Since the concept of sustainability (or sustainable development) became famous through its adoption in the UN’s report, ‘Our Common Future’ in 1987, it has travelled widely to become a global and omnipresent key concept also in the field of heritage. The inclusion into this field was facilitated by the understanding of heritage as resource, which has become the norm within cultural heritage management ...

This article examines how things contribute to an expanded and different understanding of contexts that are usually reserved for historical inquiry. To show this, the article illustrates how archaeological investigations of World War II prison camps connected to the German defensive Lyngen Line in northern Norway have uncovered aspects that are absent or unavailable in historical sources. Accordingly, ...

Forholdet mellom konge og kyrkje – mellom kongemakt og kyrkjemakt – står sentralt i europeisk historie mellomalderen igjennom, og i nord får me eit innhaldsrikt døme på ulike sider ved dette forholdet gjennom striden om kallsretten til Tromsø-kyrkja på 1480-talet. Erkebiskop står mot konge, norske interesser står mot danske, og partane må til slutt trekkje inn paven i Roma for å få ei avgjerd. På ...

What did the protestant reformations look like in the very north of Europe? How did the cultural, political and economic consequences of the religious change influence the relationship between Scandinavia, the British Isles and continental Europe? Various questions related to these main themes were the topics for discussions at the conference “Northern Reformations” in Tromsø, Norway, September ...

This article addresses emergent religious formations at protest scenes in the broader context of indigenous organization and identity-building. Our central example is the Standing Rock protest in North Dakota, 2016–2017, a local encampment-based event that quickly expanded into an international indigenous peoples’ movement. We argue that religion was a key register in the camps, during direct ...

Most parts of the Circumpolar Arctic have only discontinuous evidence for long-term human settlement. In contrast, Northern Norway has an unbroken archaeological record that extends back to the early Holocene. Numerous high-resolution archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records have been generated by commercial excavations and surveys, offering archaeologists unique opportunities to investigate ...

Datings of sheep and dog bone samples from a so-called ‘Sámi circular offering site’ at Bealjalgnai in Karasjok Municipality, Finnmark, Norway, show that they were deposited in the Middle Ages. They are among the earliest dated bones from such structures, and the sheep is the oldest known example from this part of inland Finnmark. Isotope analyses show that the dog lived primarily on aquatic foodstuffs, ...

This article discusses how dilapidated material heritage could be understood as something more than just an abject phenomenon. Archaeology of the recent past offers an opportunity to consider such things from a more nuanced perspective that don’t dismiss them out of hand. These nuances shed new light on how dilapidated things shape our experience of the recent past. The discussion is based on Retiro, ...