Stockholm university
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Anna Andreasson Sjögren

About me

Born in 1972, currently living in Helsingborg and Stockholm. MA in Archaeology and Cultural Studies from the University of Gothenburg 1996. Further studies in Medieval Archaeology, Art History, Garden History and Botany.

Between 1996 and 2008 I worked as an archaeologist at Malmö Kulturmiljö in Scania, Sweden. From 2008 to 2010 I worked at the Programme for Diversity of Cultivated Plants and the Swedish Biodiversity Centre, at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp. After that I started working full time as a consultant, through my company ArchaeoGarden, with Garden Archaeology projects and Green Cultural Heritage Management projects.

Research

Dissertation project

The working title of my dissertation project is: ”Medieval Gardens in the North – Images and Reality”. My main goal is to try to provide a new and better understanding of gardens and gardening in the Middle Ages in the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland) useful in current research. New findings and new research in the last decades increasingly show that the old image we have of gardening in this part of Europe in the Middle Ages, formed during the late 19th and 20th century, is in many ways dated and often based more on assumptions than facts. Within this project, I want to try to trace medieval gardening in the Nordic countries through as many sources as possible – archaeological as well as historical sources, like texts and images. In doing so, I also would like to explore gardens as a form of material culture, and contribute to the development of the field of Garden Archaeology. Some central questions are for example: What is gardening, and what was it in northern Europe during the Middle Ages? How were gardens used and seen – as symbols, metaphors and as physical places? What makes gardens different from all other elements in a cultural landscape?

Supervisors

Anders Andrén, professor i arkeologi vid Institutionen för arkeologi och antikens kultur, Stockholms universitet.

Åsa Ahrland, docent och universitetslektor vid Institutionen för landskapsarkitektur, planering och förvaltning, Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet, Alnarp.

Publications

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