Nordic Theoretical Archaeology Group

04/05/2026

Kalmar slott, the older but equally visual venue for Nordic TAG: Kalmar castle. Just like the campus, it is easy to find, and visible and walkable from both campus and the train station.

This is the venue for our keynote address by Yannis Hamilakis followed by opening reception on Wednesday evening.

Kalmar castle was the location for the negotiations and agreements for the Kalmar Union that united Sweden (including what is now Finland), Denmark, and Norway in 1397 - a historically significant venue for our Nordic TAG conference. Come and enjoy a beautifully preserved renaissance castle!

04/05/2026

Only a few days left to go and Kalmar is waiting for all Nordic TAG delegates.
The conference venue is easy to find. When you exit your train, just look to the sea and you will immediately see our campus, located in the harbour with its characteristic yellow library. It is just a few minutes walk from the train and bus station. Registration and events will take place in the tall building immediately to the right of the library in this photo. The building is called Culmen. Signs will show you the way.
We are looking forward to having you here with us. Welcome!

29/04/2026

Our program for Nordic TAG 2026 contains several real treats - and one of them is definitively the screening of the film "Marija Gimbutas: A Sense of the Future" (2023), on Friday, 8 May, 09.00-11.00.

The film is a documentary exploring the legacy of one of
the most influential Lithuanian-born scholars of the 20th century — archaeomythologist Marija Alseikaitė-Gimbutas. It offers a deep and nuanced portrait of her groundbreaking
contribution to archaeomythology, highlighting her intuitive, poetic, and interdisciplinary approach to understanding ancient cultures. Tracing Gimbutas’ journey from her formative years in Lithuania to her international academic career, the film reveals her profound connection to folklore and her pioneering research on Old European civilizations, goddess cultures, and mythological systems. Through reflections by scholars, artists, and thinkers, personal discoveries intertwine with scientific insights, demonstrating Gimbutas’ lasting impact on the study of ancient civilizations and her holistic vision of the interconnectedness of life, nature, and spirituality.

The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the film’s directors Gintaras Šeputis and Rasa Baltė Balčiūnienė, inviting the audience to engage in discussion and reflection on the themes raised in the film.

Don't miss this opportunity!

29/04/2026

There are a couple of days left to go!

Call for candidates – Nordic TAG Steering Committee

Are you interested in shaping the future of the Nordic Theoretical Archaeology Group?

We are seeking motivated candidates to stand for election to the Nordic TAG Steering Committee. Nordic TAG is an important forum for discussion, collaboration, and exchange in theoretical archaeology across the Nordic region, bringing together researchers at all career stages.

Why join?
Becoming a committee member is an opportunity to contribute to sustaining and developing this scholarly community across the Nordics. You will help foster international collaboration and support a vibrant platform for new ideas in archaeology.

What does the committee do?
The Steering Committee plays a key role in:
• selecting future conference hosts
• supporting and advising local organising teams
• ensuring continuity and knowledge transfer between events

We particularly encourage candidates who expect to hold a position at a university, museum, or archaeological company over the next two years. We are also committed to diversity in terms of gender and career stage, and strongly encourage applications from underrepresented groups. We especially welcome candidates from Finland.

If you are interested in contributing to Nordic TAG’s future and connecting with colleagues across the region, we encourage you to stand as a candidate to one of three open spots.

Deadline: 4 May
More info: https://tagnordic.wordpress.com
Expressions of interest and questions about the steering committee and our work should be sent to: [email protected]

27/04/2026

With a little bit more than a week away, we are excited to introduce our final special guest. Helene Larsson Pousette is a diplomat, curator, senior facilitator, writer, and the former Counsellor for Cultural Affairs at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, DC (USA) and at the Embassy of Sweden in Serbia. In these positions, she took the initiative for long-term projects such as Creative Mentorship Serbia and WE HEAR YOU—A CLIMATE ARCHIVE with The Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, The Earth Commons, The Lab for Global Performance and Politics, and The Swedish Embassy in Washington, DC.
Helene is currently an artist in residence at Linnaeus University's The Cultural University. The Cultural University has generously sponsored her participation in Nordic TAG and we are very grateful for this.

On Thursday May 7, 11.30-12.30 she will present the lecture "Archiving is Resistance"

Abstract: In a time marked by political unrest, climate crisis and an increasing weakening of democratic structures, I want to highlight archiving as a possibility for resistance – resistance to
invisibility and for justice. With examples from archiving the protests surrounding the four-day EU summit in Gothenburg in 2001, the Skid Row Archive led by homeless people in Los Angeles, an archive of young peoples climate stories, and voices from vulnerable archives in different parts of the world, this talk will explore how archives and our archived struggles today can
shape messages to future generations.
Research in archives seeks to understand and interpret the past through the traces and fragments left behind. Unlike most archaeological material, an archive usually consists of intentionally organized documents that have been preserved for administrative, legal or historical purposes. These documents are often the result of conscious actions: someone has created them, someone has collected them, and someone has arranged them.
Archives shape historical narratives by providing access to documented voices, but at the same time they reinforce certain perspectives and marginalize others through their selection
principles. The act of determining what is retained and what is discarded shapes which voices become part of the historical record and which individuals or phenomena remain obscured.
Since history is often constructed from material found in archives, active archiving can also become an act of resistance – a deliberate intervention in the formation of memory and history.
In my work with the Museum of Women's History, we have coined the term archivism – a method that connects activism and archives to make the invisible visible and highlight the
historical significance of women.
A common assumption is that archives are about the past, but I argue that they are just as much about the future, since reinterpretation, archive excavations and deliberate archiving, holds the potential to influence and inspire generations to come.

photo of Helene: Ninnia Andersson
photo of archive: Liv Nilsson Stutz

20/04/2026

We are incredibly happy to welcome Timo Menke as our second artist in residence for the Nordic TAG 2026. Timo is an interdisciplinary artist based in Stockholm. His practice is centred around various forms of nature-cultures and their entangled histories, phenomena and agencies. In 2023 he created an art project around the toxic landfill in Marhult, a small village in the middle of Småland, which in its marginality has become a site of toxic waste and seemingly unregulated garbage disposal and you can learn more about his project and process at his talk on Thursday May 7th, 12.30-13.00 entitled:

"Natureculture Preserve Marhult: Contaminated Sites as Field, Discourse and Material"

Abstract: The long-term project Natureculture Preserve Marhult (Naturkultureservatet Marhult), which launched as part of the Småland Triennial in 2023, is concerned with site-specific and process-based investigations of the illegal landfill Marhult (Uppvidinge). Dumped and scattered over the 30-hectare post-industrial sawmill ALEX, approximately 35,000 tonnes of hazardous waste consisting of “fluff” (ground car parts), demolition debris, slaughterhouse waste and various microplastics have since 2015 transformed the site into a toxic terra incognita. The landfill, run by various enterprises with ties to criminal activity adjoining the village of Marhult, poses the kind of multi-complex environmental threat typically associated with the Global South.
The key objective of the project is to investigate and research the dump site as a critical mass of archaeological, ecological and cultural agency ripe with deeply entangled relationships between what we call nature and culture, human and inhuman, or artefact and ecofact. Could waste constitute future natural cultural heritage? Waste as world heritage? How can artistic processes and transdisciplinary methods investigate, rethink and transform the unknown potential of waste as natureculture? In this talk I will present findings and insights, renegotiating the often binary concepts of natural and cultural heritage by considering contaminated sites as field, discourse and material for transdisciplinary processes between preservation, remediation and rewilding.

Timo will continue to present his work at during the afternoon excursion to The Glass Factory in Boda.

18/04/2026

Call for candidates – Nordic TAG Steering Committee

Are you interested in shaping the future of the Nordic Theoretical Archaeology Group?

We are seeking motivated candidates to stand for election to the Nordic TAG Steering Committee. Nordic TAG is an important forum for discussion, collaboration, and exchange in theoretical archaeology across the Nordic region, bringing together researchers at all career stages.

Why join?
Becoming a committee member is an opportunity to contribute to sustaining and developing this scholarly community across the Nordics. You will help foster international collaboration and support a vibrant platform for new ideas in archaeology.

What does the committee do?
The Steering Committee plays a key role in:
• selecting future conference hosts
• supporting and advising local organising teams
• ensuring continuity and knowledge transfer between events

We particularly encourage candidates who expect to hold a position at a university, museum, or archaeological company over the next two years. We are also committed to diversity in terms of gender and career stage, and strongly encourage applications from underrepresented groups. We especially welcome candidates from Finland.

If you are interested in contributing to Nordic TAG’s future and connecting with colleagues across the region, we encourage you to stand as a candidate to one of three open spots.

Deadline: 4 May
More info: https://tagnordic.wordpress.com
Expressions of interest and questions about the steering committee and our work should be sent to: [email protected]

16/04/2026

Nordic TAG 2026 is transdisciplinary, engaging with knowledge production not only across different academic disciplines, but also across other practices, including art. We are very excited to welcome John Sunderland as one of our "Nordic TAG Artists in Residence." John is an archaeologist and an artist working in the fields of mixed media visual art, archaeology and transdisciplinary landscape studies. His research considers the impacts of change on people, ecologies and places undergoing transformation, dealing with issues such as post-industrial trauma, rural depopulation, and illegal waste dumping in Sweden, the UK and in Ireland, where he is based.

John will be presenting his work in one of our special lectures on Thursday May 7th, 13.00-13.30:

TITLE: "Touching Darkness: Examining rural depopulation in the forests of Småland"

ABSTRACT: In 2019 I undertook a residency at The Glass Factory in Boda glasbruk, Småland, that was to be the beginning of a deep mapping project that I have periodically revisited in the last seven years.

The region around Kalmar is known as ‘The Kingdom of Crystal’ because of the proliferation of glass factories with 17 at its height. In the early 2000’s all of these factories ceased industrial
production, as, after c.200 years, as it was no longer competitive in a globalised glass market. Many now lay derelict, as do the former homes of the laid off glass workers who have left the region as a result. The Glass Factory in Boda is a success story of a factory that weathered this transition, from an industrial production centre to the museum, gallery and contemporary glass factory that it is today. My residency there studied nine houses that were glass workers former homes in and around the village of Boda. These ranged from near abandonment to almost completely gone, with only foundations remaining.

My talk will focus on one of these houses and follow the rich paths of evidence and narrative as the house has changed since my first visit in 2019. I will outline my approach to deep mapping in this instance and consider the processes and forces of change impacting these empty and precarious buildings. I have always been fascinated by considering how the remains of a building found on an archaeological site end up being the way they become. How do inhabited homes become archaeological sites? This project is, in part, a consideration of this.

In the afternoon following the talk there will be a field trip to a second house, as well as a visit to
the Boda village and The Glass Factory. At the end the presentation this second site will be introduced, giving some background for the trip.

15/04/2026

Another highlight at Nordic TAG 2026 is our keynote panel "Activate archaeology for just futures - a panel debate on archaeological theory, social justice, and activism."
The conversation will take place on Friday May 8th, 17.30-18.30 and will be led by Eva Mol, lecturer in Roman archaeology at the University of York, and a clear and inspiring voice in archaeological theory and activism. The other participants, also well known as leaders in their fields and for their engagement with archeological theory, politics, activism, and participation are:
Aris Politopoulos, Leiden University
Anna Wessman, University Museum of Bergen
Artur Ribeiro, University of Kiel
Please join us for what promises to be an exceptional conversation!

13/04/2026

With less than one month to go - we are getting very excited to welcome you all to Kalmar for Nordic TAG 2026. In the coming weeks we will use this page to share information about the upcoming program.

First out, our main keynote speaker Yannis Hamilakis who will introduce the conference at our opening at Kalmar castle, May 6th at 6 pm, with the following talk:

How to organize our pessimism? Archaeology, activism, and global apartheids.

As the pile of ruins is getting higher and higher, as we no longer believe that a wind from paradise will propel us forward (and who, in their right mind, would speak of “progress” today?) what is left for us archaeologists to do, other than attend to the remnants, to the residues that harbor a future promise? Re-collect the fragments, not in order to reconstitute the whole but rather to perform archaeology “in the wake”? To turn over the cinders until the fire is rekindled?
It should have already become obvious that this talk adopts a Benjaminian starting point, as the pessimism and melancholy of the cultural critic and philosopher suit our own dark moment.
And yet, his organized pessimism hints at a more hopeful way forward. But beyond his mid-20th century insightfully prophetic texts, we will need further bodies of thinking, emanating
especially from the Global South, the various decolonial currents, and the Black experience, if we are to comprehend, and respond to, the current catastrophes.
With these, semi-cryptic thoughts in mind, I will engage in a comparison, juxtaposing archaeological reactions to the South African apartheid in the 1980s with those to the contemporary apartheids, primarily in Palestine. Apart from its historical value, such a comparison would hopefully perform a diagnostic function, allowing us to trace the contours of the present moment, and even encouraging a deeper collective reflection on the ethical-political stance of our scholarly community. Beyond these two specific cases, I will be discussing the globalization of apartheid through bordering practices and the work of the border
regime. I will finish by reflecting on how I see a hopeful archaeology, an archaeology “in the wake”, developing in the current moment, and into the future.