The subject of this paper is “Archaeological investigations of 17th century whaling on Svalbard”. A fitting subtitle would be “present state of affairs and the future”, since I do not only want to talk about the research that has already been done in connection with the epoch of the whaling period; I should also like to discuss which strategy ought to be followed in this work in the future.If one wants to comment on the state of affairs of the archaeological investigation of the whaling activities on Svalbard in the 17th century, one is not only faced with the archaeological investigations themselves; one also has to consider such a fundamental problem as surveying in the field.In the following I shall at first try to present the results of the surveying and then take a look at the excavations.