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Recent research has revealed that interdisciplinary work combining archaeological and heritage practice continues to be limited by enduring assumptions separating the two fields. Traditional structures and institutional barriers make it difficult to break away from what is expected in order to explore what is possible in what archaeologists and heritage practitioners ‘do’. Though archaeologists play an integral role in the discovery and interpretation of the past—providing the foundation for the heritage-making process, there is often a gap between the scientific dissemination of archaeological findings and the interpretation and communication of these findings as heritage. We therefore position storytelling as a key to bridging the divide between archaeological and heritage practice. Offering perspectives from archaeological and heritage practices in Sweden, we argue that a renewed focus on storytelling creates more dynamic and collaborative pathways to interpret, communicate and experience archaeological heritagescapes.

In northern Europe, the 16th century was a period characterised by the breakthrough of the Reformation and the establishment of national states. Following the technological principles of printing and adapting the motifs of Renaissance woodcuts, potteries predominantly in the Rhine and Meuse regions started to produce relief-decorated stoneware with elaborate decorations. The appearance of these stoneware-vessels closely reflects both trading networks and a certain “habitus” of the consumers. The motifs of the decorations give insight into aspects of the religious struggles and political conflicts of the period. Based on finds from Norway, relief-decorated stoneware can highlight aspects of long-range contact, exchange, and conflict.

In several church declarations dating as far back as the 1990s, it is stated that Sámi spirituality provides an important impulse for churches that want to develop ecotheology. In this article, I examine how two well-known Sámi priests, Bierna Leine Bientie and Tore Johnsen, have received this encouragement and what characterizes their ecotheological responses. By studying selected publications from these two, using established methods for the analysis of ecotheological texts, I show that they present an ecotheology that places more emphasis on building ecocentric worldviews than on promoting concrete solutions. This stands in contrast to the dominant theology in the Church of Norway, which places great emphasis on ethics in its statements. I conclude that Sámi theologians, measured against the findings in this analysis, challenge the church of Norway and other western churches to focus more on the connection between humans and other species and on the value of non-human nature in future ecotheological statements.

Handout, 2A4 pages, text and images, references, hyperlinks Should CULTURAL HISTORY today include a reflective foundation on IP-addresses and metadata? In the adjoined handout (left), two very different types of archival documents (as of date belonging to a private collection) are discussed as an ensemble. They lend themselves to the discussion of the above question in a contemporary DESIGN in TECHNOLOGICAL & TRANSACTIONAL terms. The documents are: A) documents from international diplomacy in energy-trade politics selected and collected by the diplomat K [from the early 80s to the late 90s]; B) diaries written by La Kahina who was married to K, and working with him in a husband-and-wife team [71 diaries written over a period of 40 years]. The case focuses on the Troll-agreement (1986), -platform (1995) and field (1996): the public aesthetics of a huge engineering project, and the political aesthetics of the Troll negotiations and projects grown in a diplomatic domestic unit. The handout has a dual purpose: 1) communicating the project at a workshop organised by Critical Petroaesthetics [OSEH]. 2) rounding up learning outcomes from engagements of the National Library of Norway’s §112-series [§112 is the Norwegian Constitution’s environmental paragraph]. The context of this interfacing is the author’s research residency at the National Library of Norway (NLN). It is also pledged to the interfacing of different kinds of archival resources available internally at the library, and other institutions. The argument pursued in the handout is in line with Jaron Lanier’s understanding og hive minds (AI) as ‘metadata without an address’, and the relations of appropriation entailed by this (Stephen Wright).

During the Zhou to early Han dynasties, significant changes occurred in China's political, social, and cultural landscape. This era saw the emergence of new ritual practices that profoundly influenced individuals and society as a whole. Rituals, referred to as lǐ 禮 in Chinese, encompassed more than mere ceremonies. It constituted a comprehensive system of practices and social norms aimed at maintaining order and harmony. In this thesis, the concept of lǐ 禮 will be explored through the examination of excavated texts from Guodian, specifically Wǔ Xíng (五行) and Xìng Zì Mìng Chū (性自命出) in order to understand the fundamental ideas that shaped the belief and values of the society at that time. Through a comparative approach, it helps to identify commonalities, variations, and transformations of the concept, contributing to a deeper understanding of its complexities. These texts were chosen for their early historical significance, providing firsthand information on the Pre-Qin period and shedding light on personal and societal rituals and virtue. The result of this study has revealed that the concept of lǐ 禮 encompasses a multi-layered function that includes both the individual's relationship with society and their connection to the transcendent realm. It starts with the notion that the Heaven (tiān 天) gives a mandate (mìng 命) to an individual’s nature (xìng性). The four conducts of sagacity (shèng 聖), knowledge (zhì智), humane (rén 仁) and propriety (yì義) when work in harmony, will exist and function in lǐ 禮, helping the individual to cultivate and express emotions (qíng情) truthfully. Through constant practices, it can then yields virtuosity (dé 德) that helps the individual to connect symmetrically to society and the collective consciousness. Ultimately, it helps an individual realize the Way (dào 道) that Heaven shows him, and respond upward to the mandate that Heaven sends to him.

This thesis studies bakestones found in the Medieval town of Borgund, and the town’s position in the commerce network of bakestones in Western Norway. Borgund lies on the sailing route between Trondheim and Bergen, located between some known quarry areas of bakestones in Western Norway. The aim has been to find whether Borgund’s trade was directed south towards Bergen and the quarries of Ølve/Hatlestrand or north towards Trondheim and the quarries of Øye, if there were any temporal changes and if Borgund functioned as a transit port for further distribution of bakestones to nearby areas. Visual archaeological analysis was conducted to find trends in the archaeological material related to the bakestone’s use. A visual geological analysis was conducted to distinguish geological groups and quarry groups among the material. Some of the bakestones were also analysed geochemically using pXRF to see if they matched the visual geological analysis. It was found that most of the bakestones at Borgund were unused, meaning Borgund functioned as a consumer, not as a transit port for further distribution to nearby areas. More than 60% of the bakestones consisted of fine-grained chlorite schist, a quality only found in Ølve/Hatlestrand, meaning the trade of bakestone was mainly directed south to Bergen and Ølve/Hatlestrand. The remaining bakestones could not be provenaced or consisted of medium-grained or coarse-grained chlorite schist. Both materials may occur in Ølve/Hatlestrand and Øye. However, since the traces of bakestone extraction at Øye indicate small-scale production and both the materials clustered with the fine-grained chlorite schist in the geochemical analysis, they are likely from Ølve/Hatlestrand as well. Arkeologi mastergradsoppgave ARK350 MAHF-ARK

This master thesis focuses on the U.S. policy on NATO enlargement during the George H.W. Bush administration from 1989 until the beginning of the Bill Clinton administration in 1993. This thesis analyses when the thinking on NATO eastward enlargement incorporating former allies of the Soviet Union emerged and discusses how this thinking evolved during the Bush administration. This thesis also discusses why the Bush administration wanted to enlarge NATO, arguing that there were both economic and geopolitical underlying drivers for enlarging the Atlantic Alliance. In contrast to earlier research on the topic, this thesis argues, based on recently declassified documents, that the idea of enlarging NATO eastward emerged early on in the Bush administration. Moreover, this thesis puts forward the theoretical concept of hedging, arguing that in its NATO enlargement policy, the Bush administration was simultaneously balancing and engaging the Soviet Union/Russia. By pursuing the dualistic strategy of hedging, the Bush administration safeguarded itself in case the development in Russia would go in an undesirable direction. Furthermore, this thesis argues that the Bush administration favoured the enlargement of NATO for pragmatic and realpolitik reasons, seeing it as a way of preserving the U.S. dominant position in Europe and preventing other security structures from emerging in Europe.

LSD, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, was used in psychotherapy in Scandinavia throughout the 1960s. In 1966 all possession of the substance not approved for research or medical use was criminalized. Prior research on the history of LSD in psychotherapy has given several explanations for prohibi-tion, including “moral panic” and a changed attitude in scientific communities towards psycho-pharmaceutical methodology. This prior research on the history of LSD has tended to hold a nation-state scope, despite the transnational character of the issue. In this dissertation, a Nordic scope (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) is applied to the question of how LSD came to be prohibited. A Nordic community of experts in psychiatry and psychopharmacology discussed LSD-therapy at different occasions in the early 1960s. By leaning on a tradition of history of knowledge and recent findings in global drug history, the dissertation provides novel insights on how LSD was conceptualized by the Nordic scientific LSD-experts, and how these findings relate to the public debate on the topic occurring in the late 1960s. Primary sources include the expert’s research publications from the scientific community, newspapers, and different archival material. While the debate was similar in Scandinavia in its division of defenders of prohibition contra liberalists, the most outspoken and influential debaters are presented, and their arguments discussed. I argue the moral panic to have been less evident factor in Scandinavia in comparison to the USA, as the Directors of Health Departments criminalized illicit possession before non-authorized use became more widespread. Further studies should seek to uncover the role of WHO and international organizations in pressing for LSD-prohibition.

We investigate an approach for extracting occupational gender bias in the form of logical rules from Large Language Models (LLM)s based on Angluin's exact learning model with membership and equivalence queries to an oracle. In our approach, the oracle is a LLM and we show the changes that are necessary to use Angluin's algorithm with such an oracle. In our experiments, we extract occupational gender bias with the adapted algorithm from BERT and roBERTa models and compare our results to an established bias extraction method, which is template-based probing. Our goal is to use a new method to combine multiple attributes in a template sentence and to study their relationship to the gender in a sentence. We achieve this by using our rule extraction approach with a variable template containing multiple attributes. The extracted rules show a similar bias as previous bias extraction methods but also give insight into more complex relationships between attributes. Master's Thesis in Informatics INF399 MAMN-PROG MAMN-INF