Hva ligger i uttrykket «særskilt gransking»? Innsamling av data, forskning og finansiering i henhold til kulturminneloven § 10

Abstract

What do we mean by the term “special investigation”? Collection of data, research and funding in accordancewith the Cultural Heritage Act, § 10.Section 10 of the Cultural Heritage Act stipulates that expenses for special investigation of protected culturalmonuments shall be covered by the developer. In today’s practice, the term "special investigation" includes collectionof archaeological data, but not further research related to the same data. Expenses for data collection will thusbe paid for by the developer, while expenses for further research will be covered by the institution responsible forthe “special investigation”: The University and Maritime Museums and The Norwegian Institute for Cultural heritageResearch (NIKU). This implies a notion that collecting data qualitatively differs from research.However, it is not possible to see data collection as detached from the research process. In this paper, we arguethat this was not the intention behind the term “special investigation” in the first place. The epistemological dividebetween collection of data and research emerged as a result of a politically initiated, functional divide between culturalheritage management on one hand, and archaeological research on the other.We argue that “special investigation” can and should be re-interpreted in order to establish a practice recognizingcollection of data as a natural and inextricably integrated part of the research process. We believe that this does notnecessarily have to be very expensive. At the same time, it opens for a significant potential for future archaeologicalknowledge production.