A short summary of my forty years in paleolimnology

A lifetime achievement award is a reason to look back and ask, ‘‘why paleolimnology, what has been most stimulating, and what am I most pleased with?’’ As an undergraduate student, I met Dr. Kimmo Tolonen, who was a guest researcher at the Department of Ecological Botany at Umea University, Sweden. Kimmo is the most enthusiastic researcher I have met—he wished to try everything and to show everything. When Kimmo and his research group returned to Finland, Professor Bengt Pettersson bravely appointed me and two other inexperienced students in 1971 to replace Kimmo and his group in the Early Norrland Research Project. Early Norrland was a multidisciplinary project that studied the prehistory of the northern part of Sweden. Bengt Pettersson was not a paleolimnologist and he gave me free rein to plan my research. Inspired by the excellent book about Lake Trummen by Dr. Gunnar Digerfeldt (Digerfeldt 1972), I designed a multi-lake, multi-proxy project for my research (Renberg 1976a, 1978), which became an excellent school for my future research career. It has been most stimulating to think about things in a different way and find solutions to technical, methodological and scientific questions. Is there anything more exciting in science than conducting analyses that yield unexpected results, followed by weeks of pondering, to ultimately find a solution at five o’clock on a Saturday morning, when everything suddenly appears clearly in that border zone between sleep and wakefulness? Doing the same thing twice is not fun and therefore, the most recent project always seems most interesting to me. When I think back, however, I realize that some projects I did in the past, were quite rewarding.