Kalaureia 1894 : A Cultural History of the First Swedish Excavation in Greece

The excavation of the Sanctuary of Poseidon at Kalaureia in 1894 marks the beginning of Swedish archaeological fieldwork in Greece. During a couple of hot summer months, two philologists from Uppsala University, Sam Wide (1861-1918) and Lennart Kjellberg (1857-1936), worked in the sanctuary together with the architect Sven Kristenson (1858-1937), the Greek foreman Pankalos and around twenty local workmen. In 1997, the Swedish Institute at Athens began new excavations at the sanctuary. This thesis examines the beginnings of Swedish fieldwork in Greece. Within the framework of a cultural history of archaeology, inspired by archaeological ethnography and the New Cultural History, it explores how archaeology functioned as a cultural practice in the late nineteenth century. A micro-historical methodology makes use of a wide array of different source material connected to the excavation of 1894, its prelude and aftermath. The thesis takes the theoretical position that the premises for archaeological knowledge production are outcomes of contemporary power structures and cultural politics. Through an analysis of how the archaeologists constructed their self-images through a set of idealized stereotypes of bourgeois masculinity, academic politics of belonging is highlighted. The politics of belonging existed also on a national level, where the Swedish archaeologists entered into a competition with other foreign actors to claim heritage sites in Greece. The idealization of classical Greece as a birthplace of Western values, in combination with contemporary colonial and racist cultural frameworks in Europe, created particular gazes through which the modern country was appropriated and judged. These factors all shaped the practices through which archaeological knowledge was created at Kalaureia. Some excavations tend to have extensive afterlives through the production of histories of archaeology. Therefore, this thesis also explores the representations of the 1894 excavation in the historiography of Swedish classical archaeology. It highlights the strategies by which the excavation at Kalaureia has served to legitimize further Swedish engagements in Greek archaeology, and explores the way in which historiography shapes our professional identities.

Algebro-Geometric Aspects of the Classical Yang-Baxter Equation

In this thesis we consider algebro-geometric aspects of the Classical Yang-Baxter Equation and the Generalised Classical Yang-Baxter Equation. In chapter one we present a method to construct solutions of the Generalised Classical Yang-Baxter Equation starting with certain sheaves of Lie algebras on algebraic curves. Furthermore we discuss a criterion to check unitarity of such solutions. In chapter two we consider the special class of solutions coming from sheaves of traceless endomorphisms of simple vector bundles on the nodal cubic curve. These solutions are quasi-trigonometric and we describe how they fit into the classification scheme of such solutions. Moreover, we describe a concrete formula for these solutions. In the third and final chapter we show that any unitary, rational solution of the Classical Yang-Baxter Equation can be obtained via the method of chapter one applied to a sheaf of Lie algebras on the cuspidal cubic curve.

Using the Scharff-technique to elicit information: how to effectively establish the “illusion of knowing it all”?

The Scharff-technique is used for eliciting information from human sources. At the very core of the technique is the “illusion of knowing it all” tactic, which aims to inflate a source's perception of how much knowledge an interviewer holds about the event to be discussed. For the current study, we mapped the effects following two different ways of introducing this particular tactic; a traditional way of implementation where the interviewer explicitly states that s/he already knows most of the important information (the traditional condition), and a new way of implementation where the interviewer just starts to present the information that s/he holds (the just start condition). The two versions were compared in two separate experiments. In Experiment 1 (N = 60), we measured the participants’ perceptions of the interviewer's knowledge, and in Experiment 2 (N = 60), the participants’ perceptions of the interviewer's knowledge gaps. We found that participants in the just start condition (a) believed the interviewer had more knowledge (Experiment 1), and (b) searched less actively for gaps in the interviewer's knowledge (Experiment 2), compared to the traditional condition. We will discuss the current findings and how sources test and perceive the knowledge his or her interviewer possesses within a framework of social hypothesis testing.