Mats Peterson Malmer

Elected Honorary Fellow on 6 January 1983

The In Memoriam section of the Antiquity website records that he studied humanities after war service, was inspired by his teachers to study archaeology and was appointed head of the Stone and Bronze Age division of the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm in 1959. From 1970 he worked as a professor of archaeology, first in Lund until 1973 and then in Stockholm until 1987. He was a brilliant field archaeologist and theoretician, greatly influenced by analytical philosophy, not least Wittgenstein, as is plain from his doctoral thesis, a study of the Neolithic Battle Axe Culture of Sweden and Norway and its European connections, in which he argued that what lay behind different material expressions was the diffusion of ideas about material culture and varying local conditions. But the doctoral thesis was equally a methodological attack on what Malmer called ‘impressionism’ in archaeology, that is, the lackadaisical way in which many archaeologists classified their material. He demanded clear definitions of basic categories such as time, space and typology. Thus he set the stage for a theoretical and methodological debate that would later be named the New Archaeology in the Anglo-American tradition.

Swedish archaeologist Dr Martin Rundkvist describes Mats Malmer on his blog site as ‘my number one archaeological hero’, explaining that he ‘stressed the importance of clear thinking and clear writing, because in science no thinking can ever be clearer than the language in which it is presented. He also stressed the primacy and uniqueness of archaeology’s source material: most sciences deal with mute inhuman things, history with speaking human things, and archaeology alone takes care of all that is mute and human. I am very proud to count myself a Malmerian archaeologist.’