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

Sammendrag

What do we mean by the term “special investigation”? Collection of data, research and funding in accordance
with the Cultural Heritage Act, § 10.
Section 10 of the Cultural Heritage Act stipulates that expenses for special investigation of protected cultural
monuments shall be covered by the developer. In today’s practice, the term "special investigation" includes collection
of archaeological data, but not further research related to the same data. Expenses for data collection will thus
be paid for by the developer, while expenses for further research will be covered by the institution responsible for
the “special investigation”: The University and Maritime Museums and The Norwegian Institute for Cultural heritage
Research (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 argue
that this was not the intention behind the term “special investigation” in the first place. The epistemological divide
between collection of data and research emerged as a result of a politically initiated, functional divide between cultural
heritage 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 recognizing
collection of data as a natural and inextricably integrated part of the research process. We believe that this does not
necessarily have to be very expensive. At the same time, it opens for a significant potential for future archaeological
knowledge production.