In the valley of the river Viskan, about 15 km north of Varberg, there was a Cistercian monastery founded in 1194 by monks from Sorö Abbey on Zealand. The monastery, which was made possible by large land donations from the Danish king Valdemar and the spiritually and secularly powerful bishop Absalon, developed into a real powerhouse and its brick buildings are considered to be the most powerful in Halland. At the height of its development, Ås Monastery encompassed about 250 farms in northern Halland. Today, no remains of the monastery are visible above ground. After the Reformation, the church and other buildings were demolished and the bricks were reused to repair the Varberg fortress after the Nordic Seven Years' War. Uniquely, no archaeological excavations at all have been carried out on Halland's first, largest and richest monastery before our project started. This means that the statements about the exact location of the monastery that can be read on the official information board in the area are not correct. In the summer of 2010 we located the entire monastery building with ground penetrating radar and in 2011 the archaeological excavation began. In 2012, this continued in order to gain knowledge of the eastern wing and the walls of the church, while an extensive archival study of the monastery's properties was begun. Before the major international conference on Ås Monastery in 2013, a major excavation is planned to investigate the western wing of the monastery.