Prospects for Sweden.

Rundkvist, Martin

Swedish archaeology enters the new decade reeling, not so much from seasonal feasting as from lay-offs and excavation unit close-downs caused by the 2008-09 recession. Where to now? Where should we go? And, wishful thinking aside, where are we likely to end up?

Where are we now?

Ours is a large country with many spruce trees, many elks and few people. We are only 9.3 million citizens on 450 000[km.sup.2], with 90 per cent of that population living in the country's southern third where almost all land development takes place. Sweden has one of the world's most comprehensive sites and monuments registers (www.fornsok.se) and probably the world's strongest legal protection for archaeological sites. In Sweden, a site receives protection comparable to UK scheduling the moment it is identified. Our concept of a site currently extends to tar-making pits, isolated cultivation layers and the findspots of single knapped quartz flakes. And it shows a long-term tendency to grow ever more inclusive. All medieval towns are large sites, legally speaking. If citizens have reason to believe that there is a site in front of them, then they are required by law to protect it from harm.

Land owners have no right to finds that others make on their property and there are no trespassing laws. Metal-detector use is severely restricted. Archaeological finds belong to the finder, though anything made, at least in part, of precious metal or copper alloy must be offered to the state for a reward, as must any objects of other materials where more than one are found together, such as a scatter of flint and pottery. The Museum of National Antiquities, where many of the finest objects are kept, has a world-class online catalogue (mis.historiska.se).

Salvage archaeology is developer-funded and each job above a certain cost-threshold is put out to tender by the county council. The council also handles heritage aspects of building permits and decides whether there is a salvage job in each case. Contract archaeology is a three-step process: evaluation, trial excavation and final excavation. The evaluation step allows the County Archaeologist to place unusually fine sites off-limits for land development and (more often) allows road engineers to slalom around expensive archaeology when finalising their projects. Each step is put out to tender. About 45 excavation units compete for the jobs, though each has only a certain radius of action. They range in size from oneman consultancy firms to the five large state-owned units of the National Heritage Board, Uppdragsverksamheten, UV. Archaeologists move around from unit to unit and rarely achieve steady positions for very long. Thus there is not much enmity between the units, but I do perceive a certain shared animosity against County Archaeologists and their staff. They are sadly not very popular among land developers either.

Academic archaeology is weakly connected to contract archaeology. An archaeology MA can be had at seven of Sweden's universities, five of which also offer a PhD, but university courses are not designed to make field archaeologists of the students. Most university teachers have long since left salvage archaeology behind them, and most archaeology MAs and BAs never get a job in the business. Thus Swedish archivists, librarians and civil servants are exceptionally well trained in archaeology these days. There is, however, a strong one-way migration of our now numerous archaeology PhDs from the universities into contract archaeology. I sometimes discuss this with a professor friend, and he maintains that all of the archaeology PhDs his department produces get jobs. I reply that yes, they are edging non-PhDs out of poorly paid digging jobs that do not actually require PhD-level training. This has also produced a situation where the people in the County Archaeologist's office who read and evaluate project proposals in the tender process often have a far shorter and far less up-to-date archaeological education than the people who write those project proposals. As can be imagined, this leads to a certain tension, one that is unlikely to go away before recent PhDs take over that segment of the labour market as well.

Disregarding the personal finances and social security of the individuals involved and looking at it as an abstract scientific discipline, Swedish archaeology is to my mind in quite good health. Our knowledge grows by leaps and bounds. As managing editor of the venerable quarterly Fornvannen, which we like to call the country's main academic archaeology journal (fornvannen.se, Open Access), I receive more than enough high-quality manuscripts. Most of them are not written by university employees but by the staff of excavation units and museums. Some good ones in fact come from weekend archaeologists, those archivists and librarians I mentioned. The country's high output of archaeology PhDs provides us with a constant flow of hefty new monographs, as a Swedish doctoral thesis is printed before the viva. These books bear no trace of the opponent's or the committee's comments, which is to my mind a waste.

Swedish contract archaeologists are unhappy at the moment because the business is in one of its recurring slumps (cf. the highly illuminating diagram in Ersgard 2009). Research scholars like myself are unhappy because there are too many of us and there is one selling tickets in every underground station. But slumps end, and Baby Boomers retire (or so I am told). The most urgent problem has to do with the tender system in contract archaeology.

Specifically, a new set of instructions issued by the National Heritage Board to the County Archaeologists in early 2008 has led (advertently or not) to intensified cost competition (Petersson & Ytterberg 2009; Brorsson 2010). Apparently, the words 'the most cost-effective' in the document have widely been interpreted as 'the cheapest' by the people evaluating proposals in the County Archaeologists' offices. Instead of excavation units competing with a better product--more specialist analyses, more fieldwork time per krona, more PhDs in the trenches, better write-ups, stronger research integration--jobs are now simply given to the lowest bidder, quality be damned. This is frustrating and demoralising for the practitioner, and may also pose a threat to the continued popular support for our high investment, high scientific gain system. The customers are after all bound by law to buy our wares, and even if the shoddy product they get now is cheaper than the one forced upon them ten years ago, it still costs quite a bit of money. Then again, rhetoric aside, I do not think anyone really knows how land developers and the general public can assess the quality of archaeological fieldwork and excavation reports. I believe that most Swedes have never even seen such a report, though they do vote for the politicians who have made our cultural resource protection laws. And given the state of the market, excavation units are certainly not likely to refuse jobs because the outcome will be less than a site deserves.

I imagine that land developers are thinking, 'The County Archaeologists used to make us pay a certain sum per kilometre of highway for archaeology. Now, for some reason beyond our control, they demand less. That is fine with us. We just want to get on with our projects.'

Where to next?

I am an adherent of the Enlightenment project of exploring the world by means of the scientific method. Therefore the question 'What should we do next?' is an easy one for me: we should of course continue to explore. But more specifically, how should we do so? Where should we put our finite funding? Here are my hopes for the future of the discipline, largely of course reflecting what I have been doing myself in recent years.

Swedish academic archaeology should continue its ongoing voyage back towards health and sanity, away from the pretentious introversion of a decade ago, and be a robustly empirical discipline. We should return to a stricter definition of what archaeology is and what we will allow archaeological research funding to be used for. I submit, without any pretence to originality, that valid archaeological research aims to find out about how people lived in the past through study of material remains. If that is not what you want to do, then there are plenty of other university disciplines with skilled practitioners who will welcome you and judge your work in a competent manner. Yet we should collaborate even more than we do with specialists in other relevant empirical and historical disciplines. Not just buy data from them, but collaborate and co-author.

Archaeology should have a popular/populist slant designed to please tax-payers. We should study site types that are comprehensible to the interested layperson and preferably do our fieldwork in or near densely populated areas. Proximity to population centres should be seen as an important independent quality in a site as it allows members of the public easy access. New archaeological knowledge is much more valuable to a person if it relates to a place they already know.

I advocate archaeological hedonism. While of course upholding our public duties as custodians of the archaeological record, we should as far as possible avoid studying anything that is boring. Archaeology is after all not useful to anyone in the sense that food and housing and healthcare are useful. The hallmark of good archaeology, instead, is that it is fun. It is chocolate, not potatoes. And if it is not fun, then it is bad archaeology. Of course there is no accounting for taste, but I believe that there are many archaeological sites that nobody, scholar or layperson, could see any fun in whatsoever. Particularly so with poorly-preserved non-monumental sites.

Academic archaeologists must collaborate much more closely with contract archaeologists. Academics might for instance use their research funding to excavate well-preserved sites that a highway project is avoiding, or bits of an interesting site that extend outside the highway corridor. Then the research excavations and the rescue excavations in the area will provide context for each other, each producing richer results.

We should collaborate more with amateur archaeologists. Their taxes fund public construction works and contract archaeology, which means that arguably they have a right to enjoy the process of archaeology if they want to, not just its products. There will be difficult labour union issues here, but my feeling is that site managers should be open to taking on any volunteer who is willing to be a constructive member of the project team for at least a week. Seen strictly from a selfish perspective, by stimulating popular engagement with archaeology we stand to gain better funding in the long run. Amateurs also offer valuable labour and local knowledge for under-funded academic research projects.

Sweden should ease its legal restrictions on metal-detector use, so that we can enjoy the valuable work of responsible amateur detectorists, as the Danes do. I envision a licensing system much like the one for hunting rifles (Rundkvist 2008). Currently the only people who use metal-detectors in Sweden are looters, a few amateurs who have a hard time getting a spatially and temporally delimited permit, and some enlightened field archaeologists (cf. Svensson & Soderberg 2009).

What is likely to happen?

Swedish archaeology developed from a bourgeois hobby to an organised part of the state administration already during the nineteenth century. Since then, the field has continually gained momentum, becoming more robustly structured and involving more and more professional practitioners in each decade. I do not see this rolling snowball halting any time soon. Archaeology is built into the way Sweden's state bureaucracy interacts with its physical substrate--spruce trees, elks, quartz chips and all. Ironically, the politicians who protect our cultural resources probably do so to a considerable extent for nineteenth-century reasons that few archaeologists actually believe in any more. We tend to forget that our identity crises, our debates over our raison d'etre, are not actually shared by the people we serve. They largely still believe that we should protect and study our cultural heritage because it is a sacred national duty to do so, a bit like rooting for the national football team. Or they see it simply as part of what any self-respecting modern state does, comparable to offering public transport and libraries. And most importantly, they think archaeology is fun, a sentiment I hope they share with most of my colleagues.

For this reason, I do not worry about the future of Swedish archaeology. On the contrary, I believe its strong legislative position is likely to influence other EU countries over the coming decades. (No EU politician will stand up and say 'My country's cultural heritage really does not deserve the level of protection that the Swedes afford theirs'.) And Swedish heritage management is opening up and moving online at a breakneck pace (e.g. www.kringla.nu, the National Heritage Board's umbrella search-engine for the country's cultural heritage databases).

I do worry about the future of many Swedish archaeologists, though. The wisest thing for them to do is probably to enrol in archivist school immediately.

References

BRORSSON, T. 2010. En ansvarsfull uppdragsarkeologi. Fornvannen 105: 53-4.

ERSGARD, L. 2009. Pa konjunkturernas vagor. Nagra reflektioner kring 50 UV-ar, in L. Ersgard (ed.) UV 50 ar: 195-9. Stockholm: National Heritage Board.

PETERSSON, H. & N. YTTERBERG. 2009. Att kvalitetssakra den svenska uppdragsarkeologin. For en nationell centralisering av den vetenskapliga bedomningen. Fornvannen 104: 199-204.

RUNDKVIST, M. 2008. For en liberalisering av de svenska metallsokarreglerna. Fornvannen 103: 118-22. Available on open access at fornvannen.se/pdf/2000talet/2008_118.pdf.

SVENSSON, H. & B. SODERBERG. 2009. Dumpad kunskap? Om metallsokning och uppdragsarkeologins villkor. Fornvsnnen 104: 131-6. Available on open access at fornvannen.se/pdf/2000talet/2009_131.pdf.

Martin Rundkvist, Department of History and Archaeology, University of Chester, Parkgate Road, Chester CH1 4BJ (scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology--email: arador@algonet.se)