Stockholm University

Faculty Member, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies

Professor, Dr

About

Mats Burström (b. 1962) is professor in archaeology at Stockholm University.

Ph D from Stockholm University in 1991 with the dissertation 'Arkeologisk samhällsavgränsning' (Eng. ‘Delimiting of Societies in Archaeology’) combining large-scale spatial and quantitative analyses with an interpretative approach. His research then developed in the direction of focusing the multitude of meanings that material remains from the past have been ascribed in different contexts. Lately he has been instrumental in establishing the archaeology of the contemporary past as a field of research in Scandinavia. Publications within this field include the textbook 'Samtidsarkeologi' (Eng. ‘The Archaeology of the Contemporary Past’) (2007) and several case studies dealing with sites such as a car cemetery, a World War 2 refugee camp, and a Soviet nuclear missile site in Cuba from the 1962 crisis.

Research interests
• Archaeology as a field of culture and its relation to science, art, and contemporary society
• The archaeology of the contemporary past
• The relation between material culture and memory
• The theory and ideology of cultural heritage management

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Ongoing research

Artefactual Memories. Family Belongings Hidden in the Ground in Estonia during World War II

Many Estonians who had to abandon their homes during the Second World War are said to have hidden objects in the ground, hoping to return and recover them later. These objects may have included valuables, but more often the family ‘treasures’ contained objects that were important for other reasons than their pure economic value. Sets of glass or china and books seem, for example, to have been common objects to have been buried. During the many years in exile, telling stories about these hidden ‘treasures’ was a way to remember the old native home and to keep alive the hope of return. After the fall of the Soviet Union some people did return and were in some cases also able to recover their family belongings. Some of the stories about hidden ‘treasures’ and their recovery are historical facts, while others are to be considered as modern folklore, but they are all of interest. The general aim of the project is to study the relation between material objects and memory, and how the stories of individual families connect to the larger and official history to give that a human face.

Financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

See: http://ruinmemories.org/

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Dealing with Difficult Heritage
The case of Bückeberg – the Site for the 3rd Reich Harvest Festival

(project in co-operation with Bernhard Gelderblom)

From 1933 to 1937 the German Nazi Party arranged an annual Harvest Festival at Bückeberg, close to the city of Hamelin. As most, more than one million people are reported to have gathered there in order to celebrate the German peasant, to listen to speech delivered by Adolf Hitler, and to watch a military show. To manage this number of participants a special arena designed by Albert Speer was built. The site was intended to be one of the symbolically most important in the Millennium Reich. After the German defeat the arena was demolished and the site was turned into a green meadow. There is still, however, material remains left at the site that bear witness of its history, some quite overt. While Bückeberg obviously is a site of historical importance it has proven to be a most difficult heritage to handle for the authorities.

Financed by Stockholm University and the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies.

See: See: http://ruinmemories.org/

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The 'Recent' as an Archaeological Category: Problems and Possibilities

This project forms a part of the large research program 'Time, Memory and Representation: A Multidisciplinary Program on the Transformations in Historical Consciousness' (se link below). The project explores the emergence of the temporal framework of archaeological knowledge, with a particular emphasis on the category of the 'recent'. It is only during the first part of the 19th century that man obtains a 'pre-history', a historical space going back further than written documents. Archaeology is established as the discipline with the task of chronologically sorting remains from this early past, gradually integrating material from periods with written sources. The discovery that material and written sources often contradict each other has led to an increasing interest in analyzing more contemporary remains with archaeological methods. The project argues that it is no longer meaningful to delimit the field of archaeology in temporal-historical terms. This way of conceiving the field of archaeology destabilizes the standard chronological divisions, and brings in a trans-historical dimension, that looks at materiality and meaning from new perspectives. The category of the ‘recent' will be used here to reflect critically on the often obsessive relation to chronology in archaeology and in the historical sciences in general and also to question the 'chronological cleansing' that takes place at archaeological sites.

See: http://histcon.se/home/

Financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.