Disposal and deaccessioning are difficult subjects in the museum and archaeological field. Archaeological materialin museums grows only with time and increased number of excavations. Therefore problems are rising in themuseum field. In this thesis disposal and deaccessioning of archaeological material in the Nordic countries isstudied. The main question is: How is the disposal of archaeological material in the Nordic countries handled?Legislations of the countries and museum policies were studied with disposal or deaccessioning in mind. Questionswere sent to a museum in each country to get first hand information about the subject. Disposal of archaeologicalmaterial is not handled in the same way in the five countries. Two of them, Denmark and Norway havesimilar systems. But the other three have another process in these matters. The word disposal seems not to havethe exact same meaning in all of the countries. In this thesis it is argued that there is no theory that has a clearsolution about what disposal of archaeological material is. I have come to the conclusion that this is an issue thathas to be handled in the museums and the first step is to have a clear policy on disposal and deaccessioning inthe archeological field / Gallring är en svår fråga i museer och på det arkeologiska fältet. Det arkeologiska materialet i museer växer ioch med de arkeologiska utgrävningarna. Detta skapar ett stigande problem inom museum. Denna uppsats behandlargallring av arkeologiskt material i de nordiska länderna. Huvudfrågan är: Hur hanteras gallring av arkeologisktmaterial i de nordiska länderna? Ländernas lagstiftning och museer policy har studerats med gallring iåtanke. Frågor har skickats till ett museum i varje land för att få information om hur de hanterar gallring. De ärinte desamma i de fem länderna. Danmark och Norge använder liknande system medan de tre andra länderna haren annat system. Ordet gallring verkar inte ha exakt samma innebörd i alla länder. I uppsatsen diskuteras det attdet inte finns någon teori som har en klar lösning över gallring av arkeologiskt material. Jag har kommit till slutsatsenatt detta är en fråga som måste hanteras i museer och det första steget är att ha en tydlig policy om dessafrågor i museerna.

Archaeologists excavate to find out more about our prehistory. The more artifacts we dig up and preserve the more the potential to extract knowledge about the past from them grows. But some people are starting to get worried how we are going to be able to keep all the things we excavate. The museums are already filled to the brim, but the stream of new objects does not stop.  We are, according to those people, in a curation crisis. This study aims to investigate how the laws and regulations of disposal of the archaeological artifacts in museums collections translate to practice. Through interviews and analyzing laws and guidelines I aim to study how those in charge of disposal navigate between the need of more archaeological material versus the need to make more room in the collections, and how the guidelines over disposal gets implemented in practice. The conclusions of this paper is that Swedish museums employees generally thinks that the guidelines are easy to work with, however they rarely dispose of archaeological artifacts, instead they rely on it being done in the field.

This master thesis is concerned with the topic of deaccessioning from public art museums in the Czech Republic. This practice is almost never carried out due to high legal restrictions and very demanding administration. Nevertheless, deaccessioning is becoming common practice in other European countries such as United Kingdom or the Netherlands. The goal of the thesis is to suggest main topics in the hypothetical regulation of deaccessioning in the Czech Republic considering the current theoretical framework, already conducted research and newly conducted research within this thesis. The latter is open coding analysis of guidelines on collection deaccessioning made by United Kingdom Museum Association. The main conclusions are that a few topics should be subject to regulation. Firstly, the reason to dispose (either economic or other), secondly, the acceptable use of the income from deaccessioning, thirdly, decision making process and supervision. At last, selection of collection or items to be disposed and question of new collection owner should be solved.