Árdna: The Sami cultural house of
UiT The Arctic University of Norway Árdna is UiT's Sami cultural house, located on the Breivika campus, Tromsø, in a Sami cultural area. It is a communal building with great symbolic value for UiT. The name comes from North Sami and means "hidden treasure" or something valuable. Árdna is not a traditional Sami building but its form, materials and detailing have been chosen with inspiration from Sami building traditions. Together with the nearby turf hut (gamme), it forms a centre of the Sami cultural landscape on campus. It is used for events such as seminars, workshops, and various social and professional gatherings by all members of the university community.
Archaeological laboratory at UiT
The Archaeological Laboratory at the Department of Archaeology, History, and Religious Studies (AHR) is a central hub for archaeology education at UiT. Integrating advanced laboratory training from the undergraduate level, the facility emphasises archaeology’s deep connection to materiality. Here, students and researchers work handson with physical objects, focusing on the documentation of finds, detailed material description, and advanced 3D documentation. The lab is extensively equipped for specialised archaeological science, featuring element analysers, microscopes, chemical analysis tools, and a rare Kappabridge for precise magnetic measurements, effectively bridging theoretical knowledge with advanced analytical practice.
The Arctic University Museum of Norway
Funded 100 years before UiT, The Arctic University Museum of Norway conducts research in both natural and cultural sciences, as well as keeping a collection of nearly 2.5 million objects documenting our part of the world. The museum is an important showcase for UiT, communicating recent research through exhibitions, social media, printed matters, and plenty of guided tours and activities aimed at tourists, locals, and schools. Famous for comprehensive Sami collections, its exhibitions also show archaeology, geology, Arctic wildlife, Northern Lights, and beautiful church art. The museum incorporates the Polar Museum in the centre of Tromsø and the Botanic Garden on Campus Breivika.
Kitchen Garden
UiT's kitchen garden offers students a hands-on encounter with sustainable food practices right on campus. Visitors can explore how vegetables, herbs, and edible plants are grown in the Arctic climate, learning about seasonal cultivation, soil care, and biodiversity in a northern context. The garden serves as a living classroom for topics spanning environmental humanities, sustainability, and local food systems, connecting theoretical knowledge to embodied, seasonal experience. Students gain insight into traditional and contemporary growing methods adapted to short growing seasons and long daylight hours, while reflecting on questions of food security, care, and humannature relationships in the Arctic.
SimFish Lab
The SimFish Lab is one of UiT’s active-learning classrooms, located in the Faculty of Biosciences, Fisheries, and Economics at at campus Breivika in Tromsø.. It started as a shelter, then was developed into a training room and later a co-design lab. Today, the SimFish Lab is a space where students can play games, both directly related to the subject and other types of games. Trainers can switch between giving presentations, facilitating group work, and showcasing group results, with the occasional table tennis game. SimFish Lab is part of a family of UiT active-learning spaces, a Future Classroom Lab, a Lab for design thinkers, an Archeological laboratory and ship and aerospace simulators, among others. The SimFish project itself uses games as a learning tool in fisheries studies and futures studies.
University Library – Special Collections
The Culture and Social Sciences Library at UiT is the largest of UiT’s 10 libraries, serving students, staff, and researchers within the areas of humanities and social sciences. Its aim is to support teaching, learning, and research at UiT and to make relevant knowledge easily accessible to the university community. The library holds a map collection (Kartsamlinga) of around 200 historical maps of the northern regions dating from the 1400s to the 1800s, a large part of which have recently been digitized. The library is also an important place for studying and meeting friends and colleagues, offering workspaces and a wide range of support services for both students and researchers.
The Arctic-Alpine Botanic Garden
The world's northernmost botanic garden lies a short walk from campus Breivika, on a slope above the strait. It has no fences and no gates: it is simply open, all hours, all year. Plants gathered from Arctic and alpine regions across the globe – Himalayan poppies, Patagonian cushions, Svalbard saxifrage – grow here in rock beds and gravel, meeting a season compressed into a few luminous months. Snow Photo: Jørn Berger Nyvoll covers everything for half the year. What emerges from beneath it does so quickly and briefly. The garden asks for a particular kind of attention: slow looking, close to the ground.
FF Beret Paulsdatter
FF Beret Paulsdatter is a coastal research vessel owned by UiT. It was delivered in December 2022 and is 26 meters long and 10 meters wide. The vessel is equipped for sampling benthic fauna and is rigged with a trawl for fish and shellfish samples, with an onboard lab for teaching. It is used for research and education in geosciences, biology, and coastal navigation, and operates on a self-catering basis. The vessel is named after Beret Paulsdatter, a Sami coastal woman known for commanding her own boat in the early 1800s, honouring both Sami history and women’s history. It mainly operates in the coastal areas of northern Norway, from Lofoten to Finnmark.