Home

Hej and Welcome to my Site!

My name is Sven Kalmring and i am born in 1976 in Hamburg. My field of research is protohistoric archaeology in Central and Northern Europe with a special focus on Viking age archaeology. Being educated at Kiel and Lund University and then working in the Hedeby project at the Archaeological State Museum of Schleswig-Holstein I am used to combine both the view towards the North as well as towards Continental Europe.

My main research interests are Maritime Archaeology, Early Medieval Harbours, Trade and Exchange in the Viking Age and Urbanization in Northern Europe. Above that my general field is Historical Archaeology, Viking Age Scandinavia, Merovingian and Carolingian and within those frames particularly the sites of Birka, Hedeby, Dorestad and Schleswig. I am also interested in the Vikings in the North Atlantic, on the Continent and in the East, i.e. Old Rus', Byzantine and Islamic Archaeology.

My PhD on the harbour of Hedeby was awarded the with Kiel universities' Faculty Price in Humanoria and I was granted the Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humbodt foundation. Above that I was Investigator for excavations in Hedeby, Birka and on Iceland. I also was significantly involved in the preparation of a Priority Programme at the German Research Foundation DFG as a major research grant and contributed to the preparations of exhibitions and full-scale reconstructions in Hedeby.

In 2011-12 I was guest researcher at Stockholm University working myself into Birka research. In autumn 2013 I returned to the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology and since then commuted between Schleswig and Stockholm. In 2016 I was teaching at Aarhus University. In 2019 I was appointed Associate Professor (docent) at the Archaeoligical Research Laboratory at Stockholm University and since 2021 I was representative for the research focus "Man and Artefact" at the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology. Since the beginning of 2023, I am working as a senior curator of the Younger Iron Age collections at the Department of Collections and Research at the National Historical Museums in Stockholm.

I hope you will enjoy the stay on this site!