Beskrivelse

The UiO Archaeology Group (ARK) with its current profile and partakers has the status as a prioritized discipline at the Faculty of Humanities for the period 2014-17, but has its deeper roots in a fundamental reorganization of Archaeology as a research/teaching unit at UiO in the mid-1990s. Consequently, while the present ARK group consists of members in all stages of their academic careers, all group members share a distinct academic profile and signature defined by its senior members two decades ago, and for which ARK is internationally renowned: a deep commitment to archaeological research which is fundamentally anthropological in scope. More precisely, we combine solid empirical, culture-historical insights with a high degree of methodological and theoretical reflection. Our key aim is to be among the leading archaeological milieus in northern Europe in developing innovative models and syntheses in our three geographic focus areas (see below), by drawing on sophisticated insights from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history and various laboratory sciences such as geology, earth science, botany and zoology. The ARK group is anchored in four closely related themes, all of which are cross-disciplinary and developed in close collaboration with international networks of archaeologists and colleagues from a wide array of neighbouring disciplines. These are: 1) critical heritage studies, 2) environmental archaeology and archaeometry, 3) prehistoric technology and innovation, and 4) historical and contemporary archaeology. Globally we focus on three geographical areas: The Nordic region, the Mediterranean and southern Africa. The four themes are core constituents in our strategic plan for renewal and strengthening during the period 2016-2020 and, taken together, they cover the full range of research agendas of all present ARK members. A core constituent in ARK’s present profile is an anthropologically oriented archaeology. Its primary scientific goal is focused on an interdisciplinary challenge that archaeology faces at present, and has become a primary concern for the discipline through the 2000s: the amount of interdisciplinary data, especially aDNA, various isotopes and other so-called ‘big data’ from various natural sciences, has increased dramatically in pace and volume, to the extent that culture-historical syntheses have not been able to keep up. This important task of ‘making culture-historical sense’ of laboratory science data cannot be successful without combining solid empirical archaeological insights with a high degree of methodological and theoretical reflection.

Lenker