’t know that they lack it.
Chuckling a little discouragedly to myself. Good news: younger colleagues and friends of mine that I’ve coached are getting good steady jobs not in academia. Bad news: I applied for those same jobs. Because the only jobs I have really solid qualifications for are as a university professor or a humanities journal editor. And those jobs are exceedingly rare. But other employers who see my CV assume that I’ll be getting one of those jobs soon. As if.
A Danish survey documents that the country has 484 public statues of historically important men, and 43 of historically important women. Most public statues of women in Denmark depict anonymous nudes. The historically important men are almost entirely fully clad.
Movie: The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988). Rock documentary, long interviews with the famous and never to be famous in the L.A. hair metal scene in 1987-88. Grade: good!
Great line about alcoholism from Alice Cooper in the documentary. From memory, not the exact wording: “Puking blood is all well and good here on stage, but it’s not much fun when you have to do it at a Holiday Inn.”
You no longer need a publisher to get your book designed, printed and bound. The really important jobs a publishing house still does these days are marketing and distribution. Without that, a self-published author just owns a very large number of identical books that will probably stay in their spare room, where nobody knows about them, until someone throws them out.
Had tea and a chat with my first wife today. We lived together for six years, I moved out in ’98. She showed me a really good pencil drawing of a tulip. Still buys lapsang souchong.
Doodle, in the free version, recently cut down from 20 to 10 dates per poll. I have now tried xoyondo.com and found it to be even better than Doodle used to be. And free.
Skilled workers from the Baltic States are great. Very happy to have them in Sweden. But the plumbers leave one particular signature: they swap the hot and cold water at the wash stand.
Freemasons have often been the subject of the same conspiracy theories and blood libel as Jewish people. During our guided tour of the Swedish Masons’ Stockholm HQ, our guide pointed out that it was easy to accuse the Masons of killing children. Because they funded a lot of orphanages, where mortality was always high regardless of who paid the rent. So yes, children who were in a sense in the care of Freemasons did actually die. Though not as part of midnight rituals.
Grammatical confession: when someone asks to be called “them”, I just can’t do it in speech. Not because of any gender ID hostility, but because it hurts my grammar hardware too much. “Them” is plural to me. I default to using their name rather than any pronoun at all.
They took down the whole backlog of the CIA World Factbook from the web. One of the more cogent arguments against universal suffrage around 1900 was that the unwashed masses were severely ignorant, they would elect crooks and morons, and incompetent leadership is how powerful states fall into decline. It’s a sad spectacle, and it’s dangerous to us in Sweden too. “I’ll try to stay serene and calm / When Alabama’s got the bomb.” /Tom Lehrer
One of my main assumptions here in life is that if you have a really strong sense that something means something important, you’re almost certainly wrong. Religion? Impossible, there are tens of thousands of conflicting ones. Hallucinogenic drugs? No, famously you’ll come off your trip with an intense feeling of having learned something significant, but all you can ever explain to others is “You should do drugs too, man”. Your quest for meaning is doomed to begin with. Just quit.
Yay! Our new neighbour has two stringy-haired sausage dogs!
I’m working on three papers in parallel now. The big one is about Late Bronze Age stone (!) axes. Then there’s a medium one about the Äversta bog sacrificial site from c AD 200 to 1000. And finally a note about the Viking Period and Medieval location of Erstavik Manor, of whose old land my wife and I own just enough for a small house.
A new business model for book shops is doing well in Tokyo, where the old one is dying out. I rent the shop space and keep the shop. Then I sub-let shelf space in 40-centimetre chunks for €30-60 per month to self published authors, small publishers, associations, celebrities. And I pocket 5% of their sales.
I spent two happy hours peeling garlic, chopping onions and chatting to kind and friendly people with idealistic views. Prepping for the punk soup kitchen.
Did you know that technocracy means government by educated specialists? It has nothing to do with tech bros.
LinkedIn just sent me a tailored job-ad recommendation. A professorship, no less! 1. It’s a professorship of radiology. I’m not confident that I would be able to fake senior academic knowledge in this completely unknown field. 2. It’s offered via “Quik Hire Staffing” 😄
Busing tables and washing dishes at the punk lunch place was exactly what I needed in my state of unnecessariness. Lots of friendly peeps!
Sunny today, got some male birds into an amorous & territorial mood. Heard both the great tits’ Thaw Song and the woodpeckers’ brisk drum solos. ❤️
But we’ve still got a solid slab of winter weather ahead. For the next ten days, the forecast promises temperatures between -11 and -2°C, and at least two days of heavy snowfall. Reassuring that Swedish winter is more than just a memory.
The first wave of Swedish punk rock started in 1978. The people who reach retirement age in 2026 turned 19 in 1978. We are in the era of punk retirement. But Swedish recent retirees have excellent health on average. I hope they form new punk bands now that they have time.
Here’s a song title for free if anyone needs one. BUT I’M OLD ENOUGH TO BE YOUR TEENAGE FATHER
Sending a copy of my 2015 book on wetland deposition as a gift to an English PhD student. “For N.N., herewith invoking the Lady of the Lake’s constant support in a long and happy research career”.
My youngest is playing Anaïs Nin in a re-staging of a 1999 amateur musical comedy about Ernest Hemingway! ❤️
Chinawoman: “Maybe you would like some potatoes as a vegetable along with this chicken dish and the obvious rice”. Her Germanic husband: “Potatoes = rice”.

No Rotary, I’m Someone Who Needs Your Charity

Rotary International is a major charitable organisation that raises funds, largely from its own members, for some excellent causes. Notably PolioPlus, a >40-year effort to immunise children worldwide.

But in its everyday activities, a local Rotary club is primarily a social forum for businesspeople and educated professionals. They have monthly meetings, eat lunch together and listen to a talk.

Over the decades, now and then I’ve been asked to provide these talks. And I’ve given them one or two. But today when an old lady called, I turned Rotary down. Because they never pay speakers. Their operational model is that volunteer speakers make the monthly club meetings attractive to members, and this then motivates the members to donate to PolioPlus.

I wondered about this already back when I was precariously funded with small grants. And now that I’ve been on the dole for nine months, it’s really jarring to me.

Hey Rotary, listen. I already donate to several charities despite being unemployed and never having had much money. You are an association of mostly quite affluent people. Why are you keeping your support of charity hostage, subject to the condition that possibly quite poor people show up to your meetings and entertain you for free?

If I speak at your meeting, I suspect that what I’m actually mainly supporting is the cohesion of your local club as a recommendation-only social forum for retired businesspeople. And frankly, the continued availability of such a forum is not any concern of mine. If the National Pensioners’ Organisation calls me, I’ll be right there and entertain them. They may not be trying to eradicate polio, but they let anybody join regardless of recommendations.