A recurring theme here on Aard is my complaints about how useless certain kinds of higher education is if you want a job. For a change, let's take a look at what kind of degree is most likely to get you a job in Sweden over the coming decade. The Swedish National Agency for Higher Education has just published a study that offers data on this very issue. Here are the degrees where there will be a labour shortage in Sweden for the foreseeable future!
Medical laboratory scientist, Sw. biomedicinsk analytiker
High-school teacher of manual skills for craftspeople such as carpenters and plumbers, Sw. yrkeslärare
Youth centre leader, Sw. fritidspedagog
Pharmacy clerk, Sw. receptarie (but getting an actual pharmacist's degree is career suicide)
3-4 year engineering degree, Sw. högskoleingenjör
Teacher for children with special needs, Sw. speciallärare
Day care teacher, Sw. förskollärare
Dentist, Sw. tandläkare
Need I point out that most of these jobs are relatively poorly paid compared to others that presuppose a university degree, and that most are not perceived as high-status? The only real exception, to my knowledge, is dentistry. But all of them will support you and your kids quite handsomely. And most of them look to me like they'd be quite fun.
Christian fundamentalists like to believe that homosexuality is an illness that can -- and should -- be cured. The factual belief is contradicted by a solid scientific consensus, and the value judgement is widely considered to be a repressive holdover from the Bronze Age.
The makers of the French orange-based soft drink Orangina seem to agree with the fundies' unscientific belief that homosexuality can be induced post-natally in a fully formed individual. They, however, are certainly not homophobes. On the contrary, in a recent major ad campaign they invite consumers to use Orangina to "Wake the Fruit Inside!". They go on to emphasise how gay the drink can make you regardless of geography: "Orangina's original recipe is a well-guarded secret that offers joie de vivre to people around the world".
I've had lots of Orangina over the years and I still don't feel any stirrings of my inner fruit. This may be a case of fraudulent marketing. Or they may just have hired a really bad copywriter.
Last week was skiing break for my kids. I couldn't find anywhere good to stay in the mountains, so we didn't go off on holiday. Here's what we did for fun instead.
Dinner at the home of a Chinese friend. It was one of those no hablar parties that spouses in multi-ethnic marriages know all about. The food was great and everybody there except me spoke Mandarin - loudly and incessantly. I've never minded much: this time I had brought a book and there was a computer to play with.
Birthday party at the home of an Iranian friend. He used to be a death-metal kid. Now he's a pro-democracy Persian patriot. Everybody wore green.
Watched the new Alice in Wonderland movie in 3D and in the country's largest movie theatre. The kids loved it. I didn't. Instead of Carroll's original bad acid trip with language games they've made it into a slightly sappy Narnia thing where the characters have names and relationships and there's even a fixed geography. But the lead actress does a fine job and is nice to look at.
Karaoke night: my kids wowed all the grown-ups with their skillz. Did you know that there's a Chinese expression for someone who won't share the mike? Mai ba, "Microphone Tyrant". All the Beatles songs were accompanied by embarrassing footage of a look-alike band. In order to believe that they really look alike, you have to think that all European males look the same.
Went downhill skiing at the towering old Flottsbro landfill. It's just across the lake from Älvesta, in plain view of where I practiced fieldwalking back in '08. For skiing, I still use the gear my parents gave me in 1988. Need to sharpen the edges.
Went skating and cross-country skiing.
Got beaten twice at Yspahan and once at Settlers of Catan by my buddy Oscar. That'll teach me to take up with strange men that I meet at on-line discussion forums about, ah, shall we say... specialised pastimes.
Juniorette went with the neighbours and watched The Princess and the Frog, and Grandma took her to the Museum of Nordic Culture.
The skiing break then ended on a non-fun note when the entire Rundkvist family was laid low by a calicivirus on Sunday.
Spring has reputedly reached certain areas way south of where I still shovel snow daily, and with it comes Antiquity's spring issue. This is of course an intensely interesting journal, and not solely because the summer issue will feature that opinion piece of mine that I quoted from on the blog recently. In the following are some highlights. All links will give you abstracts and then present you with a pay wall.
Lisa Hodgetts of the University of Western Ontario (!) offers a paper on lithics & bone sites of the period 2400-1800 cal BC, located on the Fjord of Varanger, an area that is north of Sweden and Finland and more easterly than most of the latter country. We're talking waaay north. Explains the editor, "[T]he faunal assemblage shows that some [groups in the area] are seal specialists, while others hunt reindeer and others again ambush dolphins."
Landscape-spanning rows of standing stones are not uncommon in the UK and NW France, with Carnac being a famous example (and a book about that site is reviewed in the spring issue). But dating them is tricky. Ralph M. Fyfe and Tom Greeves of the University of Plymouth have investigated one in Dartmoor that has fortuitously been covered by peat, allowing radiocarbon dating of material both under the stones and on top of them. The stone row is surprisingly old, dating from the later 4th millennium cal BC. Good palaeoenvironmental work and interpretations are also offered.
S. Leach et al. report on skeletal analyses of a rich Late Roman female burial from York, where the woman in question most likely had the looks of combined African-European ancestry. The authors conclude,
"All evidence (unusual burial rite, unusual ancestry, strontium and oxygen isotope data) taken together can make a convincing case for an incomer to Roman York who was of high status. ... her oxygen isotope signature makes it unlikely that she grew up in York. Rather, it places her at the western edge of Britain or, perhaps more likely, an area of similar 'warm' climate on the Continent. ... The craniomorphometric analysis suggests that she may have been of 'mixed race' ancestry. In cosmopolitan Eboracum, which had been home to Severus and his troops nearly 200 years earlier, perhaps her appearance was not that unusual."
I'm not quite comfortable with the editor's characterisation of the lady as a "glamorous mixed-race woman", though. Was he thinking of Donna Summer?
Last October I reported that the Danes are running Late Bronze Age urn burials through CT scanners. So are the Italians, with Etruscan burials, and they've beat the Danes to publication. (This has been done before by the Germans, though.)
Human eyes and brains are still way, way better at image recognition than computers. There are many visual tasks that we do swiftly ourselves but that we can't yet get machines to do reliably at all. In January of '06 I blogged about the Stardust @ Home project where you can help identify particles of interplanetary dust and comet-tail debris in a huge library of digital micrographs. Now I've learned from the BBC's Digital Planet podcast about Solar Stormwatch, where you can help forecast coronal mass ejections and other destructive solar activity that humanity needs early warning about. Check it out!
Weatherwise, last weekend was thawing and misty and overcast, so I didn't feel like doing much outdoors. I finished reading Daryl Gregory's new novel (didn't do much for me) and started Douglas Adams's fifth Hitch-hiker book. When it appeared in 1992 I didn't bother with it since it seemed too much like flogging an aging franchise, but 11-y-o Junior recently asked me to buy it for him and then he recommended it. So far it seems mildly entertaining.
Had friends over for games: Settlers of Catan and Qwirkle. I was lucky enough to trade my old 80s Junta game for that Settlers box last week. I don't like to own stuff that I never use, and so the Junta game has been a source of bad conscience for years. It's probably great fun if you're six players who know the rules by heart, but I've never been able to pull that off. Junta's unconventional combination of boardless negotiation and episodes of a very basic war game leave most neophytes confused and a little bored. Settlers is much better.
I also found some games. On Saturday I lugged a bag of cardboard waste and a bag of plastic waste through fine drizzle to the recycling station. There I came upon four games sitting on a snow drift. They hadn't been there for long as they were barely damp. Two were TV show tie-ins, one was a music trivia game, and these I left alone. But the fourth was Twister, and I happily took it home to my kids.
And you, Dear Reader? Do you still remember the final weekend of February 2010? What did you do for fun?
The Vichada river in Colombia is a tributary of the Orinoco. In 2004 part-time geologist Max Rocca discovered that it skirts South America's largest impact crater. It measures 50 km in diameter, nearly a third of the Chicxulub crater caused by the space rock that killed off the non-avian dinos.
This image visualises two important things.
1. Our planet is just another crater-pocked space rock, though here surface erosion acts much faster than on nearby worlds, and we have plate tectonics, all obscuring the impact scars. The Vichada example is a recent one, being less than 30 million years old.
2. Geological time is looong. Look at that meandering river doing a little detour around the crater's edge!
There's a good feature piece on the Vichada crater at the Planetary Society's web site.
I'm happy and relieved. A 73-page paper that I put a lot of work and travel into and submitted almost five years ago has finally been published. In his essays, Stephen Jay Gould often refers to his "technical work", which largely concerns Cerion land snails and is most likely not read by very many people. Aard is my attempt to do the essay side of what Gould did. The new paper "Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia. Ørsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period", though, is definitely a piece of my technical work.
The most iconic Viking Period jewellery type is the tortoise brooch. They're big clunky things worn pairwise on your clavicles, fastening a dress with built-in suspenders over your shoulders. A number of standardised types were mass-produced during the 9th and 10th centuries, reflecting Viking Period Scandinavia's beginning urbanisation and the concomitant changes in how craft and trade was organised. The standard work on tortoise brooches is Ingmar Jansson's 1985 PhD thesis Ovala spännbucklor.
Far less well known are the 8th century ancestors of the tortoise brooches, belonging to the Late Vendel Period. Much smaller domed oblong brooches in fact show up already about AD 700 and develop a bewildering variety of styles and design that lasts a few decades into the 9th century before standardisation takes over completely. They're lovely, almost every one of them unique. There has been no concerted study of them - until now.
I finished my own PhD thesis on social symbolism in Gotlandic burials of the 1st Millennium AD toward the end of 2002. The preceding year I had been to the Sachsensymposium in Lund and seen the amazing metal detector finds from Uppåkra. That project's leaders were handing out artefact categories for study to various scholars, and I signed up for two brooch groups: the 6th-7th century snake-shaped ones and the 8th century domed oblong ones. I did this for two main reasons: I wanted to get into the metal-detectors & elite-settlement field of research and I hoped to establish a new university affiliation in Lund after my viva. Note the sociology of science aspect.
I began data collection on the two brooch groups in September 2002. My 25-page paper on the snake brooches was swiftly completed and published in late 2003. But the domed oblong ones took more time: there's a greater number of them and they're spread over a much larger area. For the second paper I ended up travelling to Lund, Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Tromsø, Uppsala, Helsinki, Mariehamn and Ribe. I photographed and measured hundreds of brooches and read reams of obscure literature.
I have mixed feelings about this paper now. From a scientific point of view, I'm very proud of it. It is solidly empirical work with good statistics, I think my arguments are clear, there are two properly done seriation chronologies in it, and at the end is a detailed catalogue that will be useful to students of 8th century Scandinavia indefinitely. Rundkvist 2010 will be the one-stop-shopping reference for this kind of jewellery. I wish more research archaeologists were doing this sort of thing with their research time instead of being such... humanities writers.
From a career-strategical point of view, however, I have to say that it was a failure. The two brooch papers took 2½ years to write and were for all intents and purposes my post-doc project. I chose a type of investigation that is not common or fashionable these days, because it suited my scholarly ideals and it was encouraged by a well-funded research project with friendly directors at another university. But as it turned out, the longer paper took five years to appear because one of the directors fell gravely ill for a time. And the work did not open doors for me as I had hoped. I still have no affiliation with a Scandy university. Instead Exeter and then Chester in England have taken me on as visiting researcher.
Anyway. I never counted on writing an entire book on Östergötland's elite settlements of the 1st Millennium before the domed oblong brooch paper was published. I had no idea that by the time the paper appeared, I would have finished up my 1st Millennium projects and turned to Bronze Age studies. But now it's out, on paper and on-line, and I am much relieved.
Rundkvist, M. 2010. Domed oblong brooches of Vendel Period Scandinavia Ørsnes types N & O and similar brooches, including transitional types surviving into the Early Viking Period. Hårdh, B. (ed.). Från romartida skalpeller till senvikingatida urnesspännen. Nya materialstudier från Uppåkra. Uppåkrastudier 11. Dept of Archaeology, University of Lund.
Being an atheist and a rationalist, I find most religious beliefs quite silly. But religious people vary hugely in their behaviour, and many do excellent deeds. Generally, I find it easier to respect the believer who lives by the core tenets of his faith, as all major religions have pretty reasonable ethical groundwork. Christian charity, for instance, is a fine thing.
On the other hand, I find idolatry and religious egoism particularly risible. And at a Chinese restaurant where I have been a regular for nearly 20 years there is a lovely example of both, as shown above.
Chinese Buddhism is a mess. It is a barely recognisable caricature of the original ideas. In China, religious worship is basically about praying to statues for stuff. And so we find this happy rotund Buddha holding a big honking GOLD COIN aloft to entice the supplicant with his incense sticks. "Pray and get rich!" Just like those sad, sad deluded people who fill midwestern megachurches in the US to hear the Prosperity Gospel.
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, skeptic, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
