Land of Four Thousand Archaeologists

My good friend and mentor Jan Peder Lamm has a thing for bibliographies. Specifically, he’s been the driving force behind a series of volumes listing photocopied BA and MA theses written by Swedish students of archaeology and adjoining disciplines. Many of these works contain very respectable research, with useful databases and thoughtful analyses. Thanks to Jan Peder’s efforts (and those of his disciples, including myself), they are far more accessible than they would have been if they had just been lying around the department store rooms.

It struck me the other day that these bibliographies allow one to estimate how many archaeologists Sweden has produced since the 1940s, assuming a BA or MA in the subject as a prerequisite for the moniker. I’m interested in this because of my strong opinions on the high unemployment rate in the profession. This is to my mind a result of a university system that strives to maximize student throughput and teacher employment rates without any view to whether the kids learn anything that might help them have a subsequent career.

There are sources of error: some theses may have been missed, and some people are listed both for their BA and their MA theses. But we should be able to see the order of magnitude. Let’s just look at theses in Scandinavian archaeology, which are the ones written by people who hope to work as archaeologists in Sweden.

For the period 1950-2003, the bibliographies list 4371 theses. They document decades of slow growth, and then a dramatic peak in the 1990s, when on average 87 theses where written each year only about the Iron Age. There is then an encouraging slump for 2000-2003, with an annual average of 63 Iron Age theses. Nevertheless, there must be thousands of people with archaeology BAs or MAs in the country, most of whom are not yet past retirement age. And believe me, there are not thousands of archaeology jobs: there may be two or three hundred. So it seems that in recent years, Sweden has had an overproduction of archaeologists on a rough scale of 10:1. Though the application numbers to recent jobs are more like 90:1.

I say, let's put a few tens of archaeology teachers on the dole, thereby stopping the university system from providing hundreds of unexperienced kids each year with a career path leading to unemployment.

[More blog entries about archaeology, Sweden, career, unemployment; arkeologi, karriär, arbetslöshet.]

Archaeology Offers No Career

The Grumpy Old Bookman is fond of saying that fiction-writing is an excellent hobby but completely unrealistic, indeed self-destructive, as a professional career. I periodically repeat the same statement for archaeology. Scandinavia is one of the parts of the world where there are the most jobs per capita in archaeology. Still there are tens of unemployed Scandinavian archaeologists for each one that has a job, however short-term and badly paid.

Here's a recent newspaper story that shows what I'm talking about. Johanna Edqvist of Gothenburg has two MA degrees, one in archaeology and one in museology, and a €32 100 study debt. The only steady job she's been able to find is 25% of full time -- at a Kindergarten.

[More blog entries about career, archaeology, Sweden; karriär, arkeologi, Sverige.]

Academy Employee

As of today, I'm an employee of the Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, founded in 1753 by Queen Lovisa Ulrika. The Academy has about 130 full members, most of them professors in the humanities and social sciences. The organisation is self-funded through old donations and acts independently of the state apparatus.



The Academy's premises is a patrician townhouse built in the 19th century. It's located in a quiet Stockholm street near the Humlegården park in which the Royal Library is sited. The house was once the abode of the Rettig family, wealthy tobacco industrialists and shipowners. It still retains the opulent furnishings collected by the Rettigs with additional goodies amassed by the Academy itself through the centuries. Above my desk, for instance, hangs a portrait of disponent Daniel Engelke, Norrköping, painted in 1924 by Asta Holmberg. I like his mustache and the intent way he's reading Norrköpings Tidningar. Good way to pass the time when sitting for a portrait.



Behind my back at the office is an outrageous tiled stove in an unusually gaudy version of the Empire style: pink, blue and gold, topped by a really gay-looking eagle.



At the moment I have three tasks at the Academy, though I hope to make myself useful in more ways.

• Organise a seminar in March to further the continued use of the Medieval parish as the basic territorial unit in taxation and census records. Modern territorial units have an unfortunate tendency to change every few decades, which creates endless problems for anyone doing longitudinal historical research. Better to keep a system that has been used for centuries. It's just a way of organising geographical information, which is arbitrary anyway from a cost and database design perspective.
  
• Continue to edit the journal Fornvännen (on archaeology and Medieval art) as I have done since 1999.
  
• Edit a proceedings volume on Fornvännen's centenary symposium last spring, on the future of the scholarly journal. One good paper by Jan Hagerlid, about Open Access publishing, is already on-line.

I feel really lucky to have this job. Interesting work with the opportunity to cultivate a lot of contacts, good pay, nice people, fantastic office, less than an hour from home. And I'll still be doing research half of my time. The university jobs I've been applying for wouldn't have offered conditions like these. It's six months to start with, and then we'll see if the Academy will have further use for my services.

[More blog entries about career, phd, Sweden; karriär, doktorera, Stockholm.]

Got A Job

Dear Reader, here's just a short note to tell you that I am a happy blogger.

If you've followed the blog, you may have gathered that the Scandinavian labour market for archaeology PhDs stinks. I got my PhD three years ago, and since then I've applied for every job announced that fit my qualifications, from Kiel to Tromsø. There have been twelve such announcements in three years. The number of applicants has been staggering, and the jobs have been given to people of much more advanced years than myself, whose lists of qualifications are of course longer than mine. Simply put: it's impossible for an archaeology PhD born in the 70s to get an entry-level academic job, because colleagues born in the 60s want them too.

You may also have gathered that I am not entirely happy with my solitary scholar's life. The freedom is great, but it's lonely and demoralising. It's tough to be the only person in the world (except one's family), for years and years, who cares whether one gets out of bed in the morning or not. Also, subsisting on small grants as I have done means no pension and no health insurance. Finally, most people have a need to belong somewhere, to be a member of a tribe. I haven't for a long time.

So you can see why I'm happy to have found a academic-ish job! Starting October, I'll work 50% for a scholarly organisation in central Stockholm as an editor and administrator. The work promises a lot of communication with scholars and other people. And working there part-time will allow me to continue my research and take care of my kids.

The paperwork isn't signed yet, so I'll tell you details in October. Whoopee!

[More blog entries about career, archaeology, Sweden; doktorera, karriär, arkeologi.]