Bjørnar Olsen Author & Editor

Bjørnar Olsen is Professor of Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Tromsø, Norway. His research interests include Sámi culture, contemporary archaeology, material culture, and thing theory. His latest books are In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (2010), Persistent Memories: Pyramiden – a Soviet mining town in the High Arctic (2010, with E. Andreassen and H. Bjerck), and Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (2012,with M. Shanks, T. Webmoor and C. Witmore).He is director of the Ruin Memories project. Þóra Pétursdóttir defended her doctoral thesis in archaeology, with the title Concrete Matters: towards an archaeology of things, at the University of Tromsø, Norway, in November 2013. Her main research interests lie in archaeological theory and practice, thing theory and archaeology of the recent past and present.