Göran Burenhult is an archaeologist at Gotland University College and author of the most important archaeological textbooks available in Swedish. He is also the best known professional archaeologist on Swedish TV. Between the mid 1980s and the early 1990s Burenhult produced a series of beautiful coffee-table books and TV documentaries about his research that combined archaeological fieldwork in Sweden with ethnoarchaeological studies on various islands in the Pacific, especially Papua New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands. This took archaeology on Swedish TV into a completely new direction.

Previously archaeology had been seen as an affair for antiquarian scholars as well as for the King. Gustav VI Adolf (1882-1973) after all was an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist (Lagerqvist and Odelberg 1972). During the early 1980s a series of programmes on The cradle of the Svea state (Svearikets Vagga) by the journalist Dag Stålsjö, advocating a revisionist theory about the location of the historic town of Birka and the origin of the Swedish state, had caused much public attention. It culminated in a recorded panel discussion to which about a dozen archaeological and historical experts, virtually all males in suit and tie and some of them University professors, contributed with scholarly assessments of the questions at hand. The archaeologists representing the professional establishment came across as stuffy, conspiring against amateurs and biased towards Stockholm. Burenhult dealt with new issues in new ways, and changed the image of archaeology in Sweden completely.

With his special interest in the inhabitants of paradise-like islands of the Pacific, Burenhult took the archaeology/exotic adventure connection further than most. He was also unusual as a TV author in being a prominent academic himself and reporting to a large extent about his own fieldwork. Yet as adventurous as his accounts were, Burenhult always maintained a strong subtext of positivistic science and frequently linked his exotic work back to Sweden. A good example is the first project he completed, a book and film series entitled ”Reflections of the past” (1986). This project dealt with the lives of Stone Age people, both in Sweden (a long time ago) and on tropical islands of the Pacific (now). The book sold in excess of 130.000 copies and twice that many watched the TV series.

Figure 3.2

In both the book and the TV programmes, the explorer Burenhult comes across as a scientific expert who speaks authoritatively about the past. His research draws not only on new excavations on Gotland but also on satellite pictures, infra-red photography and georadar surveys. In addition, Burenhults investigations involved landrover and helicopter rides as well as cruises on his yacht. He travelled to the homes of well-built former cannibals where the dark-skinned men use stone-axes and the women walk around bare-breasted. Wearing ”colonial style” clothes in the film (see Figure 3.2, cf. chapter 5), he is the white explorer documenting what appears in the viewfinder of his photo and video cameras. Burenhult is interested in ’primitive’ peoples’ architecture and subsistence strategies as well as in their ceremonies and rituals. Having labeled this research as ethno-archaeology, his observations are continuously transferred back to archaeological sites in Sweden, thus bringing the Stone Age back to life as it were. By contributing in this way to our understanding of both contemporary and prehistoric peoples, Burenhult hopes to learn about human behaviour in general, and to help humans in their future struggles for survival.

Parts of Burenhult’s work certainly evokes some of the same themes and metaphors as the film stories and images we associate with Indiana Jones (see chapter 5). When I asked him how he felt about that link he accepted without hesitation that archaeological research is of course exciting and often leads to unexpected discoveries, thus sharing some of its wide appeal with how archaeology is portrayed in popular culture. At the same time Burenhult seemed genuinely surprised how anybody could confuse a film hero with actual reality and think that the Indiana Jones stereotypes were a reflection of how archaeologists are actually working. Arguably, it is less a question of getting confused about reality, though, and more a question of the emergence of images and representations that simply merge fact and fiction.

Burenhult’s work has been popular and his TV programmes (he tells me) have been sold to 15 different countries. But it has to be said that even in Sweden they did not reach viewing rates comparable to either Gisela Graichen’s documentaries in Germany or Time Team in the UK. Recently, Burenhult featured again as a scientific expert on TV, discussing a series of archaeological documentaries about a murder case at Stonehenge, cannibalism among the American Anasazi, and a lost Viking town on Gotland, broadcast within the context of Swedish state television’s educational programmes.

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