Lili Kaelas

Lili Sanelma Nyström (better known as Lili Kaelas; born 1919 in Estonia; died 2007 in Sweden) was a Swedish archaeologist and museum director. She was the wife of Swedish historian and the former governor of Gothenburg and Bohus County, Per Nyström. She was the founder of the Lili Kaelas stiftelse för arkeologisk forskning (foundation for archaeological research). She was the daughter of sea captain Johannes Lüdig, and his wife Wendla Lüdig, née Dufwa. She studied at the University of Tartu where she became a Master of Philosophy in 1943, and in 1945 she came to Stockholm, Sweden via Finland as a refugee. There she was recruited as an assistant for the curator Axel Bagge in the Swedish History Museum. Bagge was the head of the museum's Stone and Bronze Age department and needed help with the translation of Finnish and Baltic languages. She then helped him with the translations, and afterward together created and published scientific studies on the southern Swedish age of stone and ceramics. Encouraged by Bagge, in 1953, she then studied archeology herself and graduated with a licentiate degree in Nordic and comparative archaeology from Stockholm University. In 1983, during her last year of service, she also was the acting director of the Gothenburg Historical Museum. She participated in several Swedish and foreign conferences in archeology, even after her retirement, and in 1995 she arranged an extensive cultural-historical exhibition called Estland - landet mellan öst och väst at Gothenburg City Library.