Svensk uppdragsarkeologi i förändring : En fallstudie från 1990 till 2025

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this study was to examine how the system of contract archaeology in Sweden has changed from 1990 to 2025. To achieve this, an extensive literature analysis of legal documents such as laws, regulations, and other documents that affect the legal framework that contract archaeology operates within has been performed. A traditional case study of the contract archaeology ahead of two infrastructure projects has also been performed to evaluate how the changes can be observed in real world examples. The archaeology for one of these infrastructure projects took place from 1991 to 1994, the Viby project, while the other project started 2022 and is planned to be completed by 2028, the East Link project. While material from all the different stages of the archaeological work for the Viby project has been gathered, material from the last stage of the archaeology for the East Link project has not been used as those investigations are currently ongoing and not available. For the analysis and discussion of the changes to the legal framework of contract archaeology New Public Management has been applied as a theoretical perspective. The result of the study shows that since 1990 the amount of private archaeological firms engaged in contract archaeology has increased significantly because of the introduction of open competition within the field. There has also been significant discourse among actors involved in contract archaeological about the effect that more private archaeological firms would have on the effect of the quality of the investigations, due to this the requirements and regulations of contract archaeology has been tightened to maintain the scientific quality of the archaeological investigations. In practice these changes can be spotted in the East Link project where more actors, both state or county owned, and privately owned, cooperate on different archaeological assignments and use material from each other to supplement or base their own work on. In conclusion, the contract archaeology system in Sweden today has, too a degree, been privatized compared to how it operated during 1990 where most of the actors involved were state owned.