Job description

I have the professional responsibility for the museum's Stone Age Collections. This includes public management concerning documentation, analyses, research, exhibitions and depositions in other museums.

I am professionally responsibile for selected archaeological excavations.

I do research-based popular outreach,supervising on PhD-level and some teaching. 

My research focuses on Northern Stone Age and related themes. Among my research interests are technology and resource availability and knowledge as conditions for northern Stone Age societies. Resource use and management has changed time, and there are differences in material culture between various parts of the northern region. At the same time, much is similar and maintained through millennia. How critical knowledge concerning the use of the local environment is maintained, modified and changed in a time when people lived far between is of general interest to me. II am interested in how social identity is established and maintained within particular historical conditions, traditions and nature. I have special  interest in the introduction of the first Stone Age pottery in Norway c. 5300 calBC,  a phenomenon spatially restricted to easternmost Finnmark. I am interested in changes in lithic materiales and technologies and their various spatial distributions over time. I also work on early Sámi identity. Recently I have been studying attitudes towards wild animals in hunter-gatherer societies.   

I am 2017 - 2020 PI of the NFR-granted research project "Stone Age Demographics: multi-scale exploration of population variations and dynamics " together with Charlotte Damm, IAR, UiT. I am member of the transfaculty and multi-institution Stone Age Research Group (SARG) (established 2014) supported by the Faculty of Humanities, Social Science and teaching education, and of the Arctic Archaeology research group (established 2018) at the Arctic University Museum,  which includes permanent staff researchers and PhDs working on various periods of prehistoric as well as recent historical archaeology. Both groups actively engage in establishing relevant collaboration networks. 

I am 2019 - 2023 member of the Arctic University Museum board.