Cornelius Holtorf: Dare to think big

Pioneers break new ground 

One example of how Cornelius has carved out his own path in academia is the industrial research school he helped to establish at Linnaeus University in Kalmar. Together with Per Lekberg, then head of contract archaeology at Kalmar County Museum, Cornelius hatched the idea of an industrial research school in archaeology. This had not been tried by anyone before. The two pioneers not only wanted to create a new type of research school in the humanities, but also to help change the way archaeology is viewed as an academic subject and challenge established ideas about what archaeologists can and should do.

We wanted to move away from a one-sided focus on the Bronze Age or another historical period and instead focus on contemporary challenges. We wanted to offer a doctoral programme in areas that may be termed applied archaeology, in other words archaeology that contributes to solving societal problems.

Together with other colleagues they developed the Graduate School in Contract Archaeology (GRASCA), with the explicit agenda of reforming both research and practice in the field. The PhD projects have now been completed or are in their final stages, and Cornelius notes that they have challenged prevailing norms and ideas about what archaeologists can and should do, where the disciplinary boundaries lie, and what questions and problems are appropriate and interesting to investigate. Just as he had hoped.

Cornelius highlights a completed doctoral project that illustrates archaeology’s potential to contribute to society, broadly speaking: in her PhD thesis, Clara Alfsdotter studied the decomposition of bodies in different environments by analysing modern and ancient skeletons. Today Clara contributes to the forensic work done during crime scene investigations. 

Fighting structural arrogance 

GRASCA has been carefully organised so that both parties – academia and business – work closely together. An important premise has been to appoint company mentors and academic supervisors on the same terms, so that they are on an equal footing. Placing less weight on the appointment process and person appointed as company mentor than on the academic supervisor breeds what Cornelius refers to as a form of “structural arrogance”.

The joint process is most important to Cornelius. Willingness to listen to others and the desire to understand the activities and perspectives of others do not mean that anyone else can decide what we as researchers choose to write and publish. These are two different things. The academic freedom to decide independently what questions to ask and how to conduct research can never be compromised. Nor is that being demanded, says Cornelius: “Nobody we’ve worked with wants uncritical research.” However, a requirement is that everyone is interested in and willing to learn from each other – to challenge their own perspectives and think in new ways.

Many people mistake collaboration for communicating research results to someone who’s interested in what you do. For me, collaboration involves much more. It’s about learning from each other, wanting to do something fun together, and being prepared to think outside the box. It’s about recognising opportunities – that I can use my knowledge to solve someone else’s problems and vice versa. Collaboration is simply about doing things together.

From expertise to debate

Rather than just delivering results – knowledge – Cornelius wants to contribute insights and additional perspectives on societal issues and problems. In order to do so, it is also important to try to spread joy and sometimes perhaps even sow a little confusion. “I want to write articles that make people smile, that make them think ‘Oh, what really happened here?’”

Being a researcher involves influencing how people think about societal issues and problems. Learning occurs at the intersection of different skills. When people meet and talk – whether at the Getty Conservation Institute, the United Nations, or in Kalmar – insights are shared, leading to the creation of mutual understanding, Cornelius explains. When someone listens things can happen.

The companies say the main value of the work is the process. It’s the process that we’ve jointly undertaken over the years that has delivered results for both sides. The process is more fundamental than the research result itself. This actually applies to everything I do.

Cornelius describes scientific exploration as being more akin to an artistic, aesthetic process than the pure knowledge process it is often thought to be. It involves moving away from a one-sided focus on presenting expertise, to instead engaging in discussion and debate. His ambition is to highlight the nuances of knowledge and to contribute to reflection and new questions.

A spanner in the works

Cornelius thinks that the humanities are currently structured in a way that does not always make it so easy to collaborate. It’s about money, in part. At a societal scale, the whole contract archaeology sector has financial resources amounting to “peanuts”, as he puts it. Such a limited sector has few opportunities to co-fund multiyear PhD projects. Although many companies would like to participate in GRASCA, few are willing or able to take the risk of co-funding research. Companies in the sector are almost always small, with few employees and no time or resources for anything other than their specific work.

Other issues are the lack of entrepreneurship and businesses’ limited knowledge of product and service development in contract archaeology. In the framework of an industrial research school, it is key that service development takes place during the final phase of a PhD project so that new PhD graduates can and want to stay on. Therefore, markets, customers, products, or services need to be developed so that PhD graduates are allowed to continue to apply their newly acquired knowledge. Cornelius believes that more initiatives are needed to ensure that companies in the sector can and dare to develop in this way.

Working with society – not against it!

Cornelius is keen to return to the possibilities of research, the role of the researcher in society, and the importance of looking beyond individual results. Researchers need to develop and communicate their arguments, not least in relation to the rise of AI tools. Generative AI is better at producing pure descriptions or summaries than students are, who instead need to understand what the summaries mean and learn to decide whether they are correct. Creative problematisation is therefore crucial. 

The articles I write very rarely have knowledge outcomes. This is a different kind of text. It’s a reasoned discussion that mainly focuses on insights. Why do I think something is right or wrong?

Developing the ability to reason and critically discuss contemporary issues also requires a change in what studying the humanities at university involves, says Cornelius. Not least, more contact points between students and businesses are needed. The humanities as an academic area need to develop a greater understanding of society and the times we live in, while society also needs to understand the humanities better.

Broad training is needed to become a manager in the business world. They don’t want specialists, but people able to analyse, present, and think critically, all of which you need in high positions everywhere. That doesn’t mean you don’t need practical knowledge – in archaeology you need to have worked on excavations and you need to have some basic knowledge of artefacts, for example. You simply need to have both.

PhD students and undergraduates need to learn, and be encouraged, to ask big questions and think about why archaeology is important. Why does the world need to know what they are doing? We work for society, not against it, Cornelius reminds us. Cultural studies ought to become a self-evident voice in the public dialogue – a voice that takes its place and contributes to solving current societal problems and challenges.

This text is translated from Swedish. Original text: Maria Grafström and Anna Jonsson. Photos: Sebastian Borg.