Dr Alison Klevnäs is employed as a researcher in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University where among other projects she is working on the ERC-funded PresentDead on early medieval reopening.
Her PhD was completed at the University of Cambridge in 2010 and investigated Merovingian-period grave disturbance in northern and western Europe, with the main case study in East Kent in Anglo-Saxon England.
Further research explores the widespread disturbance of Vendel and Viking Period boat-burials in Scandinavia, with publications on the heavily disturbed boat-grave cemeteries at Gamla Uppsala and Vendel in Uppland, Sweden.
From 2018-2021 she led a three-year project funded by the Swedish Research Council on ‘Interacting with the dead. Belief and conflict in Early Medieval Europe (AD 450-750)’, which investigated the widespread practice of reopening recent burials seen across the Merovingian kingdoms.
Wider ongoing interests include taphonomy, ritual activities at burial places, and archaeological approaches to possessions and ownership, particularly in the context of grave finds. She worked at Stockholm University from 2012 to 2024, and for several years was responsible for the MA theory and dissertation courses, plus undergraduate courses on archaeological practice and the Viking period. From 2017-19 she ran a Humanities Faculty doctoral school on the theme ‘Materiality and the human’ and for 2020-22 she directed one on Digital Humanities. From 2018 to 2022 she was Editor of Current Swedish Archaeology, Sweden’s highest ranked academic journal for the discipline.
