Northern Webpdf

NORTHERN ARCHAEOLOGY
AND COSMOLOGY
In its analysis of the archaeologies and histories of the northern fringe of Europe, this
book provides a focus on animistic–shamanistic cosmologies and the associated human–
environment relations from the Neolithic to modern times. The North has fascinated
Europeans throughout history, as an enchanted world of natural and supernatural
marvels: a land of light and dark, of northern lights and the midnight sun, of witches
and magic and of riches ranging from amber to oil. Northern lands conflate fantasies
and realities.
Rich archaeological, historical, ethnographic and folkloric materials combine in this
book with cutting-edge theoretical perspectives drawn from relational ontologies and
epistemologies, producing a fresh approach to the prehistory and history of a region
that is pivotal to understanding Europe- wide processes, such as Neolithization and
modernization. This book examines the mythical and actual northern worlds, with
northern relational modes of perceiving and engaging with the world on the one hand,
and the ‘place’ of the North in European culture on the other.
This book is an indispensable read for scholars of archaeology, anthropology, cultural
studies and folklore in northern Europe, as well as researchers interested in how the
North is intertwined with developments in the broader European and Eurasian world.
It provides a deep-time understanding of globally topical issues and conflicting interests,
as expressed by debates and controversies around Arctic resources, nature preservation
and indigenous rights.
Vesa-Pekka Herva is a professor of archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland.

He has studied various aspects of material culture, human– environment relations,
cosmology and heritage in north-eastern Europe from the Neolithic to modern times.
Antti Lahelma is a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Helsinki,

Finland. His core expertise lies in the study of prehistoric identity, cultural production
and worldview, particularly in the northern circumpolar area.
NORTHERN
ARCHAEOLOGY AND
COSMOLOGY
A Relational View
Vesa-Pekka Herva and Antti Lahelma

First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Vesa-Pekka Herva and Antti Lahelma
The right of Vesa-Pekka Herva and Antti Lahelma to be identified as authors
of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made
available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Herva,Vesa-Pekka, author. | Lahelma, Antti, author.
Title: Northern Archaeology and Cosmology: a Relational View /
Vesa-Pekka Herva, and Antti Lahelma.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018061140 | ISBN 9781138358980 (hardback: alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781138359017 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429783494 (mobipocket unencrypted) |
ISBN 9780429783500 (epub3) | ISBN 9780429433948 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Excavations (Archaeology)—Europe, Northern. |
Excavations (Archaeology)—Arctic regions. | Europe, Northern—Antiquities. |
Arctic regions—Antiquities. | Europe, Northern—Mythology. |
Arctic regions—Mythology. | Folklore—Europe, Northern. | Folklore—Arctic regions.
Classification: LCC DL321.H47 2019 | DDC 936.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061140
ISBN: 978-1-138-35898-0  (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-35901-7  (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-43394-8  (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Newgen Publishing UK
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction: Northern Exposure 1
The North and the world 3
Relationality, spirituality and the richness of reality 5
Spirituality and magic in the northern world 7
Knowing the world 9
Relationality and the northern world 10
Time, temporality and the longue durée 13
Defining the North 15
A brief outline of the Fennoscandian past 17
The structure of the book 20
PART I
Land 23
2 Stone-worlds 25
A race to the Arctic 25
The world inside the rock 26
Crystal cavities and other marvels of the Underworld 30
Cavities and recent folklore in the North 32
Early modern northern mining as dreamwork 35
Disciplining and ordering of the North 37
Mining and magic 38
Dreams of Lapland’s gold 40
The enduring allure of minerals and the Underworld 42
vi Contents
3 Houses, land and soil 46

Dwellings, people and the cosmos in the North 46
The introduction of the house 48
Pottery, semi-subterranean houses and cultural transformation 50
Early pottery, cultivation and place making 51
Houses and the changing relationship with the underworld 53
Clay work as a means of restructuring human–environment relations 54
Living in an inspirited world 57
The inspirited house 58
4 Forests and hunting 63

The forest in northern landscapes and mindscapes 63
Engaging with trees 66
Humans and animals in the North 70
Seducing the prey 73
Elk-headed staffs –symbols of Stone Age clans? 75
Sceptres of the shaman? 77
The Bear –the ‘Golden King of the Forest’ 80
PART II
Sea 85
5 Coastal landscapes and the sea 87

Living with the sea 87
The two Mediterraneans 89
Engaging with changing coastal environments 92
The temporality of Baltic coastal landscapes 95
Cairns in northern coastal landscapes 99
Otherworldly islands 102
Coastal mazes in the North 104
6 Boats and waterways 108

The mystery object from a Lapland bog 108
Water and the Otherworld in a northern context 110
Travelling as a spirit fish 111
Blue elks and flying boats 114
Solar boats in razors and rock art 118
Boats for the dead 119
7 River mouths and central places 123

The real and mythical rivers 123
River mouths as liminal spaces and central places 127
Contents vii
Mythical kingdoms in later prehistory 130

The ‘trader kingdom’ of the birkarls 133
Marketplaces 135
PART III
Sky 139
8 Birds and cosmology 141

Migratory birds and changing seasons 141
Birds as persons 144
Birds as guides and soul-birds 145
Cranes and dwarfs 148
Devil’s swans 151
Solar swans? 152
9 The sun, light and fire 154

People of the Sun 154
Amber and Apollo 156
Worshipping the northern sun 159
The marriage of fire and earth 162
Fire and the hearth in northern cultures 166
Fire and transformation 168
Strange lights in the northern sky 169
10 Epilogue 171
A world full of life 171
The North and the South 173
Bibliography 176
Index 198
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Like most books, this one has a history. The two of us originally arrived at the
themes discussed in this book independently, and from different angles, when
working on our doctoral dissertations. However, we always seemed to share much
common ground and have later collaborated in various contexts. Most importantly
for the present book, we were both core team members of a project entitled The Use
of Materials and the Neolithization of North-Eastern Europe (c 6000–1000 BC), which
was funded by the Academy of Finland for 2013–2017 (AoF decision 269066) and
directed by Janne Ikäheimo at the University of Oulu, Finland. It was Janne, who
prompted us to write this book as our contribution to the project. The bulk of
this book was written in the spring term 2017 when we were on research leave
enabled by the said Academy of Finland funding. This gave us a welcome break
from teaching and administrative duties, as well as a chance to engage in discussions
and exchange of ideas with close colleagues –particularly Janne Ikäheimo, Teemu
Mökkönen and Kerkko Nordqvist.
The idea for this book had started to incubate already a little earlier when Elina
Anttila, the director of the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki, asked us to
write a manuscript for the upcoming permanent prehistory exhibition in late 2015.
We were captivated by this opportunity, as the exhibition has traditionally been of
a central importance in teaching Finnish archaeology students about prehistoric
artefacts, as well as being one of the main channels in introducing laypeople to
Finnish prehistory. The exhibition had, however, only been renewed once in its
century-long history of existence and had not changed much since the museum
opened in 1916. The old exhibition had been arranged in a strictly chronological
fashion, while we chose a thematic approach, with artefacts associated with themes
such as cosmology, mobility and materiality.
Excited, we went on to produce a manuscript that was probably much longer
and more exhaustive than what the museum expected. It nonetheless guided the
newgenprepdf
Acknowledgements ix
building of the new exhibition, which was opened in the spring of 2017, and a
somewhat compacted version of the manuscript was published as a book (Herva
and Lahelma 2017). In addition to Elina Anttila, we would particularly like to thank
Anna Wessman,Wesa Perttola, Marja Ahola and Timo Salminen for their comments
on the exhibition manuscript which –although very different from the present
book –provided a kernel of inspiration to it. Both works are structured around
similar general ideas and ultimately revolve around the dynamic relationship
between materiality, cosmology and the environment in the context of the circum-
polar European North.
The present book draws from and synthesizes the research that we have done
over the 2000s independently, together and in collaboration with numerous other
colleagues in Finland and abroad. This research has encompassed a wide range of
specific topics from rock art to the heritage of the Second World War and from the
dynamics of Neolithization to Renaissance–Baroque culture and understanding
of the world. This book, like our previous research, covers a time span of over
7,000 years with a geographical focus on north-eastern Europe, although we have
always tried to locate this rather poorly known region in a broader European,
Eurasian and/or circumpolar context. Likewise, most of our previous research has
generally explored questions of relational thinking and northern environmental
perception and cosmologies, which are at the heart of this book.
We would like to extend special thanks to our home institutions –the University
of Oulu and University of Helsinki –for their flexibility and generosity during
this book project, which has enabled us to take some time off, travel back and
forth between the two cities and occasionally retreat to the tranquillity of northern
nature to work on the book.
1
INTRODUCTION
Northern Exposure
Northern Exposure, the award-winning American TV series created by Joshua Brand

and John Falsey, ran for six seasons in 1990–1995 and introduced the viewers to a
neurotic New York medical doctor, Joel Fleischman (Rob Morrow). Dr Fleischman
unwillingly ended up working in the small town of Cicely in Alaska, inhabited
and occasioned by a wide variety of colourful characters. There was the Amelia-
Earhart-type bush pilot Maggie O’Connell (Janine Turner), the ex-astronaut and
millionaire Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin), the calm and quiet Native Alaskan
Marilyn Whirlwind (Elaine Miles), who works as Dr Fleischman’s receptionist, and
the young half-Native Ed Chigliak (Darren E. Burrows), who aspires to become a
film director and later discovers his calling as a shaman, among many other intri-
guing characters (Figure 1.1; see Epes 2008 for an analysis of the characters and
their identities).
Over the course of the 110 episodes produced, the viewers were exposed to
a wide array of mundane and extraordinary aspects of the North, grounded on
real or perceived features of northern life and worldview. The series blended real-
ities, imaginaries and fantasies to produce a cinematic North that in many ways
resonates with both northerners’ and non-northerners’ (however one chooses to
define them) views and experiences of the world. In addition to the stories and
how they were scripted, the design and production also promoted a sense of an
enchanted reality. As Diffrient (2006: 81) puts it, ‘the experience of watching this
cult dramedy, noted for its eccentric characters, surreal storylines, psychological
nuance, philosophical musings, picturesque backdrops and high production values
can be likened to a kind of “cinematic sublimity” ’.
Upon his arrival to Cicely, the central character, Dr Fleischman, is a furiously
sceptical rationalist and a New Yorker to the core, who finds himself in a funda-
mentally incomprehensible northern natural, social and spiritual world. The close
community of the small ‘frontier’ town is deeply alien to him, and he is constantly at
2 Introduction: Northern Exposure
FIGURE 1.1 Key characters of the TV series Northern Exposure, which ran on CBS
from 1990–1995. From left to right: Marilyn Whirlwind (Elaine Miles), Holling
Vincoeur (John Cullum), Shelly Tambo (Cynthia Geary), Ed Chigliak (Dan
E. Burrows), Maggie O’Connell (Janine Turner), Chris Stevens (John Corbett), Joel
Fleischman (Rob Morrow) and Maurice Minnifield (Barry Corbin). Photo: Alamy
Stock Photos.
odds with the Alaskan environment and local ways of relating with it, as well as nor-
thern ways of life and thinking in general. Alaska constantly presents Dr Fleischman
with marvels and oddities which conflict with his ideas and assumptions about the
world and its workings. Drama–comedy in style, Northern Exposure portrays a reality
Introduction: Northern Exposure 3
that is prosaic and extraordinary at the same time, blending mundane affairs of day-
to-day life with wondrous and surreal dimensions of the northern world, where
learning to fix a toilet goes hand in hand with solar storms that mix up peoples’
dreams.
Fiction though it is, Northern Exposure illustrates many themes that cut across
this book, which employs insights drawn from archaeology, history, ethnography
and folklore to explore northern cosmologies and ways of being in the world. The
series engages with various aspects of northern peoples, cultures and lived worlds,
as they appear from within the northern world, on the one hand, and as they have
been seen by outsiders on the other. Like Northern Exposure, this book explores
both of these two views on the North and ‘North-ness’ and how they have been
intertwined at different times. Northern Exposure draws particular motifs, such as a
shape-shifting bear/man, directly from northern natural and cultural worlds but
echoes also more intangible or transcendental northern matters, such as the mys-
terious or ‘magical’ connectedness between different things in the world. These are
also characteristic features of relational cosmologies which are at the heart of our
exploration of northern worlds.
The North and the world

This book analyses shamanistic–animistic cosmologies and the associated human-
environment relations in northernmost Europe from the Neolithic to modern times.
It frames northern cosmologies and ways of life in terms of ‘relational thinking’,
which has recently attracted considerable interest in archaeology and anthropology.
Geographically anchored on north-eastern Europe, and specifically on northern
Fennoscandia (Figure 1.2), the book addresses a host of themes related to northern
relational modes of perceiving and engaging with the world in a broader circum-
polar context, on the one hand, and the ‘place’ of the North in European culture on
the other. Although the imagined and real North –its lands, skies and people –has
fascinated European minds since classical antiquity, it has also remained unknown
and overlooked in European archaeological narratives and also more generally. At
the same time, the North has become a globally topical issue due to climate change
and the implications that it has to, for instance, resource extraction, nature preser-
vation and indigenous rights. The current interest in the North and its material
and symbolic resources, however, is ultimately rooted in much longer-term imagin-
ations of and engagements with the North. The study of the northern world can
make a significant contribution to the understanding of continent-wide prehistoric
and historical processes, such as Neolithization and modernization, and to current
theoretical discussions in archaeology.
Fennoscandia is a name used of the geographic region that consists of the Finnic-
speaking areas of Finland and Karelia, the Kola Peninsula and the Scandinavian
Peninsula, consisting of Norway and Sweden (Figure 1.2). The term derives from
geology, where it refers to the Fennoscandian Shield, consisting primarily of granite
and gneiss, but is increasingly used also in a wider sense. It refers to a region that,
FIGURE 1.2 Fennoscandia encompasses the modern states of Norway, Denmark,

Sweden, Finland and parts of north-western Russia and Sápmi, the core area of
the indigenous Sámi people in northern Fennoscandia. The black line marks the
northern boundary of urban settlement in Fennoscandia in the Middle Ages. It also
roughly denotes the cultural border zone between south-western and north-eastern
Fennoscandia, which can be traced far back into prehistory. Map: Oula Seitsonen.
in addition to shared geology and geography, is climatically, ecologically and to

a certain extent also culturally distinct from the more ‘continental’ Denmark or
other countries on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, where a limestone bed-
rock dominates. It comprises an excellent arena for exploring the nature and sig-
nificance of relational ontologies and epistemologies in a long-term perspective,
because traditional ways of life based on hunting and fishing (typically accom-
panied by small-scale farming) persisted especially in the more remote parts of the
region almost until present day. This makes it possible to employ ‘ethnographically
informed approaches’ to trace cultural and cosmological continuities and changes
over centuries and millennia; in other words, some information on beliefs and
practices recorded in the ethnographic present can –with some reservations –be
projected into ‘deep prehistory’ (see e.g. Lahelma 2007).
Northern cultures have provided anthropological examples for discussions of

relational ontologies and epistemologies, which nonetheless tend to lack the deep-
time perspective that the combining of archaeology, history, ethnography and folk-
lore can provide, and such a dialogue between different materials is at the heart of
the approach taken in this book. By the same token, we interrogate the mythical
and actual northern worlds that are intertwined in many curious and sometimes
surprising ways. The northern fringe of Europe is often viewed as an enchanted
land of marvels and magic, albeit conceived differently in European imagination
from local northern perspectives. Both perspectives, however, can contribute to an
understanding of northern landscapes and mindscapes.
Past and present northern worlds are generally poorly known and often
marginalized or exoticized. For example, broad surveys and large- scale master
narratives of European prehistory (e.g. Scarre 2005) and history commonly ignore
the northernmost reaches of the continent. And yet while the North has always
been unknown –and in many ways still is –it has fascinated European minds recur-
rently since classical times. Indeed, Arctic regions have recently become a hot topic
again due to climate change and the new opportunities it is claimed to promise
for global transportation and extractive industries, thus rendering the Arctic as
an arena for a range of geopolitical, economic, environmental and sociocultural
interests. The future of the Arctic is an issue of global interest, as demonstrated for
example by China’s Arctic strategy and the active involvement of major powers
like the United States, Canada and Russia in the Arctic Council –an intergovern-
mental forum founded in 1996, with eight member states and six organizations
representing Arctic indigenous peoples.
This upsurge of interest is, however, but the most recent phase in a much longer
continuum where the North has been seen as a land of riches and utopias but
also of darkness and dystopias. Indeed, ambiguity, contrasts and oppositions have
characterized ‘outsider’ perceptions of the North since the dawn of European his-
tory (e.g. Davidson 2005; Naum 2016). On one hand, the North has appeared
exotic and alluring, but on the other hand, it has often been overlooked and
ignored. Although geographically on the margins, northernmost Europe has none-
theless always been part of, and connected in diverse ways with, European and
Eurasian worlds. Northern Fennoscandia has for centuries and millennia been a
borderland where the North, East, South and West meet, which makes it as a highly
interesting region in its own right and at the same time affords a fresh perspective,
a view from the margins, on wider developments that extend well beyond the nor-
thern lands themselves.
Relationality, spirituality and the richness of reality

Although ‘only’ a TV series, Northern Exposure resonates closely with the ‘real’
relationally constituted and known northern worlds. Relationality as a theoret-
ical stance and framework has attracted an increasing interest in archaeology over
the 2000s, inspired by research and thinking in anthropology and other fields.
Relational thinking comes in many specific forms and under many banners, such as
‘perspectivism’ (e.g.Viveiros de Castro 1998), ‘Actor Network Theory’ (e.g. Latour
2005) and ‘symmetrical archaeology’ (e.g. Olsen 2010), and engages with ideas such
as ‘material agency’ (e.g. Knappett and Malafouris 2008) and ‘non-human persons’
(e.g. Harvey 2005). The different frameworks of relational thinking have different
emphases and to some degree different terminologies but also similar foundational
ideas and ambitions. Relational approaches seek to collapse the subject/object and
related dualisms, recognizing that non-humans, such as artefacts and animals, are
active players in the world and not merely passive objects. Besides having agency
(an ability to make things happen in the world), non-humans can be more or less
person-like beings. In the relational view, what things ‘are’ and what they do is situ-
ational; so (say) a tree can be a sentient person-like being in one context of inter-
action and merely an ‘object’ in another.
Relational thinking seeks to defuse the anthropocentrism and essentialism that
characterize modern Western thinking. This is also one reason why relational
thinking and modes of being in the world –reciprocity and interconnectedness –
can be difficult to grasp. Relational thinking rejects or turns upside down many
foundational assumptions of modern Western thinking and understanding of the
world. Because relational thinking is embedded in different ideas about the world
from how rationalist thinking conceives it, various aspects of relational thinking
may appear magical and irrational. The extraordinary dimensions of relational
worlds, however, are better understood in terms of different systems of knowledge
and forms of engaging with the world. Relational knowing builds on situational
and embodied knowledge instead of abstract propositional ‘laws’ that are dear to
Western scientifically oriented understanding of the world.
Dr Fleischman comes across this difference and otherness in various forms
in Alaska. The Cicilian world is populated by whites and indigenous people,
by ‘rednecks and intellectuals, escapists and entrepreneurs’ (Hanna 1996: 640).
Fleischman must engage with people, both Native American and local whites,
whose general disposition to the social world, life and indeed reality is pro-
foundly different from his own. Assuming his rationalist disposition to be superior,
Fleischman scorns local views on the world, which often have a mystical or spiritual
dimension and which he finds inconceivable or unreal.Yet this reveals more about
his mechanistic understanding of the world than the nature of reality that he is
enmeshed with and a part of. When Ed is visited by the 258-year-old Indian spirit
One Who Waits (‘The Big Kiss’ 2.2), Dr Fleischman gets worried over Ed’s mental
health because, in his view, Ed is keeping company to an imaginary person, whereas
Marilyn merely observes that ‘White people can’t see’. Likewise, exasperated with
Dr Fleischman’s stubbornness to accept phenomena that do not fit his narrow
worldview, Maggie cites Hamlet, ‘There is more between heaven and earth than
your philosophy ever dreamed of ’ (‘Dateline Cicely’ 3.11). In Northern Exposure,
people encounter, interact and engage with mystical powers and non-humans with
extraordinary properties, ranging from strange forces that link together particular
human individuals to artefacts that manipulate and change their owners.
Spirituality and magic in the northern world

Spirituality plays an important role in the fictitious world of Northern Exposure
(Mihelich and Gatzke 2007), which echoes the centrality of spirituality within
traditional northern cultures and outsider perceptions of the North. It is not by
coincidence that the White Sea, in the north-western corner of Russia, emerged
as a spiritual centre of Russian Orthodox Christianity in the sixteenth century, as
most prominently exemplified by the Solovetsky monastery (Figure 1.3), now a
UNESCO World Heritage site.
The North has been seen as a place of spirituality, self-realization, retreat and
isolation for a long time. As the Italian war correspondent Curzio Malaparte, who
was stationed in Finnish Lapland during the Second World War, wrote: ‘War is far
from us. We are outside it, in a remote country, in a timeless space, outside of man-
kind’ (quoted in Lähteenmäki 2006:84). ‘Spirituality’ is a tricky word and concept
because it tends to be associated with out-of-this-worldliness and a religious
or belief-related mode of thinking. In a relational view, however, spirituality is
primarily about connectedness: we take it to refer to a sense and awareness of
reality being richer than a purely natural-scientific view would have it. This
entails a sense of deep connectedness and entanglement of all things in the
world. Magic and magical thinking, in turn, can usefully be conceptualized as
reflecting a sense of an interconnected reality. While modern Western thinking
builds on analytical deconstruction (trying to understand the world by reducing
it to its constituent elements and their properties), magical thinking proposes
FIGURE 1.3 A view on the Solevetsky monastery in the White Sea. The monastery
was founded in the fifteenth century and soon became the northern centre of
Christianity in Russia, a faraway place in the North suitable for spiritual pursuits.
Photo: Vesa-Pekka  Herva.
that everything in the world is interconnected –that there is unity and reci-
procity between people and the world (see Greenwood 2009).
Magic can be understood as a means of becoming aware of this deep inter-
relatedness by manipulating perception and consciousness (Glucklich 1997: 12;
Greenwood 2009), as exemplified by shamanic practices. Magic enables ‘seeing’
reality and one’s place within it from a new angle, which can bring unconscious
issues and anxieties to the surface and help to recognize patterns of connections and
relationship with which one is enmeshed (Greenwood 2009: 111–113). Magical
thinking is not limited to premodern or non-Western cultures, but flourishes
also in contemporary Western society –and thus affects the ways people per-
ceive the world and relate to it –although it does not necessarily take conscious
or clearly defined forms (e.g. Aupers 2009; Greenwood 2009: 45–56; Fernandez
and Lastovicka 2011: 280). For example, the idea of the magical transference of
properties appears to be commonplace even today (Greenwood 2009: 45–46 with
references), and there is also a ‘spiritual’ dimension to the complex interaction
between programmers, computers and software, which can produce experiences of
enchantment (Aupers 2009).
Connectedness is closely associated with openness, another key aspect of
relationality. Modern Western thinking assumes that the ‘real’ world is composed
of bounded material entities with clearly defined boundaries and fixed prop-
erties. In this view, people are categorically different from, say, rocks, whereas
the relational view holds that such categorizations are illusionary products of
modernity –and that all things in the world have porous boundaries and are
‘open’ to the world without fixed boundaries or inner ‘essence’. Therefore, there
is no clear division between subjects and objects or insides and outsides. Likewise,
cognition and thinking are not simply something that happens in the brain but
also out there in the world, within the brain-in-body-in-an-environment system
(e.g. Ingold 2000, 2011; Clark 2010), which also means that artefacts and the
material world in general shape people’s identity, thinking and behaviour in
various ways.
In Northern Exposure, Ed finds a ring in a fish, engraved with the initials FF,
hypothesizing that it once belonged to the Italian film director Federico Fellini
(‘On Your Own’ 4.4). Wearing the ring, Ed gradually starts to see the world through
‘Fellinian eyes’ and ultimately discovers to his horror that he himself appears to be
changing, turning into somebody else. Although artefacts may not alter people
quite as clearly in the real world, they do affect people even if people are usually not
aware of this. In the relational view, artefacts are effectively parts or extensions of
people and their physiological–cognitive machinery. An intuitive sense of this con-
nectedness between people and artefacts is perhaps reflected in magical swords and
rings of power featuring in contemporary popular culture, with Tolkien’s The Lord
of the Rings as the best-known example. Artefacts with extraordinary powers are a
recurrent theme in northern cultures from prehistoric to present times, as reflected
in the archaeological record and historical accounts, as well as mythological and
folklore sources.
Knowing the world
When Dr Fleischman is (involuntarily) in the process of becoming an adopted
member of a local Tlingit tribe, he must go on a vision quest, accompanied by
the shaman trainee Ed. When Ed calls it a night after hours spent in the forest, Dr
Fleischman complains that he has not had his vision yet. ‘Well, maybe you did’, Ed
observes, ‘and you just didn’t know it’ (‘Our Tribe’ 3.12).Visions may seem to have
little to do with proper knowledge, and yet they can be –and have been –under-
stood to afford insights into some state of things in the world, thus constituting a
form of knowledge in certain cultural contexts. Rationalism has come to dom-
inate the understanding of what proper knowledge is like, but there are also other
systems of knowing and knowledge. It is against this background that visions, too,
can be interpreted as providing a particular (‘magical’) perspective on the world,
with the focus on ‘seeing’ and understanding the deep connectedness of things
in the world, and one’s place and position within this network of relationships
(Greenwood 2009).
Different systems of knowledge and knowing also resonate with a branch of rela-
tional theorizing called ‘perspectivism’ (Viveiros de Castro 1998) which holds that
different beings know the world from their own embodied perspective. A walrus
perceives, experiences and knows the world very differently from an elk or a human
being because they all have different sensory apparatuses, different brains, different
modes of moving and so forth –they inhabit the world in profoundly different
ways. In Northern Exposure, Ed’s Uncle Anku advises Dr Fleischman, who is at pains
over how to fix his toilet, that ‘in order to catch a fish, one must think like a fish’
(‘Brains, Know-How and Native Intelligence’ 1.2). This is an accurate crystalliza-
tion of what perspectivism means in the context of northern hunter cultures, where
hunters during the hunt do their best to become the animals they seek to catch
in order to seduce and kill them (Willerslev 2007). In a less spiritual setting, Dr
Fleischman stumbles on a perfectly preserved carcass of a mammoth that an elderly
Cicely trapper (and formerly a Wall Street stockbroker) subsequently butchers for
the meat, leading Dr Fleischman to exclaim a broadly perspectivist observation that
‘Life is a mystery. One man’s life-altering experience is another man’s tenderloin’
(‘Lovers and Madmen’ 5.24).
‘Becoming an animal’ obviously comprises a rather different mode of knowing
and engaging with the environment from the analytical, abstracted and distanced
approach enshrined by rationalist science. As Bird-David (1999) illustrates it, to
know a tree in terms of modern Western epistemology is to cut it to pieces and put
them under the microscope, whereas relational knowing is grounded on engaging
with a tree, with attentiveness to what a particular form of engagement in particular
circumstances does to the tree and oneself. Such forms of knowing are at odds with
Dr Fleischman’s rationalist stance and therefore appear as esoteric nonsense to him.
The Enlightenment never eradicated ‘non-modern’ forms of thinking, as illustrated,
for example, by a range of esoteric traditions that tend to have relational elements to
them irrespective of their specific ideas and vocabulary (see e.g. Goodrick-Clarke
2008). Indeed, relational knowing has not disappeared from the modern Western
world either, as Ingold (1999) observes, although it has lost its authority. The
situation was different still in the Renaissance and Baroque periods when reality
was conceived in essentially relational terms and relational knowing was fully legit-
imate (e.g. Herva and Nordin 2013, 2015). Modernity has constructed a particular
hegemonic understanding of the world and its workings, but it describes only one
aspect of reality from a specific vantage point and does not mirror what reality is
‘really’ like. Even scientific knowledge is culturally constructed and situational (e.g.
Ingold and Kurttila 2000).
Relationality and the northern world

Northern Exposure evokes a sense of wonder with elements like a golf course in the
middle of nowhere (‘Realpolitik’ 6.10) or the film enthusiast and aspiring film-
maker Ed turning out to be a pen pal with the movie directors Steven Spielberg,
Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen (‘Animals R Us’ 3.4). The world of Northern
Exposure is a world where unexpected things can happen, where things are not
necessarily what they first appear to be and where they are sometimes (inter-)
connected in unexpected ways. This is an important element of how the world is
perceived within northern cultures –with their animistic–shamanistic relationship
with the world –and an important characteristic of relationally constituted worlds
in general.
A key element of both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ views of the North is that it is a
magical place. While outsider ideas of the enchanted North reflect the exoticization,
romanticization and colonialist ‘Othering’ of northern lands and peoples, there are
also rich and persistent northern traditions of nature spirits, ghosts and non-human
persons, of enchanted and haunted places and of the magical and extraordinary in
general (e.g. Sarmela 1994; Harjumaa 2008; Myllyniemi 2013 for a range of Finnish
examples). In a rationalist framework, such notions would be regarded as mere
beliefs and superstitions (effectively something that has no bearing to what the
world is ‘really’ like) whereas we argue that they are better understood as reflecting
relational knowing and an ultimately relational constitution of reality. Although
the relevance of this perspective is not limited to the northern world or northern
peoples, the significance of non-humans to the unfolding of human life –or the
mutual and dialogic relationship between humans and non-humans –is particularly
acutely felt in the North, where the coexistence of and connectedness of diverse
‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ constituents of the world is (or was) a normal state of affairs.
Cultures and environments co-generate each other, and Northern Exposure fre-
quently taps on the close and deep connections between people and the extra-
ordinary northern environments. The seasonal Coho wind (‘Ill Wind’ 4.16) and
the ‘breaking of the ice’ in the spring inflicts strange behaviour in the towns-
people (‘Spring Break’ 2.5). The water in a millions-year old sealed deposit, which
Maurice Minnifield starts bottling, turns out have the curious property of reversing
the gender roles of its consumers (‘Horns’ 6.13). Aurora Borealis activity, in turn,
mixes up the peoples’ dreams (‘Mr. Sandman’ 5.12). Outlandish as these particular
fictional impacts of the environment on people are, they nonetheless illustrate the
entanglements of and correspondences between people and their environments,
or how human beings and other organisms are open to the world. ‘Everything
leaks’, as the philosopher Andy Clark’s (2004) playful ‘Clark’s Law’ puts it. The
world leaks into people, and people leak into the world, destabilizing and dissolving
the imagined boundary between self-contained subjects and objects. It is readily
acceptable that the environment poses conditions to cultural forms, but relational
thinking suggests a profound unity and multidimensional correspondence between
people and the environment. Alfred Gell’s (1995) study of environmental percep-
tion in Papua New Guinea is a case to the point in showing how living in a thickly
wooded rainforest environment affects the very understanding of the world.
As a part of Dr Fleischman’s initiation process into a Tlingit tribe, he is expected
to give away his personal possessions, which he feels results in the melting of his
very personality and makes him aware of his porous identity and the boundaries
of himself. Rites of passage are designed to have such an impact on people, as they
effectively mark, or facilitate, transitions from one identity or mode of being to
another. In a relational view, nothing in the world is stable and fixed, and trying
to ‘stay the same’ requires effort as it means an attempt to halt the normal state of
constant becoming (Alberti 2012). Or as Dr Fleischman exclaims: ‘I […] have zero
desire to go native. I have a hard enough time maintaining my identity as it is’ (‘Our
Tribe’ 3.12; quoted in Wilcox 1993: 6).
In the unstable relational world everything is constantly moving, changing
and coming into being, which is a principle central to northern animistic–
shamanistic cosmologies. This has important implications to knowledge, as
knowing such a dynamic world is essentially situational. It requires continuous
and active attentiveness to one’s surroundings, as well as negotiating one’s place
in the world, which frequently calls for improvisation and adapting to particular
situations of interaction. The relationally constituted properties of things are not
‘in’ things as such but ‘between’ them, and knowledge about the relational world
is constituted in a dialogue between people and things. Relational knowing –
or knowing the relational world –is about knowing the links and connections
between things. This is expressed in the relational Renaissance-Baroque view
of knowledge, where
To know the peacock […] one must know not only what the peacock looks
like, but what its name means, in every language; what kind of proverbial asso-
ciations it has; what it symbolizes to both pagans and Christians; what other
animals it has sympathies or affinities with; and any other possible connection
it might have with stars, plants, minerals, numbers, coins or whatever.
[Westerhoff 2001: 641]
In a northern Fennoscandian context, the same principle is demonstrated, for

example, in the academic treatise of a certain Hermann Daniel Bonge (1706–1774)
from the town of Oulu (Sw. Uleåborg) in Finnish Ostrobothnia, who in 1730
delivered a disputation about salmon fishing at the University of Uppsala in Sweden
(Roling 2017). He described the habitats of the fish and ways of catching it, but
rather symptomatically of the period, then spent much of his attention to the
various etymologies for the word for salmon (Lat. salmo, Sw. lax, Finn. lohi). In his
view, all these words for salmon contained the root sal or ‘salt’, thus referring to a
salty fish, while sal in turn was supposedly derived from the Hebrew word salat,
also denoting something salty. The words for trout (Sw. trutta, Finn. taimen) were
according to him similarly derived from the Hebrew word tarit that refers to a par-
ticular species of fish. In Bonge’s view, the words must have derived from ancient
Hebrew, since Noah’s sons Japhet and Magog were the first humans to make their
way up north after the Deluge and had given names to all of the fish in the Sea.
Etymologies, in general, play a major role in both Baroque and later explorations of
the perceived connection between the North and the Mediterranean world.
Here Hermann Bonge probably drew upon the work of the great Swedish
seventeenth-century polymath Olaus Rudbeck the Elder (1603–1702), who had
a school of followers at the University of Uppsala, and whose name will come up
on numerous accounts in the following pages. Rudbeck held that a healthy climate,
clean water and above all plentiful sources of fish were the main reasons why Japhet
and Magog made their way to the northern latitudes, eventually settling down in
Sweden and Finland. It thus seemed only natural that some remains of their stay
should be preserved in either physical monuments or toponyms and folklore in
both regions. His son Olaus Rudbeck the Younger (1660–1740) –also a professor
at the University of Uppsala –likewise devoted much of his professional life to
determining whether the Sámi and Hebrew languages are related (they are not) and
went on to search for Noah's Ark in the northern Swedish mountains (Chapter 3).
Dreams, visions and the spirit world can provide insights into how things in
the world are related to each other, with direct or indirect contributions to the
unfolding of human life. In Northern Exposure, the Indian spirit guide One Who
Waits tries to help Ed to find his biological parents by conversing with wind, water
and other elements (‘The Big Kiss’ 2.2). Likewise, Marilyn informs Maggie’s mother,
who is visiting Cicely, that she is an eagle in spirit, and, indeed, she lands unharmed
after falling off the cliff (‘Birds of a Feather’ 5.6). The theme of ‘supernatural’ flying
comes up in other contexts as well. The ‘flying man’ in the touring circus party
seems to be capable of actually flying, but, more importantly, Ed starts waking up in
high places at some point (‘Get Real’ 3.9). It is implied that he must have flown in
his sleep and the healer Leonard interprets this as the sign that Ed has been called to
become a shaman, and his journey towards shamanhood –which involves engaging
with non-humans –becomes a recurrent theme later in the series.
Although fictional, these examples again resonate closely with actual relational
ways of knowing and engaging with the environment in the northern world.
Dreams and visions –and altered states of consciousness in general –are integral to
northern animistic–shamanistic modes of being in the world. They are associated
with ‘spiritual’ flying and diving, which in turn provide an alternative perspective
on reality and one’s place in it –that is, they enable ‘seeing’ and knowing it differ-
ently, which can be considered as a key function of magical practices in general (cf.
Greenwood 2009). ‘Magic’, as Glucklich (1997:12) puts it, ‘is based on a unique
type of consciousness: the awareness of the interrelatedness of all things in the
world by means of a simple but refined sense of perception’. Mystical forces are
in operation in relationally constituted and interrelated worlds, and knowing the
networks of correspondences and affinities that bind things in the world together
requires other than rationalist knowledge. Thus, for example, Maggie in Northern
Exposure appears to have a special relationship with death in that all her former
boyfriends have died in a more or less peculiar manner. There is also, in one epi-
sode, a strange correspondence between her and Dr Fleischman where her amorous
approaches always result in him getting hurt and almost killed (‘Old Tree’ 4.25).
Whatever a scientist approach makes –or rather does not make –out of such extra-
ordinary forces and apparently meaningful connections between things, they have
nonetheless been, and still are, part of (northern) lived worlds and therefore relevant
for understanding the dynamics of human relationship with the environment.
Time, temporality and the longue durée

Pregnant overdue, Shelly –a former ‘Miss Northwest Passage’ and the partner of
Holling Vincoeur, the proprietor of the Cicely bar, The Brick –meets a stranger, a
teenager girl by the name Miranda, in the self-service laundry (‘Hello, I Love You’
4.15). Intrigued by the girl, Shelly engages with her in a conversation and comes to
learn figments about her life. Shelly keeps bumping into Miranda in the same place
also in the following days, except that every time the girl is a year older, and Shelly
comes to believe that the girl is actually her daughter in the future. As Miranda
has reached her early adulthood, Shelly realizes that life is treating the girl well and
finally goes into labour to give a birth to a baby girl, who is then given the name
Miranda.
Time is a messy place and a mysterious thing. For a long time, archaeology relied
unproblematically on the idea of linear chronological time –time as a unidirec-
tional arrow that moves forward, with the implication that the past and present
cannot exist at the same time. This, of course, is how time is generally conceived in
popular thinking, although developments in physics have problematized such linear
notions of time since the early twentieth century. However, time and temporality
have become a subject of theoretical interest and critical scrutinizing in archae-
ology especially since the 1990s (e.g. Gosden 1994; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2011).
Geographers have likewise problematized the geometric and linear understanding
of time-space, inspired by the idea of haunting that effectively suggests an over-
lapping of different worlds and times horizons. Similar perspectives have recently
been pursued also in more theoretically oriented branches of heritage studies (e.g.
Harrison 2013).
The Renaissance ‘anachronic’ understanding of time, as discussed by the art
historians Nagel and Wood, provides an example of how time may be understood
in relational terms. Although a linear and historicist understanding of time was

not alien to post-medieval Europe, it coexisted with other ways of configuring the
past–present relationships, which enabled a peculiar (from a modernist perspective)
overlapping and entanglement of histories, periods, cultures, mythologies, peoples
and places in a non-linear and non-historicist manner (see Wood 2008; Nagel and
Wood 2010). Thus, the sixteenth–seventeenth century Swedes, for instance, could
identify themselves with the migration-period (400–600 ad) Goths, while at the
same time asserting a cultural affiliation with the ancient Roman civilization that
preceded the Goths by many centuries (Neville 2009).
This theme of alternative pasts and utopias projected on the North was rehearsed
also in Northern Exposure. There is, for instance, the case of a frozen French soldier
who possesses a diary that indicates that Napoleon was never at Waterloo, pushing
Dr Fleischman on the verge of breaking because nothing that he used to believe
in –or regard as true knowledge about the past –seems certain anymore (‘The
Body in Question’ 3.6). Towards the end of the show, Dr Fleischman learns about
the mythical ‘Jeweled City of the North’, supposedly located on an island. He goes
looking for it with Maggie, and they indeed find it after an adventure that is mod-
elled after Homer’s Odyssey (‘The Quest’ 6.15). This conflation of the classical
Graeco-Roman and northern worlds is a recurrent theme also in the real world
and in the present book.
Artefacts played an important role in bringing together different times and
worlds as they ‘stitched through time, pulling together different points in the tem-
poral fabric until they met. By means of artefacts, the past participated in the pre-
sent’ (Nagel and Wood 2005: 408). The past and present worlds could also be
brought together through material practices, such as Renaissance mythico-historical
plays. These plays mixed seemingly unrelated peoples and places –for instance
ancient Goths and American Indians –or the real, mythical and imaginary pasts
(Godwin 2002: 181–202; Nordin 2013: 198) and can be understood as a means
of bringing the past ‘magically’ back to life or establishing a gateway or channel
between different times. This provides a concrete example of the rather abstract
idea of relational time and place and of how there was a broadly mystical or magical
dimension to the overlapping or ‘percolating’ time horizons in the relational reality
of the Renaissance. Ghosts and haunting experiences can be thought to provide a
modern example of how the past is sometimes leaking into the present. Whatever
the ‘causes’ of such experiences may be, they nonetheless demonstrate one form of
how the coexistence of the past and present can manifest itself.
The power of artefacts to ‘stitch through time’ can be understood in terms of
Gell’s (1998) concept of artefacts ‘abducting’ qualities from the people who own
them. Artefacts thus become extensions of people and their personality and agency
(or ability to make things happen in the world), an idea that others have pursued
also in more metaphysical and ontological terms (e.g. Clark 1998, 2010; Ingold
2000, 2011). Artefacts can outlive human persons and, through the qualities they
have abducted from them, represent a living presence of the past in the present.
They can thus potentially collapse the boundaries between the past and present, just
like ‘[g]‌hosts unsettle the assumed stability and integrity of western temporalities
and spatialities’ (Cameron 2008: 383). Indeed, ghosts comprise a prime example
of the ‘mystical’ dimensions of non-linear time and temporality and illustrate the
manner in which the past can be considered to be actively present in the pre-
sent. By the same token, in early modern Scandinavia the ancient Germanic runic
letters were thought to have a mystical connection to the ancient worlds (Karlsson
2009: 71–72), and early modern antiquarian pursuits in general carried mystic and
esoteric ambitions (Curran 2007; Curran et al. 2009; Stolzenberg 2013; Herva and
Nordin 2015).
Defining the North
General works on the archaeology of Fennoscandia have mostly only been published
in languages such as Finnish (e.g. Haggrén et al. 2015) and Swedish (Edgren 1992),
and the topic thus remains poorly known outside the region. It is illustrative that,
so far, the only English-language textbook on the prehistory of Finland (Kivikoski
1967) was published over fifty years ago at the time of writing this volume. While
the present work is hopefully helpful in highlighting some of the research done in
the region to an English-speaking audience, our approach is not of the systematic
or chronicling kind, even if the individual chapters do follow a rough chronological
outline. Instead, we take up a variety of themes and phenomena in the northern
world, and specifically northern Fennoscandia, at different times. We identify cul-
tural and cosmological elements that appear to have persisted in the North for
very long periods of time –in some cases from the Neolithic to a recent past and
even the present-day world –but our focus is not on specific cultural expressions
as such. Instead, we are primarily interested in the more general-level structure and
dynamics of northern relational modes of being in the world. Long-term continu-
ities on this ‘deeper’ level do not imply an absence of change or cultural stagnation.
We posit that the persistence of a particular cosmological element, for example, is
not only a matter of passing on abstract cultural knowledge from one generation
to another but rather reveals something more fundamental about the unity and
reciprocal dynamics of human–environment relations, which must be understood
in relational terms. The cases we discuss arise from this wider aim.
Various cultural features associated with circumpolar and Arctic cultures bear
witness to deep and ancient roots even today. Modernity never completely wiped
out ‘non-modern’ or ‘non-rational’ ways of thinking and being in the world, but their
significance to the unfolding of the modern world is often ignored, overlooked and
marginalized, resulting in a skewed perspective on modernization. However, mod-
ernist ideas and categories continue to haunt the portrayal of the premodern world.
This book is, in essence, an attempt to understand how the northern animistic and
shamanistic ways of being in the world have been generated and reproduced over
millennia in a reciprocal relationship between people and the world. However, to
assist the reader in following the argument, it is probably useful to provide a brief
overview of the postglacial past of the region, as the characteristics and datings of
various prehistoric and historic periods differ significantly from those of Central or
Southern Europe. But first it needs to be clarified what we mean when we speak
of the North.
As noted, we focus geographically on north-eastern Europe, and more spe-
cifically on Fennoscandia, but alas the geographic terminology related to this
corner of Europe is quite confusing. While Fennoscandia as a geographical area
can be unambiguously defined, its usage tends to be limited to a narrow group of
specialized fields such as geology and meteorology, and to a lesser extent archae-
ology. Scandinavia is a term much more commonly used by laypeople when
speaking of the northern reaches of Europe, and in English it is often used col-
lectively of the five countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland.
In Scandinavian usage, however, Finland is usually left out due to the fact that
Finnish is not a Germanic language but belongs to the completely unrelated
Finno-Ugric language group. However, Finland’s historical and cultural links to
the Scandinavian sphere run deep, while from a purely geographical perspective
neither Iceland nor Denmark are part of Scandinavia, which in geography refers
to the northern European peninsula formed by Norway, Sweden and the north-
western parts of Finland.
To escape this rather messy situation, the term ‘Nordic’ (Sw/Dn/No. nordisk) is
commonly used in the region to cover all five countries, which in the post–World
War II period sought shelter from the Great Powers by deepening mutual political
and cultural cooperation and formed the Nordic Council in 1952. But then, unlike
its Scandinavian counterpart, the English word ‘Nordic’ is not without ambiguity
or historical ballast: it sometimes suggests northern Europe in general but is also
associated with Nazi ideological concepts such as the ‘Nordic race’. Overall, the
geographic terms intended to cover north-eastern Europe all seem to be more
grounded in ideological, political or cultural discourses than any observable facts.
When speaking of ‘the North’ in this book, we will generally refer to
Fennoscandia, with an emphasis on its central and northern parts characterized by
boreal forest and tundra environments. This emphasis on eastern Fennoscandia is
partly due to the fact that this is admittedly the northern region that the two of us
are most familiar with, but at the same time it is, as indicated earlier, probably also
the least known part of Fennoscandia in the English-speaking world because of the
language barrier –and it thus deserves to be ‘exposed’. At times, we may also use
the word ‘North’ to refer to the entire Nordic region, but in such cases the meaning
should be obvious from the context. Only sporadic references will be made to the
archaeology and ethnography of Denmark and Scania (the southernmost province
of Sweden, which until 1658 was a part of Denmark), as that region is in many ways
distinct from areas further north. It is characterized by a limestone bedrock, a tem-
perate climate and deciduous forests, and while the climate and vegetation have of
course changed over time, it is in part due to these natural factors that the region
has undergone a rather different (pre-)historic trajectory compared to that of the
Fennoscandian Shield. However, boundaries such as these are obviously artificial
and porous. Indeed the connectedness of the North with the South (as well as other
directions) is one of the main themes of our discussion, and therefore some degree
of vagueness in defining ‘the North’ cannot be escaped.
A brief outline of the Fennoscandian past

A significant feature of the Fennoscandian past that makes it distinct from Central
and Southern Europe is that it was covered by a thick glacier during the last (or
‘Weichselian’) glaciation. The region was thus uninhabitable during the Upper
Palaeolithic, and the ice sheets moreover effectively removed all signs of older occu-
pation. The first traces of pioneer human occupation in Fennoscandia are thus
‘only’ ca. 11,000 years old, or from the Early Mesolithic period, and related to
small groups of highly mobile hunter–fishermen. Mesolithic sites generally bear just
modest traces of human activity, dominated by lithics and burnt bone, as in the boreal
zone soils are acrid and organic material is generally preserved only in exceptional
environments (such as waterlogged conditions or permafrost). The Mesolithic sites,
moreover, bear few signs of permanent dwellings or burials. Large burial sites such
as the famous Olenyi Ostrov in Karelia (Gurina 1956) and rock art emerge towards
the end of the period, suggesting social changes and changing relations towards
the environment. Pottery is adopted in north-eastern Europe in the latter half of
the sixth millennium bc, with the Early Comb Ware, while the emergence of the
so-called Typical Comb Ware around 4000 bc marks a plethora of changes across
much of Fennoscandia, including a more sedentary lifestyle and increasing signs of
social complexity –that is, a variety of cultural traits associated with the Neolithic
(Chapter 3). Unlike in southern Scandinavia, where the emergence of Neolithic
ways of life is related to Central European developments such as the Funnel Beaker
Culture (ca. 4300–2800 bc), the Neolithic of northern Fennoscandia seems to be
related to impulses from the Far East (Jordan and Zvelebil 2009; Nordqvist 2018).
The divisions between South and North and East and West are indeed a recurrent
theme in Nordic prehistory and history and their later representations. Although
as noted such divisions are artificial and porous, a general division between south-
western Fennoscandia and the rest of Fennoscandia can be identified at least since
the Neolithic and becomes rather clear in the Bronze Age (ca. 1800–500 bc).
South-western parts of Finland manifests connections to the Nordic Bronze Age,
whereas the northern and eastern parts of Fennoscandia retain contacts to the East
and appear ‘poorer’ in cultural expression –but are also less well known and studied.
The Iron Age in Fennoscandia begins around 500 bc with both imported iron
objects and evidence of indigenous iron-making occurring at the same time. The
earliest phase of the Iron Age, the so-called Pre-Roman Iron Age (500 bc–0 ad),
appears to have been characterized by receding settlement and possibly a very low
human population. A slow recovery of at least permanent agricultural settlement
begins in the Roman Period (ad 0–400), even though it should be noted that an
undue concentration on burials (especially ones equipped with grave goods) may
skew the picture of both this and all other periods of the Finnish Iron Age. In the
course of the ‘Migration Period’ (ad 400–600), we begin to see a marked increase
in the influx of goods from both the Germanic and Baltic cultural spheres –in
effect resulting in a ‘rebirth’ of the Fennoscandian world and its realignment with
the European world following the fall of the Roman Empire. Although there
were connections between the Graeco-Roman world and the northern reaches
of Europe already during classical antiquity –just like there had been connections
during the Bronze Age –the North started to loom in a new manner in the broader
European world in the second half of the first millennium ad. This was especially
due to Viking activity (beginning in late eighth century ad) and the incipient state
formation and Christianization of the Nordic world around the turn of the second
millennium. Even if these processes affected the vast region of Fennoscandia very
differently and at different times, it is nonetheless against these large-scale processes
that the signs of increased activity –such as trade –in Late Iron Age northern
Fennoscandia should be understood (Chapter 7).
The historical period begins comparatively late in Fennoscandia. The threshold
between prehistory and history has traditionally been set at ad 1050 in the south-
western part of the region and ad 1300 in eastern and northern Fennoscandia,
although in truth, written sources remain very scarce throughout the entire medi-
eval period and in the North are almost non-existent. Medieval cultural forms in
southern Fennoscandia, with urban centres and close contacts to the continental
world, differed radically from those of northern Fennoscandia. The Scandinavian
kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden formed in the Middle Ages, but
northern Fennoscandia remained only partly and loosely under royal control.
Meanwhile in the East, the Republic of Novgorod (and later Muscovy) likewise
sought to expand its influence northwards, leaving the territory of present-day
Finland a meeting ground and conflict zone between ‘Western’ (or Scandinavian)
and ‘Eastern’ (or Russian) interests until the latter part of the sixteenth century.
Sweden established a prominent presence across present- day Swedish and
Finnish Lapland –or Sápmi, the homeland of the indigenous Sámi people –in
the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even though it was a poor,
underdeveloped and sparsely populated country at the dawn of the Early Modern
Period, the expansive and militaristic Kingdom of Sweden managed to reinvent
itself and emerge as a European great power in the seventeenth century. For a short
time, Sweden dominated the Fennoscandian and Baltic Sea world and embarked
on colonial ventures along with its long-time adversary Denmark. Sweden and
Denmark reached for overseas colonies, such as New Sweden in present- day
Delaware in North America, but northern Fennoscandia, too, was now connected
to the traditional heartlands of the kingdom through essentially colonialist ideolo-
gies and practices (Chapter 2).
The Swedish Empire collapsed in the beginning of the eighteenth century with
the Great Northern War (1700–1721), fought between Sweden and Russia, which
also marked the founding of St Petersburg in 1703 and thus the re-entry of Russia
into the Baltic Sea world. At the same time, the European fascination with the
northernmost reaches of the continent, as well as its indigenous inhabitants, the
Sámi, increased in momentum in the eighteenth century, with travellers driven
by both scientific interests and sheer curiosity exploring the exotic and unknown
North. This Enlightenment Era interest in the North was in every respect a con-
tinuation to the European Arctic explorations of the sixteenth century, which in
turn were partly inspired by the classical literary sources concerning northern
marvels, where the fantastic and the factual were inextricably intertwined.
The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought about industrialization
and the formation of nation states, including Norway’s independence from Sweden
in 1905 and the establishment of an independent Finnish republic in 1917. This
process also saw the gradual settling of definite state borders in the northernmost
parts of Fennoscandia, as well as other boundaries between regional and territorial
units, which deeply impacted upon traditional northern ways of life. For millennia,
the remote North had been an ‘open borderland’ –an arena for mobilities and
encounters between different groups of people with different ethnic and cultural
backgrounds. Unlike modern state borders that limit mobility, such borderlands
are deeply dynamic and generational places, rendering the northern ‘periphery’
a meeting zone for trade, intermarriage, possibilities and innovation. Therefore,
together with other detrimental effects of modernization and colonization in the
north, the cessation of free movement caused severe social problems and contributed
to the increasing marginalization of the Sámi in their ancestral homeland in the
course of the twentieth century.
However, the fundamental changes brought about by modernization also
promoted a nostalgia for and research into premodern times. There was an
understanding that modernization posed a threat to traditional forms of life,
which –although viewed as doomed to disappear –were nonetheless deemed
worth recording before they disappeared forever. Nations and nation states required
narratives of their pasts and origins, while industrialization and urbanization (and
the associated large-scale relocation of people) fostered a sense of rootlessness. All
these interlinked processes promoted an interest in and study of traditions and
ancient times in the form of archaeology, ethnography and folkloristics –all of
which were fields of research in which scholars from the Nordic countries pursued
pioneering and groundbreaking work. Modernization thus contributed to the pres-
ervation of archaeological and historical sites, as well as the early collecting and
documenting of the rich northern mythology and folklore, such as the Icelandic
sagas and the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala (first published in 1835).
The Kalevala and related Nordic folklore plays an important role in the
understanding of northern cultures and pasts in our research. However, it should be
kept in mind that the book known as the Kalevala (which can be loosely translated
as ‘The Land of Heroes’) is a literary creation of Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884), a
Finnish historian who was instrumental in collecting the poems and believed that
they represented fragments of an ancient Finnish epic not unlike the Homeric
Iliad and Odyssey. He was not content to publish the poems as such, but heavily
edited and processed them, forcing a coherent storyline into a body of folk poetry
that in reality is incoherent, contradictory and quite often incomprehensible.
Lönnrot’s Kalevala thus should not be used in drawing analogies or interpretations
in archaeological or historical research –the original poems must be used instead

(an anthology of English translations has been published in Kuusi et al. 1977) –and
even then only with great care (see e.g. Lahelma 2008, 2010 for a discussion).
Unlike the Norse myths, which were written down by medieval Icelandic
scholars ‘only’ a couple of centuries after the conversion of the island, the Kalevala
poems were collected mostly in the nineteenth century, while they were still part of
a constantly changing and evolving oral tradition in an essentially illiterate Karelian
society. They thus do not relate directly to an Iron Age situation (let alone a Stone
Age one), but ‘belong’ in nineteenth-century rural Karelia, even if they carry echoes
of much more distant times. The poems were situational or related to a particular
ritual context –an aspect relevant to their interpretation but often ignored by the
early collectors of folklore –and the mythical themes reflected in them are evi-
dently historically stratified, making their decipherment an incredibly complicated
case of detective work (Siikala 1992, 2013). Even so, they sometimes appear to open
windows to an incredibly distant past, offering a unique opportunity to interpret
archaeological phenomena that would otherwise remain completely mute.
The structure of the book

This book is structured in three parts –around the themes of land, water and
sky –modelled loosely after the traditional three- tiered northern shamanistic
understanding of the world. In this view, land is most readily associated with ‘this
world’, whereas water has associations with the underworld and the sky with the
upper world. Although the relationships between the three worlds (or dimensions
of the world) cannot be reduced to a ‘geometrical’ superposition, but have rather
more complex mutual interrelations, the tripartite model provides a structure that
identifies distinct themes related to basic cosmological notions. Such notions have
been widely acknowledged in the North over the millennia, but at the same time
they allow a certain overlap between the chapters of this book. This also reflects the
nature of northern cosmological notions, which do not follow a strict or coherent
doctrine but are often ambiguous or contradictory.
The first part of the book (‘Land’) traces the entanglements of the spiritual
and material in relation to land, including underground worlds, from prehistory
to the recent past. We focus on three basic components of terrestrial environ-
ments and how northern cultures have related with them, namely rockscapes, soils
and the forest, all of which bring together a number of material, experiential and
cosmological aspects. These are considered in a long-term ‘deep-time’ perspective
to which postglacial processes, such as isostatic land uplift, provides a general back-
ground, as they have shaped northern environments from the end of the Ice Age
to the present. Indeed, we propose that glacial and postglacial processes have linked
together different generations in northernmost Europe and in part shaped the per-
ception and understanding of the northern world through millennia.
The second part (‘Sea’) engages with the Baltic Sea region as a distinctively
maritime world similar to the Mediterranean: an inner sea that has connected
different regions and cultures of northern Europe. Furthermore, bodies of fresh

water –great lakes and rivers –are a prominent feature of northern landscapes and
have further facilitated mobility and cultural contacts over vast areas in Eurasia, not
just throughout prehistory and the historical period. Finally, the North Atlantic and
the Arctic Ocean frame the Fennoscandian world, and bogs and wetlands are one
of the predominant landscape types in northern Europe, besides woodlands and
tundra. Water, and particularly the contact zone between water and land, can be
seen as a cosmological constant in the Nordic worlds, marked archaeologically by
such remains as rock art, burial cairns and stone labyrinths. In this section we trace
the role of water in the northern experienced, symbolic and cosmological world in
a long-term perspective.
The third part (‘Sky’) addresses the significance of the sky and the celestial
world in northernmost European cultures. The sky was more intimately present
in premodern lifeworlds than it is in today’s urban contexts where artificial light
can substitute sunlight and ‘light pollution’ obscures starlight. Various aspects and
elements of the sky, from migratory birds to the phases of the moon, have been sub-
ject to symbolic construction in northern pasts. Two phenomena particular to the
extreme North –the mysterious Aurora Borealis and the midnight sun (and con-
versely, the months-long darkness of winters) –accentuated the significance of the
sky in the northern way of life and affected northern mentalities, perceptions and
representations of the North since classical antiquity. Some elements of northern
skies have undoubtedly been invested with meanings among northerners since pre-
historic times, such as the North Star, around which the northern sky appears to
revolve, and the associated constellation of Ursa Major (the Great Bear). In the
traditional Finnic cosmology, the bear is considered to have heavenly origins, and it
has been conceived as a forefather to and kin of people. Combining archaeological,
historical, ethnographic and folklore sources affords glimpses of human relationship
with northern skies through time.
PART I
Land
2
STONE-WORLDS
A race to the Arctic
Arctic resources, ranging from minerals to fish, have been subject to a thriving interest
in recent years and are intertwined with the debates of environmental and climate
change, as well as indigenous issues and geopolitical interests in the northern Polar
Regions. Global warming has particularly pronounced effects in the Arctic, opening
up new opportunities in the North, such as the extraction of previously inaccessible
mineral deposits or access to new Arctic transportation routes like the Northeast
Passage, while at the same time endangering the fragile Arctic ecosystems and indi-
genous ways of life. But although mineral riches are one of the most important
reasons for the present-day global interest in the North, the contemporary interest
in the ‘New Arctic’, and the economic opportunities that it is imagined to provide, is
but one expression of centuries-and millennia-long fascination of real and imagined
northern riches. This fascination has its roots already in the amber trade of the
Mycenaean and classical periods and in medieval trade in walrus-tusk ivory. A ‘race
for the North’ was taking place already in the Middle Ages when the Scandinavian
kingdoms and the Republic of Novgorod sought to establish their presence in the
northern fringes of Fennoscandia and thus secure their access to its resources, of
which furs and fish were particularly attractive at the time.
However, this interest reached a completely new level in the Age of Discovery,
or the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when explorers like the Dutch
Willem Barentsz (1550–1597) mapped the Arctic and rising powers such as Sweden
and Muscovy began to systematically explore and exploit the resources of their
northern extremes. The early modern period saw the intensification and diversi-
fication of the interests in northern and Arctic regions of Europe, with economic,
cultural and scientific dimensions to them. In addition to the Nordic and Russian
states, the British, Dutch and French were drawn to the North and exploring the
26 Land
opportunities it promised to offer. Mineral resources became of a special focus of

interest in the seventeenth century, and the dreams and realities of mineral riches
have significantly affected northern environments and people ever since.
On a different level, stones, rocks and the mineral world have also played an
important role in the landscapes and mindscapes of northern cultures from prehis-
toric to modern times, and the spiritual and mythological dimensions of the stone-
worlds underneath are crucial to understanding the nature of the early modern and
modern mining ventures (cf. Boivin 2004a). Although rock formations or other
features of rock and stone as landscape elements have presumably been meaningful
already to early Mesolithic communities, and stone was quarried in some magni-
tude for artefacts, a different kind of engagement with the rocks becomes evident in
the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition in the latter sixth millennium bc (Herva et al.
2014). There is a new fascination with colourful or shiny rocks, polished surfaces
and digging deeper into the rock. One important manifestation of this engagement
is what Gjerde (2010) calls the ‘rock art explosion’ in northern Europe.
Although a small number of early and middle Mesolithic rock art exists in nor-
thern Fennoscandia, the situation changes dramatically throughout the region vir-
tually simultaneously between 5500 and 5000 bc. The number of sites suddenly and
greatly increases, ‘mega-sites’ like Alta in Norway, Nämforsen in Sweden and River
Vyg in northwestern Russia emerge and the style and choice of motifs depicted
undergoes a major change. Whereas the rock art of the preceding period was
focused on animals, typically naturalistic in both size and execution, now humans
engaged in various scenes and activities emerge as a central theme, and new types
of figures such as boats are being depicted. All of this probably signifies changes
in the meaning and purpose of rock art, as well as new ways of relating between
human and non-human beings, but there is also evidence of a new kind of atten-
tiveness to the shapes and features of the rock itself. For example at Alta, according
to Helskog (2004), the undulations, crevasses and small pools of water are integrated
into narratives played out in the carvings (Figure 2.1).
At River Vyg, likewise, the shapes of the rock appear to represent hills and
valleys, through which groups of skiing hunters speed in pursuit of prey (Janik et al.
2007). Gjerde (2010) has pursued this view even further, suggesting that the micro-
topographies of rock surfaces were conceived as ‘maps’ which correspond with
the surrounding macro-landscapes. At Nämforsen and Lake Onega, for example,
boats have been carved into black linear lava formations that resemble rivers, and
significantly these ‘rivers’ in the rock may refer to real-world rivers as both sites are
immediately adjacent to a river.
The world inside the rock

Some sites also indicate a fascination with the world beyond the rock surface. At
Vingen, western Norway, many of the carvings have been made inside small cavities
formed by boulders (Mandt and Lødøen 2012), and at Lake Onega images of swans
appear to emerge from cracks in the rock or, alternatively, to disappear into the
Stone-worlds 27
FIGURE 2.1 Undulating bedrock at the rock carvings of Alta, northern Norway.

The carvings (painted red in modern times to increase visibility) are intimately related
to the microtopography of the rock. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
Underworld through ‘openings’ formed by cracks in the bedrock (Lahelma 2010).

The most famous figure of the Onega carvings, a large anthropomorph known
locally as ‘The Devil’ (Rus. Bes), is intentionally positioned around a large crevice
so that it divides the figure in two. At some Finnish rock painting sites (such as
Salminkallio and Siliävuori), apparently significant cracks and openings have been
emphasized with red paint (Lahelma 2012b), and in a few cases, paintings have
been made inside caves and semi-caves. Actual cave paintings occur in Trøndelag,
north-western Norway, suggesting a similar interest with the Underworld (Norsted
2013). Their dating is uncertain (the early Metal Period has been suggested because
of artefacts associated with them), but as Sognnes (1982) notes, stylistically they
resemble the Finnish paintings and thus could be broadly contemporary.
An interplay between rock art and rock surface and a fascination with the
Underworld are of course phenomena known already from Palaeolithic cave art
(Clottes and Lewis-Williams 1998; Lewis-Williams 2000), and shamanistic inter-
pretations of rock art emphasize the rock as an opening to –or a membrane
between –different dimensions of the world. This notion even occurs in Kalevala-
metric poetry, where one particularly significant poem appears to describe the
making of rock art (Lahelma 2010). In it, the sage Väinämöinen ‘drew a picture on
the stone, a line on the rock’, as a result of which ‘the stone split into two’, and he
28 Land
sees snakes –denizens of the lower world –inside the rock. There is, of course, a
staggering temporal gap between Neolithic rock art and historically and ethno-
graphically documented traditional northern cosmologies, but it is interesting that
in Finnish lore falling into a shamanistic trance is referred to as falling into a cleft
of rock (Lahelma 2007). Siberian folklore and rock art express similar ideas of
shamans entering into rock and meeting with mountain spirits, which could also be
conceived as ancestors, sometimes coupled with the notion that in order to gain their
first drum, shamans were to take a journey into a mountain (Rozwadowski 2017).
In northern ethnography, the widespread notion of non-human beings residing
inside the rock was in part vindicated by auditive evidence, in particular echoing.
Ethnographic accounts concerning echoes in association with Sámi sacred sites
suggest that echoes were perceived as evidence of spirits residing inside particular
cliffs and were among the reasons why particular loci came to be viewed as sacred
(Lahelma 2010). Rainio and others (2018) have explored the significance of the
acoustic features in defining ‘special’ places –rock art sites and a Sámi sieidi site –
through 3D-recording sound waves and their reflections in the landscape. They
discovered that the painted cliffs produced particularly clear echoes that appeared to
come directly from the painted images and moreover produced confusing ‘auditive
illusions’ that contributed to an ‘eerie’ auditive environment, suggesting that sounds
were indeed among the reasons why particular cliffs were perceived as ‘special’.
The notion of venturing inside rock, in turn, was not merely a shamanistic
mental concept but had a correlation with material practices, especially in the
form of quarrying. Quarries and quarrying were effectively a form of entering
and engaging with a world under the surface of rock in a material, experiential,
spiritual and metaphysical sense. While quarrying was a means of acquiring raw
material for stone tools, it was also an experiential and spiritual journey inside the
earth, a mode of getting to know what the world was like beneath the surface.
Even small-scale breaking into the ground would potentially have had spiritual or
metaphysical consequences, as it involved coming into contact with the beings and
powers residing underground. It has, for example, been suggested that the empty
and apparently immediately backfilled small pits sometimes documented at prehis-
toric sites in northern Europe could be seen in terms of communicating with the
underground world (Davies and Robb 2004: 147). This may also be the reason
why rock art is sometimes associated with stone quarries (e.g. Mulk and Bayliss-
Smith 2006; Goldhahn 2010). Because disrupting the rock surface was a dangerous
activity, it necessitated ritual engagements with the rock and the inhabitants of
the Underworld. In Fennoscandia, historical and folklore accounts reveal that the
underground world was believed to be inhabited by gnomes and trolls –non-
human beings that were in some ways similar to humans. They lived their lives
inside the rock, unconstrained by it, and were social beings with which people
could and did occasionally communicate and engage (Sarmela 1994: 414).
Quarrying intensified in the late Mesolithic, sometimes reaching massive
proportions, as exemplified by the diabase quarry of Stakallneset (Figure 2.2)
and greenstone quarry at the island of Hesperiholm in western Norway, where
Stone-worlds 29
FIGURE 2.2 A view from the vast Mesolithic diabase quarry of Stakallneset, central
Norway. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
as much as 400 m3 of stone has been extracted at each of them (Nyland 2017).

The use of these quarries continued well into the middle Neolithic, and Nyland
(2017) makes the argument that quarrying became an expressive act and a socio-
political strategy undertaken to demonstrate continuity, uphold traditions and
strengthen group cohesion. For example, greenstone would have been readily
available at sites more easily accessible than Hesperiholm, a little island in the
open sea, but evidently it was essential to import the material from that particular
site. The myths and history associated with the site were in a sense attached
to the artefacts made, and distributing them among group members may have
contributed to a shared identity.
The diabase quarry of Stakallneset has likewise been regarded as a special, pos-
sibly sacred site. With this in mind, it seems significant that excavations of hut-floors
associated with the huge rock carving site of Vingen in western Norway produced
a pecking tool made of diabase (Lødøen 2012). Geological thin-section analyses
30 Land
have confirmed that the raw material for the artefact almost certainly derives from
Stakallneset. At the same time, practically no flakes or axes of diabase were found
at the Vingen excavations, even though both are extremely common at virtually all
other contemporary sites in the region. This has led Lødøen (2012) to suggest that
its use at Vingen was strongly regulated and reserved into ‘sacred’ contexts, in par-
ticular the making of rock carvings.
Crystal cavities and other marvels of the Underworld

In early modern historical sources as well as in modern mining folklore, the world
underground is represented as a place of manifold marvels:
The myriad sizes, shapes, and colors of rocks underground as they become
visible in the flickering light of a candle or in the pale light of the miner’s lamp
account in large part for the numerous fanciful stories one hears of ghosts,
white mules and other animals, devils, and so forth, supposed to inhabit the
workings of certain mines. Almost every mine of any size has its ghost story.
[Hand 1942: 131]
This would not have been simply a matter of imagination but also supported by
actual encounters with colourful or otherwise special rocks and ores. In phys-
ical terms, the underground world was familiar to the prehistoric inhabitants of
Fennoscandia only ‘superficially’, or in very small scale compared to the limestone
caves or the vast quarries and mines in some other parts of Europe. However, even
this kind of a small-scale penetration into rock would have introduced people to a
range of otherwise unfamiliar experiences associated with being inside of rock. The
introduction of deeper mines in the historical period would only have amplified
this sensory strangeness of the underground world –weird sounds, colours and light
effects and even hallucinations, illusions and transformations.
The so- called crystal cavities of eastern Fennoscandia are a particularly
interesting and illuminating example of the marvels that could be encountered
inside the rock (Figure 2.3). The cavities, which have only recently attracted the
interest of archaeologists (Mökkönen et al. 2017), vary in size from tiny to over
2 m in diameter, usually with a thin pegmatite lining and quartz or amethyst
prisms covering the interior. Because they occur in a soft, crumbling type of
stone known as rapakivi granite, some of the cavities have become exposed by
glacial forces and have been subject to quarrying activities especially during
the Typical Comb Ware phase in the first half of the fourth millennium bc
(Mökkönen et al. 2017).
Although crystal cavities have not yet been subjected to proper archaeological
research, at least four sites in south-eastern Finland show traces of prehistoric (most
likely Stone Age) quarrying for crystals, as evidenced by knapping debris and the
occasional chipped artefact. The archaeological record of the region confirms that
the systematic exploitation of the cavities begins in the early Neolithic and becomes
Stone-worlds 31
FIGURE 2.3 The entrance to a quarried crystal chamber in Hitonharju, south-eastern

Finland, known as the ‘Devil’s Nest’. One of the authors (V.-P. Herva) is shown as
descending into the chamber that is about 2 m in diameter and accessed through a
half a metre wide hole in the rock. Photo: Teemu Mökkönen.
relatively common in the Typical Comb Ware phase, when flakes and artefacts made
of rock crystal, smoky quartz and related high-quality quartzes become relatively
common (Mökkönen et al. 2017). The exposed cavities would have been filled
with glacial deposits and so had to be emptied in order to access the crystals, which
may have been thought of as a form of descent into another dimension of reality
and thus associated with shamanic trances. This experience would have been fur-
ther heightened by the strange, geometric shapes of the prisms and their unusual
visual properties, which may have evoked connotations with the light phenomena
experienced in altered states of consciousness and ideas of ‘seeing’ behind the surface
of things (cf. Lewis-Williams and Pearce 2005: 253, 259, 280; Reynolds 2009: 160).
Rock crystals and smoky quartz provided first class raw material for knappers: their
properties equal those of flint, and the artefacts made of them can be exquisitely
beautiful. But what is more, rock crystals (especially if they are convex or concave)
can sometimes work as ‘lenses’, looking through which reveals a different world
than that seen with the naked eye. Moreover, crystals can function as prisms that
reflect light or break it into rainbow colours. Associating rock crystals with spir-
ituality may seem a bit ‘new ageish’, but human fascination with rock crystals goes
back several millennia, as evidenced, for example, by one of the graves excavated at
32 Land
the TCW burial ground of Vaateranta, south-eastern Finland. Among other grave
goods, the buried individual had been given an idiomorphic rock crystal, one end
of which was notched, indicating that it had been attached to a cord and worn as a
pendant (Mökkönen et al. 2017).
An increasing awareness of the richness of stone- worlds, which emerged
together with the increased exploitation of mineral resources, is also reflected in
the choice of lithic materials, which (particularly from the TCW phase onwards)
seem to celebrate colour, shininess and other ‘non-functional’ properties of stone.
Artefacts of red slate, a material specific to the Caledonian mountains of northern
Scandinavia that often features decorative white stripes, were distributed in an
intensive exchange network where the important rock art site of Nämforsen in
northern Sweden seems to have been a central node (Baudou 1992; Goldhahn
2010). Although red slate had been used locally already during the Mesolithic, in
the early Neolithic artefacts made of the material spread over a vast area ranging
from north-western Finland to much of northern Scandinavia and as far south as
the Uppland region of Sweden. Some of them feature elaborate shapes such as
carved elk heads, suggesting that they belonged to the ritual sphere (Hallgren 2012).
In a similar way, the metatuffite known as ‘Onega green slate’ that derives from
deposits on the western shores of Lake Onega, Karelia, had been used and traded
already during the Mesolithic, but their distribution and frequency increases dramat-
ically in the Early Comb Ware and Typical Comb Ware periods (Heikkurinen 1980;
Tarasov and Gogolev 2018). As with the quarries of Hesperiholm and Stakallneset
discussed above, the location of the main quarry of Lake Onega slate at the outfall
of River Shuya on the western shore of the lake also seems to have been symbol-
ically significant and perhaps accounts for the fact that the so-called ‘Karelian adzes’
produced there were so widely distributed. The Onega rock carvings on the eastern
shore of the lake were a major ritual congregation site for millennia, and it has been
suggested (Lahelma 2010) that the lake itself may have been mythologically important,
perhaps understood as the place where the world was created. Onega green slate is
also a prime example of how new dimensions of stone could be discovered also in a
small scale: the unworked slate is non-descript and brownish, but when grinded and
polished, it transforms into a green and sparkly material. Some artefacts made of green
slate are immaculately shaped and show no signs of use-wear, such as a shiny, imprac-
tically long (40 cm) curved adze from Kiuruvesi in eastern Finland –an astonishing
piece of craftsmanship quite unlike most of the rather roughly worked Mesolithic
stone tools. The practices or grinding and polishing stone thus had the capacity of
revealing different and surprising aspects of stone, a discovery that the northern early
Neolithic societies made great use of (Herva et al. 2014).
Cavities and recent folklore in the North

Developments during the Neolithic set the stage: a fundamental change in the
way the subterranean world was perceived, nature manipulated and man’s role
accentuated. Rocks and stones have continued to be culturally and cosmologically
Stone-worlds 33
significant among northern cultures also in later times, as demonstrated by histor-

ical and folklore materials. A famous case, discussed, for example, by Bradley (2000),
is the Sámi sacred site of Ukonsaari in Finnish Lapland. The site is a strangely
shaped little rocky island on Lake Inari, where sacrificial meals were held still in the
late nineteenth century (Äikäs 2015). Sir Arthur Evans visited the island in 1873
and excavated what he called a ‘votive cave’, finding bones, charcoal and a late Iron
Age silver ornament in it. When the Finnish ethnologist T.I. Itkonen conducted
fieldwork in the region in 1910–1912, the site was still venerated to the extent
that his informants refused to point out the actual site of sacrifice at the island
(Itkonen 1962: 136–137). Subsequent investigations have confirmed that the ritual
activity was concentrated on a little rock shelter on the south-western part of the
island (Okkonen 2007). In general, mountains and rock cliffs were widely venerated
in traditional Sámi religion as the abodes of supernatural beings and people of
the Underworld (Bäckman 1975). Particular kinds of cracks or formations in the
rock, such as the famous door-shaped Passeuksa, or ‘Sacred Door’ in Padjelanta,
Swedish Lapland (Mulk and Bayliss-Smith 2006), were perceived as entrances to an
enchanted Underworld.
Finnish historians and other scholars have occasionally discussed the
relationships between the geographies of the Kalevala and the real geographies
of eastern Fennoscandia –that is, where or if the places described in the epic
poems can be put on a contemporary map (Chapter 7). These explorations
have produced uncertain and ambiguous results, but there are some intriguing
cases where the poems seem to refer to real cliffs and rock formations. For
example, several poems that describe a magical battle between two seers –the
Sámi Joukahainen and the Finnish hero Väinämöinen –refer to the hill of Pisa, a
rock formation ca. 270 m high that rises well above the surrounding plateau in
central/eastern Finland. The same poems also refer to the hill as the ‘Hill of Hell’
(Fi. hornan kallio), and it seems significant that the hill also features a particularly
large crystal cavity traditionally known as the ‘Devil’s Cellar’. The cavity has
been almost completely quarried clear of rock crystal, presumably already in the
prehistoric period.
A second interesting example of a real location possibly described in the poems
concerns the so-called ‘Kipumäki’ (or ‘Pain Hill’), a supernatural cliff to which
Finnish folk healers banished the pains of their patients and where the spirit of
maladies known as Kiputyttö, or ‘Pain Girl’, was thought to reside. The folklore
related to Kipumäki precedes the collection of the Kalevala, and although it has
been widely considered a purely mythical site, already in the eighteenth century,
the antiquarian Christfrid Ganander (1984) speculated that it might also represent
a real location. This suggestion has recently been elaborated by Tuomo Kesäläinen
(Kesäläinen et al. 2015; Kesäläinen and Kejonen 2017). Based on the relevant
descriptions of Kipumäki, as well as the travels of the person who documented the
poem, Kesäläinen argues that the mythical Kipumäki can be identified with a spe-
cific place near the town of Rovaniemi –a central place of northern Finland since
ancient times –on the Arctic Circle.
34 Land
According to the tradition recorded in the poems and oral accounts recorded
by the nineteenth-century Finnish historian and author Zachris Topelius (1818–
1889), the Pain Hill was located near river Kemijoki, at a cliff where there are
nine holes on top that have been ‘bored into the rock’, with the largest hole in
the middle said to be 15 m deep. Furthermore, the hill is said to be located where
three large rivers converge. Kesäläinen observes that the topographic description of
Kipumäki matches perfectly with that of a rocky hill today known as Sukulanrakka,
a local geological attraction on top of which there are nine so-called giant’s kettles,
or large cavities formed in the bedrock by boulders rolling in glacial rivers. The
kettles are among the largest found in Finland, and the deepest of these formations
indeed reaches 15 m into the bedrock, as specified in the poems. Because several of
these formations have characteristic corkscrew-like walls, they do indeed give the
impression of having been bored into the rock with a gigantic drill (Figure 2.4).
The place names associate the holes with both demons (Finn. hiisi) and Bishop
Hemming (1290–1366), an important medieval bishop of Finland.
It is of course impossible to know for certain if the Kipumäki referred to in folk
poetry actually refers to a real identifiable location –let alone a single location –as
even if it was associated with a real place, the place identified as Pain Hill may have
varied regionally. However, what matters here is not so much whether or not the
said rocky hill in Rovaniemi is the actual Pain Hill of the poems but rather the way
FIGURE 2.4 A ‘Devil’s kettle’ (Finn. hiidenkirnu) at Sukulanrakka near Rovaniemi,

possibly related to the myth of the ‘Pain Hill’. Photo: Tuomo Kesäläinen.
Stone-worlds 35
in which it illustrates how real topographies were tied to mythical descriptions of

landscapes and offers clues of how rock formations were signified in the past. Even
though the archaeological evidence is largely absent at such formations (or at least
so far unrecognized), there can be little doubt that various features in ‘rockscapes’ –
such as the giant’s kettles –have attracted the attention of local people from the
prehistoric past up to the recent past and present times.
Early modern northern mining as dreamwork

While the notion that all ‘places’ are culturally constructed is self-evident, northern
Fennoscandia seems to have formed an unusually fertile ground for European cul-
tural images, ideas and fantasies over the centuries. The northern world is thus a
particularly illustrative example of the deep fusing of the real and imaginary, or the
natural and cultural. In other words, our view of the North must be seen as inex-
tricably entangled with the historical processes unfolding in the northern margins
of the continent and are critical, for instance, to understanding how the various
projects of modernization such as industrialization (here exemplified by mining)
unfolded in the North.
Contemporary and historical extractive industries are often regarded as mostly
technical and economic ‘rational’ pursuits, but mining is also deeply imbued with
sociocultural, ideological and cosmological issues. Early industrial mining in cen-
tral and northern parts of early modern Sweden can thus be regarded as a kind
of dreamwork, which unfolded not simply in relation to rationally encountered
physical realities in the North but was thoroughly affected by dreams, fantasies and
imaginaries. In other words, there was a distinctive irrational (as it would be under-
stood today) and utopian dimension to early extractive industries.
In Sweden, mining and metal industries have been central to the representation
of the nation’s progress and fortune (Evans and Rydén 2007), and metal production
was elementary to the modernization of Sweden, as it has been an important sup-
plier of copper and iron to European consumption since early on. Large-scale metal
production in Sweden dates back to the Middle Ages, but mining and metal indus-
tries expanded into new regions in the early modern period, when copper, iron and
forest products comprised the backbone of Swedish economy and domestic metal
reserves were invested with substantial symbolic and ideological meanings (Evans
and Rydén 2007; Nordin 2015).
As noted, Lapland has been viewed as exotic and somehow outside the ordinary
world –an idea expressed by many travellers to the North. Thus, when the
renowned Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) travelled to northern
Sweden, he wrote in his journal that
When I reached this mountain, I seemed to be entering on a new world; and

when I had ascended it, I scarcely knew whether I was in Asia or Africa, the
soil, situation, and every one of the plants, being equally strange to me.
[quoted in Naum 2016: 496 ]
36 Land
At the same time, the North has been as a land of opportunity and material
plenty. Already in the sixteenth century, Olaus Magnus had depicted Sápmi as a
rich and plentiful land, pleasant to live in. As Naum (2016: 501) writes, ‘Sápmi
was seen not only as an exotic place but as the fulfilment of a desire of marvellous
transformation of an underappreciated wasteland into a rich promised land’. As
we have seen, this perception of northern lands –appropriated and promulgated
in early modern Swedish antiquarianism (see Herva et al. 2018) –can in turn be
seen as grounded on age-old cultural images of the North that date back to the
classical antiquity.
The first ‘mining fever’ took place from around 1630 onwards when silver ore
was found in Nasafjäll on the Swedish– Norwegian border in Lapland/ Sápmi.
This discovery led almost immediately in the founding of mines and foundries
on the northern fringes of the kingdom. However, even though substantial eco-
nomic hopes were projected on the North, the region was poorly known even
from a southern Scandinavian perspective. It is illustrative that, following the dis-
covery of the Nasafjäll silver, the Privy Councillor Carl Bonde mused that Lapland
could become ‘the West Indies of the Swedes’ (Bäärnhielm 1976; Naum 2016: 493),
which clearly echoes the idea that industrial projects were embedded in ‘dreams of
colonial wealth’ (Nordin 2015).
The search and exploitation of metals in northern parts of Fennoscandia occurred
with the tightening of the Swedish state’s control over the North, and they were also
driven by the increased need of metals for arms production as Sweden joined the
Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) on the Germanic lands of the Holy Roman Empire
in Central Europe. Indeed, the Falun mine alone in Sweden produced about two-
thirds of European copper in the seventeenth century (Heckscher 1954: 175–176),
and the Falun and Sala mines were so famous in Europe that they were among the
northern marvels that travellers wished to see in addition to natural attractions such
as the midnight sun (Naum 2019). In addition to the increased demand for metals
by the arms industry, domestic metal resources were integral to the mercantilist
thinking of the time. Silver, in particular, was invested with a substantial cultural
meaning among the seventeenth-century Swedish elites (Götlind 2005: 261–262;
Nordin 2015: 252; see also Nordin 2013).
The seventeenth-century mining boom and metal fever, which were accom-
panied by significant long-term environmental and sociocultural changes in nor-
thern Fennoscandia, died out soon but has since been followed by a number of
more or less utopian mining projects. Although some of them led to the founding
of the large iron mines in northern Sweden that continue to flourish, such as
Malmberget and Kiruna, many were economic failures, founded on great but
unsustainable dreams. The first foundry and works site at Silbojokk operated only
for a short while before it was destroyed by the Danish–Norwegian troops, and the
subsequent works at Kvikkjokk also functioned only for some decades. The works
of Kengis, in the River Tornio valley, was more long-lived –and briefly even profit-
able –but struggled with financial and other problems most of the time (see further
Nordin 2015; Nordin and Ojala 2017).
Stone-worlds 37
Disciplining and ordering of the North

Even if the acquisition of northern treasures proved to be more challenging
than imagined, the broader sociocultural function of metal production –that of
ordering and disciplining the North –was arguably a more successful project. The
seventeenth-century mining projects instilled new (‘modern’) cultural elements in
the northern fringes of Europe and contributed to the transformation of nor-
thern landscapes and mindscapes (Nordin 2015; Naum 2017). Mines, foundries and
works were highly ordered and regulated materially and socially, as metal making
was to promote civility, order and rationality. Besides the strict rules of conduit,
the places themselves were geometrically and hierarchically ordered, with different
activities, functions and groups of people spatially separated from each other.
It is striking that the classically inspired grid plan makes an early appearance at
sites associated with the expansion of mining industries to central and northern
Sweden, spearheading the broader classicizing of Swedish spatial planning, archi-
tecture and culture in the mid-seventeenth century. The classicizing of Sweden in
itself can be regarded as something of a utopian project –a material, cultural and
spiritual endeavour to become like ancient Romans –and it seems fitting that one
of its earliest manifestations should take place in the context of metal-making in a
northern land of fantasy.
Industrial complexes have been characterized as ‘social utopias’ (Anfält 2002),
which structured human life so as to cultivate virtues, such as obedience and
productivity, and comprised islands of civility in the wilderness. Perhaps the most
obvious material expressions of the dream-like utopian ideals implanted in nor-
thern landscapes are the substantial manor house and formal garden constructed
at the site of Kengis on the Torne River in Sweden, at its time the northernmost
iron works in the world (Nordin 2015). The use of the grid plan also echoes the
colonialist character of industrial projects in the North, with associations to New
World plantations. Industrialization and colonialism were indeed deeply connected
in early modern Sweden, but the industrial complexes were just one expression of
the Swedish Crown’s attempts to transform the North. It was accompanied by sev-
eral other policies and practices, such as the founding of towns and market places
and the launching of an extensive surveying and mapping campaign around the
realm. According to Naum (2016: 504),
All these proposals for improvement and multiple visions of utopia had one
common trope: they transformed the landscape and nature of Sápmi into a
commercial product, abstracted away from the existing and dense socioeco-
logical web and meaning it had for the Sami.
Moreover, the early modern pursuits of metal also had a religious dimension. In the
seventeenth-century Lutheran Orthodox rhetoric of Sweden, it was a responsibility
of Man to harness nature and its resources for general benefit. However, the success of
the state was predicated on its internal cohesion which, in the (learned) aristocratic
38 Land
view, was compromised especially by the heathen and nomadic Sámi, whose life-
style and beliefs diverged from proper subjects to the Crown. The establishing of
mines and foundries thus served two different but interrelated functions: economic
profit and the moral responsibility of bringing the Sámi to God and teaching them
civility (Naum 2017).
Mining was also closely associated with the extension and instituting of mon-
etary economy in Sweden, and money itself, in turn, was an expression of and tool
for the abstraction and standardization of value and the world (Simmel 1992[1900]).
Early modern states in Europe were continuously wrestling with the shortage of
cash, and the value of money was still tied to the very metal that coinage was made
of (Wennerlind 2003). Sweden was the first state to introduce copper money in an
attempt to boost economy, on the one hand, and to put excess copper in a use that
would not affect the prices of copper in international markets on the other. Some
of this money consisted of thick copper plates (Sw. plåtmynt) that could weigh sev-
eral kilograms. The plan did not work, as copper coins floated out of the country
to be re-melted, and the price of copper –and consequently of copper money –
fluctuated radically (see further Herva et al. 2012). But although Sweden failed to
control the markets the way it had hoped, the case again demonstrates the import-
ance and implication of mining to other domains of society.
Mining was integral to the development of the modern monetary system also
through the invention of credit money: Sweden was the first country in the world
to introduce banknotes in the 1660s, and this innovation was based on the tokens
used by mining companies (Hyötyniemi 1978: 184–186; Lappalainen 2007: 100–
101; Nurmi 2011: 123). The idea of banknotes was an important step towards the
‘modern’ concept of money as representing value, in which money became a matter
of social trust (Simmel 1992 [1990]). It can also be argued that the introduction of
credit money and the expansion of money economy promoted the modern idea of
measuring in standard units and the prioritizing of quantities over qualities (Zelizer
1989: 344–348). It thus also mediated the development of a mechanical worldview
(Wennerlind 2003: 255) in a similar manner as early modern planned urban spaces
did (Akkerman 2001).
Mining and magic
Early industrial mining heralded the certain elements that we may recognize as
‘modern’ in the North, but ‘modernization’ was far from a straightforward devel-
opment in the European world in general and the northern world in particular.
They must be considered in the broader frame of the Renaissance– Baroque
cosmology, in which the emerging rationalist and mechanistic ideas about the
world and its workings were still embedded in and entangled with relational and
magical thinking. Indeed, northern mining and metal-making in the seventeenth
century provides a particularly illustrative setting for exploring the relationship
between the ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ ways of perceiving and engaging with the
environment.
Stone-worlds 39
FIGURE 2.5 A human and a mountain troll working in a mine. A vignette from

Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555).
In both the learned and folk view, mining and processing of ores were practices
which involved reciprocity and sociality with entities and powers of the under-
ground world, because people co-inhabited the world with range of non-human
beings –from angels and demons to trolls, people of the Underworld (Finn.
maahinen) and so on (Figure 2.5). Mining thus took place in a setting which
involved many actors and was an inherently social practice involving, in addition
to the miners and their foremen, also encounters with non-human beings (Fors
2015: 31–33). For example, since the trolls were inhabitants of the mountains, for
them rock was thought to present a medium through which they could move and
see as easily as humans move and see through the air. Inside the rock, they were
believed to carry out social lives more or less similar to those of humans (Fors
2015: 32–33).
In Scandinavia, orebodies were thought to be controlled by ‘keeper entities’,
which were mostly invisible but could manifest themselves in different forms, such
as animals or ghostly shapes or strange sounds. They had a material dimension
as well and could be touched (and even had sex with), and they were capable of
manipulating the minerals and changing reality. They could, for instance, substitute
orebodies of precious metals with worthless metals –a notion that corresponded
with broader ideas of how metals were ‘organic’ in the sense that they grew and
transformed in the earth (Fors 2015: 35–36).
Material things and substances were likewise infused with extraordinary or
magical properties and could thus be manipulated by other than purely mechan-
ical means (see further e.g. Herva 2010b). It is well established, for instance, that
early chemistry (or ‘chymistry’) and laboratory science brought together what in
today’s terms would be considered as magic and scientific thinking (e.g. Principe
2007), not unlike iron working in a prehistoric or non-Western context (e.g.
Gansum and Oestigaard 2004; Haaland 2004). Substances and entities had a poten-
tial to transform, or be transformed, into other substances and entities. Objects
40 Land
could be ‘compressed, expanded, made to disappear and reappear, and affect other
objects over vast distances’ (Fors 2015: 20–21), and even though the behaviour of
substances and entities was predictable and ‘stable’ in many contexts, they could
also be autonomous and behave unexpectedly. In other words,‘seventeenth-century
epistemology, or knowledge, about things material was still quite fluid and open-
ended’ (Fors 2015: 40).
Dreams of Lapland’s gold
Extractive industries in the North have often failed or proved disappointing from
the early modern period to the present, regardless of increasing knowledge and
improving technologies, but nonetheless ‘expectations tend to be the same, no
matter how many times such expectations have been disappointed or opportunities
wasted in other regions in the past’ (Wilson and Stammler 2016: 1). Faith in the
economic and social benefits of mining remains strong, which in some ways reflects
the situation in early modern times and the long-standing dream of northern riches.
These utopian legacies can be identified in contemporary industrial projects, such
as the disastrous case of the Talvivaara mine in northern Finland, where a privately
owned company begun large-scale extraction of nickel and zinc in 2008 but went
bankrupt in 2018, in spite of significant state support for building the necessary
infrastructure. More than 80,000 minor shareholders lost their investments in the
process.
Although the Talvivaara saga has already made an imprint on Finnish popular
imagination (a major feature film titled The Mine directed by Aleksi Salmenperä
entered Finnish cinemas in 2016), the utopian nature of these later exploits is even
more clearly manifest in the case of the late nineteenth-and twentieth-century
gold rushes in Finnish Lapland. The gold rushes are of particular interest here
because they demonstrate the wide-ranging cultural impacts and implications of
extractive pursuits, and the manner in which dreams and fantasies can be entangled
with reality. Moreover, the pursuit for gold in the North once again replicates
the age-old perception of Lapland as a strange, exotic and enchanted land, where
opportunity awaits.
While traces of gold had been reported from Finnish Lapland earlier, the first
finds of sizable gold nuggets were made in 1868 at River Ivalojoki by a gold-finding
expedition commissioned by the Finnish Senate. In the following summer, two gold
panners exploring the river banks managed to pan 2 kg of gold, causing enormous
excitement and the first gold rush to Lapland. Following this discovery, a number of
other significant deposits were located, and small-scale prospecting of gold mainly
using simple panning techniques has continued up to this date (Figure 2.6).
Globally, the nineteenth century marked a huge growth in the production of
gold, as reflected in the great gold rushes in, for instance, South Africa, California
and Alaska (Schoenberger 2011). The scale of the Lapland gold rushes in the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries was minuscule in comparison but can nonethe-
less be seen as one manifestation of the global gold fever, and some people who
Stone-worlds 41
FIGURE 2.6 Gold prospecting has left diverse traces in the landscapes of Finnish
Lapland. The prospector Jaakko Mäkinen lived in this hut, built on his claim
in Laanila, Inari, permanently for thirty years in the later twentieth century.
ventured for Lapland gold had previous experience of prospecting and mining in
North America. Like the seventeenth-century mining boom, the later gold rushes
contributed to the ‘modernization’ of northernmost Finland. The discoveries
boosted geological survey, cartography, industrial extractive ventures, road building,
population growth, tourism and so forth (Partanen 1999). At the peak of the gold
rush, the mining station of Kultala (kulta is Finnish for gold) at River Ivalojoki
was a bustling community of more than 600 people –very large in the context of
nineteenth-century Finnish Lapland, and with inhabitants of highly diverse origins,
forging new connections with faraway regions.
But even if the search for Lapland gold was in part motivated by economic gain,
it is at the same time deeply grounded in fantasy and imagination. It made a few
lucky individuals comparably rich, but in reality, the river deposits had little com-
mercial potential, and most prospectors struggled to make even a modest living.
Mining companies such as Prospektor, Ivalojoki and Lapin kulta all faced trouble
and went bankrupt very soon after they had started, even though notable figures
such as J.K. Paasikivi –who later became president of Finland (1946–1956) –
were involved as shareholders (e.g. Launonen and Partanen 2002: 14). However,
the cultural significance of the gold rush cannot be downplayed: Lapland gold
42 Land
miners are featured in numerous Finnish novels and films, and in general form
an archetypal character in Finnish popular culture. Still, the estimated total yield
of the desired metal is a very modest 2,000 kg over the entire 150-year time
period. By way of comparison, the thriving modern gold mine of Suurikuusikko
in Kittilä, northern Finland, produces ca. 5,500 kg of gold per year. This facility,
founded in 2005, is another legacy of the dreams of Lapland’s gold and today the
largest gold mine in Europe. Thus, a dream that was fundamentally ungrounded
in reality, nonetheless facilitated real sociocultural, economic and environmental
changes in Lapland.
From early on, Lapland gold and its prospectors began to develop a legendary
aura. For example, the prominent Finnish folklorist Julius Krohn (1835–1888)
compared the prospectors to the heroes of the Kalevala, who likewise endured
hardships in their exploits in the mythical Northland. This aura persists to the pre-
sent day, and the prospectors –many of them from the South –comprise an exotic
‘tribe’ of their own, with their own ways of life and traditions that echo broader
cultural fantasies of the North. Some prospectors have become larger-than-life fig-
ures within Lapland gold culture, ‘forefathers’ who are revered and whose ways
are still imitated (Leppänen 2016) and whose stories are related in the extraor-
dinary Gold Village and Gold Prospector Museum in Tankavaara, Finnish Lapland.
Prospecting as escape from civilization and as a distinct way of life (see Leppänen
2016) also resonates with the classical notion of the North as ‘a place of purification,
an escape from the limitation of civilization’ (Davidson 2005: 21).
There is also a dose of the supernatural to the stories and experiences related to
gold hunting, which adds to its dream-like character. For instance, the deposit of
Hopiaoja in Tankavaara was allegedly revealed to a local Sámi man in a dream and a
spiritual being guided him in the right place, whereas the mining station of Kultala,
the site of the first Finnish gold rush, is said to be haunted (Leppänen 2016: 63),
and we have heard similar stories in association with the Gold Prospector Museum
in Tankavaara. In more concrete terms, Lapland gold is commonly seen as a special
type of gold, which is somehow different from ‘normal’ gold (typically described as
more reddish in colour). One expression of this is that Lapland gold can fetch prices
that are substantially higher than the normal market prizes. This has to do with
the individual character of larger nuggets which have a cultural life –even reputa-
tion –of their own, often as collectibles with certain identifiable features (such as a
specific shape) and stories associated with them, especially their connections to the
legendary gold prospectors.
The enduring allure of minerals and the Underworld

In the folklore of Lapland gold miners, some of the legendary prospectors and
other characters of the gold rush mythos are associated with hidden treasures. One
example is ‘the treasure of Appisjoki, a kettle full of gold supposedly hidden by the
Sámi trader Gabriel Aikio (1834–1903), who ran a general store and an inn and sold
wares to prospectors in exchange for gold’ (Launonen and Partanen 2002: 36–37).
Stone-worlds 43
A similar story relates to Jaakko Isola (1903–1978), who was known as a hard-
working and skilled panner, but a hermit by nature and had little use for gold (or
money) and is said to have rarely sold any. Mr Isola was found dead in his cabin in
1978 and the gold that he is thought to have found –allegedly ‘many kilograms’ –is
supposedly hidden somewhere near his cabin (Leppänen 2016: 47). To add to the
sense of mystery, it is said that an enchanted white reindeer is watching or guarding
Mr Isola’s cabin and treasure.
Supernatural elements are typical to the folklore of hidden treasures, which
can be retrieved only in special circumstances and appear to exist in an inter-
dimensional space between the worlds ordinarily inaccessible to humans (Lindow
1982: 262). This applied not only to narrated but also real treasures of different
age and origins that were found in the past. Treasures were magical and treasure-
hunting an inherently magical practice (Dillinger 2011: 1–6). Treasures could also
demonstrate independent agency, shift shapes and behave in ways that resembled
living and conscious beings (Sarmela 1994: 452); they could, for instance, first
manifest themselves in the form of an animal or everyday objects before revealing
their true nature (Lindow 1982: 261). Like the ores encountered by early modern
miners, treasures were much more than matter: they had a spiritual dimension and
were capable of transformation.
Real and narrated treasures came in many forms but were often composed of
coins or other metal objects, and in the folklore sources were often placed in a
kettle or a similar container. Certain peculiar natural phenomena could be seen as
indicating the presence of a treasure, including what in Finnish folklore is referred
to as ‘treasure fires’ or will-o’-the-wisps –an elusive but probably real physical
phenomenon of spontaneously ignited gasses burning in the landscape, especially
in wetland environments. Although shrouded in the supernatural and extraor-
dinary, treasure stories are perhaps ultimately grounded on occasional discoveries
of actual ancient caches of hidden objects in the past. There are, for instance,
medieval Scandinavian laws that address the ownership of treasures found in the
ground (Lindow 1982: 257–258), some or many of which would have been pre-
historic metal hoards, hundreds of which have also been recorded by antiquarians
and archaeologists (e.g. Spangen 2009). There is even an etymological connection
between hoards and buried treasures (Lindow 1982: 257). In addition to prehis-
toric caches of valuables, buried treasures could also comprise of objects such as
church bells which may reflect a real practice that people sometimes engaged with
in turbulent times.
While placer gold and orebodies are not treasures in a literal sense, there are sev-
eral links between the northern folklore on treasures and the hunt for Lapland’s gold.
Rich orebodies, for instance, are sometimes metaphorically referred to as treasures
hidden under the fjells. Likewise, the element of the supernatural associated with
certain discoveries of gold, as in the case of Hopiaoja mentioned above, can be seen
as reflections of much older ideas that mineral riches –and indeed treasures as they
feature in folklore –are guarded or controlled by spiritual keeper entities. They can
thus likewise be seen as a type of supernatural treasures.
44 Land
One of the most curious recent manifestations of the enduring allure of

Underworld realms and hidden treasure in the North relates to the life and deeds
of the charismatic and eccentric Finnish neo-pagan artist Ior Bock (1942–2010),
who for decades captured the public imagination in Finland with his projects. His
pseudo-historical family saga (eventually published in Bock 1996) fused fantastic
elements drawn from an idiosyncratic reading of the Kalevala with real-world
locations, such as Gumbostrand east of Helsinki and the castle of Kajaani in north-
eastern Finland, where physical evidence vindicating the saga was supposed to be
found. Interestingly, the Bock mythology –much like those constructed by the
Baroque antiquarians –depended heavily on flawed etymologies.
Just like Rudbeck, Bock also initiated a project for uncovering the hidden Nordic
past. In 1987, he began excavations at a rubble-filled cave at Gumbostrand near Helsinki,
close to his family estate, in an effort to uncover the ‘Temple of Lemminkäinen’ (one of
the central heroes of the Kalevala poems). Although the academic community unani-
mously viewed the cave as a natural formation, with no potential for archaeological
discovery, excavations were nonetheless begun and attracted a large international group
of followers of alternative lifestyles, whose antics stirred and aroused the curiosity of
the little rural community. Rather incredibly, Bock also received substantial financial
support from a large construction company (called Lemminkäinen Ltd.) and a local
bank, which enabled the use of heavy machinery in the excavation work. A section of
the cave ca. 50 m long, 4 m wide and 3,5 m high was emptied. Unsurprisingly, nothing
was found, and eventually the companies involved withdrew from the project, as it
began to draw ridicule and negative attention in national media. Today, the cave is
inaccessible as it is filled with groundwater (Figure 2.7).
Presumably, only a small core group of followers took Mr Bock’s version of
Finnish history literally, but it nonetheless captured several prominent followers,
some of whom took it very seriously indeed. Petri Walli, the lead singer of a Finnish
progressive rock band called Kingston Wall, famously committed suicide in 1995
by throwing himself from the top of Kallio Church in Helsinki, apparently having
become disillusioned in the Bock mythology. The Bock legend fused the real and
the imaginary in a way that appealed to a wide segment of the Finnish populace –
even resulting in financial support for the outlandish temple project. In a similar
vein, Mr Bock maintained that a sacred golden statue of a ram (bock is Swedish for
a ram) weighing 300 kg was hidden by ‘the last king of Finland’ in the castle of
Kajaani in ad 1250. According to conventional knowledge, the castle –which is
the northernmost stone castle in the Swedish realm –was constructed only in the
early seventeenth century. However, according to the Bock saga, it was preceded
by others many centuries earlier and served as a hideaway of the family when the
Swedish conquerors arrived in Finland and forced the royal Bock family to flee to
northern Finland.
This aspect of the Bock family saga likewise found remarkably wide support
outside the academia. In 1990, followers of Mr Bock –who identified themselves
as ‘Diggers of the Truth’ –faced criminal charges, having dug a large hole in the
castle courtyard in search of the golden ram (Korhonen 1990), and subsequently
Stone-worlds 45
FIGURE 2.7 A view of the ‘Temple of Lemminkäinen’ near Helsinki in 2018. The

entrance to the cave is today filled with groundwater. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
the castle courtyard was studied using a ground-penetrating radar. Intriguingly, the
data suggested the presence of a substantial metal object some metres under the sur-
face of the ground. This stirred up excitement in some circles, and several groups
with questionable archaeological knowhow applied for permission to excavate in
the castle, which however was not granted. Even such prestigious institutions as
the Thor Heyerdahl museum in Oslo, Norway, sent out applications. The Finnish
Heritage Agency eventually conducted excavations at the courtyard as part of the
restoration works at the site, and it transpired that the echo detected in the geophys-
ical survey was caused by a bit of thick copper cable buried in the courtyard due to
some earlier construction work. Even so, the story of the golden ram buried in the
castle –just like the Temple of Lemminkäinen –attracted substantial interest and
publicity, testifying to the enduring significance of real and mythical geographies
and material realities in the North.
3
HOUSES, LAND AND SOIL
Dwellings, people and the cosmos in the North

Houses and other constructed dwellings have been central to human life for
thousands of years. Given their importance, it is unsurprising that dwellings have
not only rich symbolism to them but also reflect and structure the ways of life and
thought of their inhabitants in various ways. There is an intimate and dynamic
relationship between people and dwellings –dwellings are, in effect, extensions
of people’s bodies and cognition in much a similar manner as termite mounds
constitute a part of termites’ metabolism (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Turner
2000; Herva 2010a). Buildings have been likened to organisms in different cultures.
For instance, parts of buildings may be named after body parts (Blier 1983) and
buildings can be seen as biographical entities with their own life cycles. Buildings
can also be understood as active living beings in a more literal sense, as will be
discussed later in this chapter.
The deep entanglement of dwellings with the sociocultural world also means
that numerous broader themes can be accessed through the study of buildings,
and this chapter considers houses in the northern world in relation to environ-
mental perception, cosmological concepts and modes of engaging with the world.
Dwellings function as a ‘mesocosm’ which connects together the human person
as a microcosm to the macrocosmic world. Associations and correspondences
between particular features or aspects of dwellings –such as form, materials and
decoration –have been identified and discussed in a range of Eurasian prehistoric
cultural contexts. For instance, Lewis-Williams and Pearce (2005) have discussed
how various spatial and built forms at the early Neolithic town of Çatal Hüyük in
Turkey would have been connected to a shamanistic cosmology, while Boriç (2002)
proposes that the conical form of the Mesolithic huts at Lepenski Vir in Serbia imi-
tate the shape of a prominent mountain opposite to the settlement.
Houses, land and soil 47
The symbolic dimensions of built environments have also been addressed within
historical archaeologies (although usually not in cosmological terms) by writers
such as Mrozowski (1999). Renaissance urban planning and architecture were
informed by ideas of correspondences (or causal influence) between a meaningfully
organized cosmos and human life (e.g. Akkerman 2001). By the same token, a new
perspective can be gained on apparently ordinary vernacular buildings of historical
times by examining them in the light of traditional cosmologies and folklore.
While the cosmological dimensions of early modern and modern-built environ-
ments in the Western world have attracted limited attention, the dwellings and cos-
mologies of the indigenous peoples inhabiting the northern parts of Eurasia –from
the Scandinavian lands of the Sámi in the west to Siberia in the east –have been
subject to an ethnographic interest from the seventeenth century onwards (e.g.
Schefferus 1956 [1673]; Witsen 1692). This ethnographic work provides at least a
glimpse of how the organization of space and structural elements were embodied
in the context of northern peoples. While specific cultural concepts and practices
associated with dwellings of course have not remained stable over the centuries and
millennia, the ethnography nonetheless gives some ideas of how dwellings were
signified in a deeper northern past.
Archaeologically, settlements and dwellings are very unevenly known and
studied from different periods of prehistory and history in north-eastern Europe.
In Finland, for instance, thousands of dwelling sites are known from the earliest
postglacial inhabitation in the region to the beginning of the fourth millennium bc
(Ranta 2002; Mökkönen 2011), but remains of the actual buildings are very scarce.
They are common at sites of the later Stone Age, and a substantial number has also
been excavated, but the number of known building remains again decreases dra-
matically in Bronze and Iron Ages and only a handful have been properly excavated.
Even though the evidence is limited, it seems nonetheless evident that the pre-
dominant type of dwellings before 4000 bc was light tent/teepee-like structure,
which suited a mobile hunter–gatherer way of life, with the dwellings probably
packed up and taken to new places according to the annual economic cycle. The
archaeological record of these Mesolithic and Early Neolithic sites may not lend
itself easily to an analysis and interpretation in cosmological terms, but northern
ethnographies suggest that mobile communities have very different way of per-
ceiving, understanding and engaging with the environment than the more sed-
entary house-based communities. Even simple dwellings could be intertwined
with cosmological concepts. For instance, the central axis of the tent, along which
smoke ascended and escaped from an opening in the tent, was typically associated
with the notion of the world-pillar that supported the sky, by climbing which the
Upper World could be reached. The sky dotted with stars was likened to a huge
tent canvas, to which sparks shooting from the central hearth had burned holes –
allowing the light of the Upper World to shine down on Earth. Likewise, the com-
pass points and their cultural meanings appear to have been reiterated within the
dwelling and its spatial divisions. As an example, in the Finnish language, the word
for North (pohjoinen) is associated with the back or far-end of a dwelling (pohja),
48 Land
and South (etelä) is associated with the entry or vestibule of a building (eteinen),
reflecting the ethnographic and archaeological reality that these kind of dwellings
were always aligned according to the north–south axis (Häkkinen 1996). Such basic
vocabulary, then, reflects the correspondences between the dwelling and the world;
the dwelling in effect offered a blueprint for the structure of the cosmos.
The introduction of the house

A major change in the mode of dwelling occurred in north-eastern Europe around
4000 bc with the wide introduction of the so-called semi-subterranean pit-houses,
or rectangular log-built houses which were partly dug into the ground (Ranta
2002; Mökkönen 2011). Pit- houses are known from different periods around
the circumpolar world, across Eurasia and in western parts of North America
(Mökkönen 2011: 20–22). Although not exclusive to the Arctic and sub-Arctic
regions, ethnographic data show that pit-houses are generally found in regions with
colder climates at least part of the year and are usually winter dwelling associated
with more sedentary ways of life and practices of storing food (Gilman 1987;
Mökkönen 2011: 21). In Fennoscandia, pit-houses of this type appear to have been
the predominant type of dwelling for at least two millennia (Figure 3.1). Moreover,
the introduction of the house in northern Europe was associated with a range of
FIGURE 3.1 A reconstruction of a large Neolithic pit-house at the Kierikki Stone

Age centre, northern Finland. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
other material and cultural changes and indeed marked significant sociocultural and
environmental transformations.
Pit-houses make their appearance and become common roughly simultan-
eously throughout Fennoscandia, although sites in Karelia appear to be a few cen-
turies older than elsewhere in the region (see Mökkönen 2011: 22–34). In Finland
alone, several hundred sites with remains of Neolithic semi-subterranean houses
have been documented, with a total number of individual dwelling remains is in
the range of thousands. The semi-subterranean dwellings are dated predomin-
antly between 4000–2300 bc and the excavation data suggest that the plan of the
dwellings varied from quadrangular and rectangular to oval and round (Mökkönen
2011: 25–26). The remains of pit-houses often appear in clusters or ‘villages’ which
in some cases include over a hundred building remains dating over a thousand-year
period (Mökkönen 2011: 25). Even if all the buildings at such sites were not simul-
taneously in use, the use of the word ‘village’ seems warranted.
Although there is a substantial regional variability and changes over time in
Stone Age semi-subterranean houses in north-eastern Europe, the introduction and
spread of this particular type of dwellings particularly from the early fourth millen-
nium onwards can be seen to mark significant general-level cultural and environ-
mental transformations despite the remarkable internal diversity of the ‘pit-house
phenomenon’. For instance, the spread of pit-houses coincides with the appearance
and spread of a new pottery style (Figure 3.2) –or rather a series of mutually related
pottery styles, traditionally referred to as Typical Comb Ware (TCW) in Scandinavia
and Comb-Pit Ware in Russia (CPW) –over an enormous area from the Urals in
FIGURE 3.2 Typical Comb Ware (TCW) pottery decorated with a row of schematic
waterfowl from the site of Kanava, central/eastern Finland. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
50 Land
Russia to north-eastern continental Europe and northern Scandinavia (Vitenkova

2002; Pesonen and Leskinen 2009).
While not a homogenous ‘culture’ in any meaningful sense, this ‘Comb Ware
phenomenon’ would seem to indicate a network of new and intensified contacts
between communities in the north-eastern boreal zone of Europe. This is also
reflected in the use and circulation of certain artefact types and materials, such as
finely polished stone tools, flint, colourful slates, amber and copper (Núñez and
Okkonen 2005; Mökkönen 2011, 2014; Nordqvist and Herva 2013; Seitsonen et al.
2012). Archaeological assemblages of this period are both quantitatively and quali-
tatively richer and more varied than before. There is also more evidence for sym-
bolic expression in various material forms, ranging from increased use of colourful
or otherwise ‘special’ materials (such as the common use of red ochre in various
contexts) to the production of figurative rock art.
The emergence of the house and the formation of village-like settlements
indicates more sedentary ways of life and increased social complexity, which is
also suggested by the construction of ‘mega-structures’ –large stone enclosures
known as ‘giant’s churches’ –on a strip of north-western coast of Finland around
mid-fourth millennium bc onwards (Okkonen 2003; Núñez and Okkonen 2005).
Although hunting, fishing and gathering remained the primary source of food,
cultivation (or growing of plants in a broader sense) was also practiced and indeed
appears to have significantly contributed to a changing human perception of and
relationship with the world. These material, sociocultural and environmental
changes become clear in the first half of the fourth millennium, but they persist
into and become even more amplified in the next ceramic phase, when asbestos-
and organic-tempered wares (AOW) are prominently present in the archaeological
record of north-eastern Europe.
Pottery, semi-subterranean houses and cultural transformation

The significant change in dwellings around 4000 bc, as represented by semi-
subterranean houses, was associated with a host of other changes in material cul-
ture at the same time. The substantial cultural and environmental transformations
around this time, however, must be considered in a longer perspective, and the
implications of this change are arguably rather more fundamental than has pre-
viously been appreciated. The roots of these transformations can be traced to
the introduction of pottery to north-eastern Europe from around mid-sixth mil-
lennium onwards (German 2009; Pesonen and Leskinen 2009). The discoveries
of very early pottery in East Asia (Kuzmin 2015) lends support to the idea that
pottery-making emerged independently in the Far East and was distributed across
the northern boreal zone. Its introduction in northern Fennoscandia thus appears
not to derive from the Levant, as traditionally assumed, but from China and Japan
(e.g. Jordan and Zvelebil 2009; Hartz et al. 2012).
This Eastern wave of influence explains the otherwise curiously early appearance
of pottery in the boreal zone of north-eastern Europe, a region otherwise commonly
seen as a marginal backwater in the narratives of the Neolithization of Eurasia. The

established traditional idea holds that ceramic technology was adopted in the cir-
cumpolar fringes of Europe for practical reasons –the supposedly obvious useful-
ness of ceramic vessels –but no broader changes in local cultures and ways of life
are evident in the archaeological material at the time (Núñez 1990; Carpelan 1999;
Pesonen and Leskinen 2009). Although continuity seems to be a characteristic fea-
ture of the archaeological record in this region from the pre-ceramic Stone Age to
the end of the fifth millennium bc in general, there is an increasing body of subtle
but important changes that emerge simultaneously with the earliest pottery. These
include the beginning of the North-East European rock art tradition (Lahelma
2008: 33–41; Gjerde 2010: 291–300) and signs of anthropogenic modification of
the local vegetation and forest clearance (Mökkönen 2010; Alenius et al. 2013; see
also Poska and Saarse 2006; Kriiska 2009), both of which hint at an incipient new
way of seeing the environment and relating with it. Pottery-making itself can be
seen as a reflection and agent of this reconfiguring of the human relationship with
places and landscape, even though this process did not take the form of a sudden
break or change.
Tracing the subsequent trajectories of these postulated first signs of cultural
and environmental changes is difficult, however, due to the limited amount of
research on the earliest ceramic phase (Early Comb Ware) in the prehistory of
north-eastern Europe. Traditionally, the TCW–CPW ceramic phase with its rich
archaeological assemblages has tended to overshadow the phases before and after it,
which has obscured our understanding of what kinds of developments took place
between the first adoption of pottery and the emergence of houses. Consequently,
the changes taking place from 4000 bc onwards may seem more sudden than they
really were. Indeed, the roots of the Comb Ware Phenomenon can be traced back
to the introduction of pottery in the north-eastern boreal zone of Europe in the
second half of the sixth millennium bc, which marked the beginning of a slow
cultural transformation that culminated in the early fourth millennium bc (Herva
et al. 2017).
Early pottery, cultivation and place making

The introduction of pottery in the boreal zone of north-eastern Europe is not
associated with dramatic changes in the archaeological record, but it does coincide
chronologically with new kinds of manipulation of the landscape –both sym-
bolically and materially –even if it is at first rather slight. Although the dating of
rock art can be challenging, the earliest currently known rock carvings in eastern
Fennoscandia (from Zalavruga at the White Sea in Russian Karelia) can be dated
fairly securely to ca. 5300–5200 bc (Gjerde 2010), given that they were covered
by soil sediments that also included radiocarbon-datable material. Based on shore-
line dating, the earliest rock paintings, located at Lake Päijänne in central Finland,
appear to be roughly contemporaneous (Poutiainen and Lahelma 2004). Whatever
the interpretations given to this early rock art, the very making of visible and
52 Land
long-lasting images in the landscape indicates a new kind of ‘signing’ the land and
engaging with particular loci.
Just as importantly, there are indications of increased altering of local environ-
ments through the manipulation of vegetation in the later sixth millennium bc,
which similarly implies new ways of engaging with particular places in the land-
scape. There is, at present, only a limited amount of sufficiently high-resolution
palynological studies that enable identifying such changes in the landscape, but
some recent research indicates episodic opening of local landscapes that can very
likely be associated with human activity and forest clearance. Currently the most
detailed and thorough case study, which also discusses the implications of the
cycles of landscape change, focuses on the small lake of Huhdasjärvi in south-
east Finland (Alenius et al. 2013, 2017), which shows increased human activity
around 4400 bc and pollen from Hordeum and hemp around 4000 bc. Perhaps
the most intriguing, and somewhat unexpected, finding was that of buckwheat
(Fagopyrum esculentum) pollen that dates to the Mesolithic/Neolithic transition ca.
5300 bc and thus coincides with the earliest pottery in Finland. Although so far a
unique discovery, the fact that buckwheat was domesticated in the Far East (Janik
2002; Fuller et al. 2011) corresponds with the fact that comb-stamped pottery also
derives from that region (Jordan and Zvelebil 2009; Hartz et al. 2012). These early
signs of cultivation at Huhdasjärvi are accompanied by almost as early evidence
for Hordeum pollen in Estonia (Kriiska 2009) and Lake Onega in Russian Karelia
(Vuorela et al. 2001).
However small its scale was initially, this cultivation is another strand of evi-
dence that people intentionally and unintentionally started imprinting signs of
their presence and activity in the landscape simultaneously with pottery use. Its
highly localized and episodic nature makes it difficult to identify in the palyno-
logical record, suggesting that it was most likely economically unimportant.
Intriguingly, a similar pattern of small-scale temporary cultivation, which takes
the form of occasional ‘blips’ in the environmental data, has been identified in
much later Iron Age and medieval northern Fennoscandia inhabited by the
Sámi groups who, in the established traditional view, never practiced agriculture
(Hörnberg et al. 2014).
This very early engagement with cultigens in the North also challenges the
explicit and implicit assumptions of the nature and character of cultivation. In the
archaeology of north-eastern Europe, the beginning of cultivation has often been
seen first and foremost as an economic transition –with the persistent underlying
assumption that prehistoric communities can be divided into hunter-gatherers
and agriculturalists, and that the former did not practice cultivation. In eastern
Fennoscandia, it seems evident that hunting, fishing and gathering comprised the
basis of local economies at least until the late Stone Age and, indeed, in many regions,
throughout prehistory and into historical times. In general, the ‘Neolithization’ of
the region did not happen in a one-off manner or through a speedy transition, as
has been suggested for some other parts of Europe, but was a slow long-term pro-
cess spanning several millennia. Indeed, elements of ‘hunter-fisher-gatherer type’ of
culture, lifeways and mentalities persisted into modern times especially in eastern
and northern parts of Fennoscandia, as reflected in northern folklore and cosmol-
ogies documented in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The early instances of cultivation in the boreal zone took in all likelihood a
very different form compared to the earliest central European–style field culti-
vation associated with the ‘Linearbandkeramik’ (LBK) culture. The ‘LBK model’
of Neolithic cultivation and agricultural practices applies poorly to the environ-
mental and cultural conditions of the boreal zone, as in the northern environments,
growing imported, ‘exotic’ crop plants probably had more to do with questions
of cultural identity, cosmology and prestige than economy or subsistence as such
(cf. Hastorf 1998; van der Veen 2014). Whatever the immediate motivations and
reasons for growing crop plants, the very practice of growing plants, with its par-
ticular ‘taskscapes’, had broad implications and impacts to the local mode of being
in the world.
While hunting, fishing and gathering required a body of intimate knowledge
of, and close attentiveness to, the various aspects of the environment, c ultivation
focused attention on rather different qualities and features of the landscape. To
successfully grow plants required a new understanding of soils, topographies and
weather, as well as completely new ways of engaging with the environment.
Cultivation entailed, for instance, the clearing and burning of plots of land and
breaking the surface of the ground –both of them dramatic breaks from the pre-
ceding Mesolithic ways of life, which left little impact on the physical landscape.
The tilling of land associated with cultivation, for instance, brought people in closer
contact with soils –their consistence, texture and feel –and that ‘is the closest,
most intimate, scale with the land surface that can be experienced under everyday
practices of living’ (Evans 2003: 45). People, in other words, ‘zoomed into’ the land
to discover its fine structure, which might also have linked cultivation on some con-
ceptual level with procuring of mineral materials (cf. Chapter 2).
Houses and the changing relationship with the underworld

The appearance of cemeteries in the late Mesolithic and the burying of the dead
at or close to settlements indicate the emergence of a new kind of attachment to
places, a community’s sustained relationship with and a sense of belonging to a
particular place. Burying was a means of making the dead a part of the place. As
bodies decomposed, the dead became literally and metaphorically incorporated in
the soil and infused it with (some) properties and qualities of the buried people.
Thus, people and communities became one –inextricably entangled –with the
places they inhabited. The keeping of the dead close to the living also meant that
the living co-inhabited the everyday world with the dead who were probably
considered to have some kind of active presence in the community. This idea
of ancestral presence is reflected in later folklore concerning household spirits, a
tradition that may ultimately have its roots in the emergence of the house in the
Neolithic.
54 Land
The burying of the dead in pits is related to a number of other practices that
became prominent in Neolithic Europe and suggest an increased interest in the
world underground, including intensified quarrying, growing plants and the digging
of pits and ditches for ritual purposes (Davies and Robb 2004; Tilley 2008; Herva
et al. 2014, 2017). If, as seems likely, all manner of pit-making and digging into
the ground had potential associations with burial, dead and/or engagement with a
different dimension of reality (e.g. Davies and Robb 2004; Herva et al. 2014), then
semi-subterranean houses would also have involved an ‘otherworldly’ dimension.
That is, the very breaking of the ground opened an interface to the underworld
in a broadly similar manner as rock-art panels have been understood as meeting
points between ‘this world’ and an ‘Otherworld’ behind the surface of rock (e.g.
Lewis-Williams  2000).
Ethnographic data from around the world indicates that even small- scale
breaking of the surface of the ground and penetrating into it could be considered
as involving engagement with the spirits and forces inhabiting the subterranean
world and hence required special ritual practices or, more accurately, negotiation
with non-human beings (Boivin 2004a). The inhabitants of pit-houses lived lit-
erally in touch with a subterranean dimension of reality, sharing the house with
the beings and powers associated with the underground world, although it is, of
course, difficult to tell how exactly they conceived this connection. However, the
common presence of clay figurines in Comb Ware residential contexts can be taken
to indicate that this ‘otherworldly’ aspect of everyday life was recognized to at least
some degree. In north-eastern Europe, Neolithic clay figurines are found in associ-
ation with houses, and although there is substantial variation among the figurines,
many of them seem to represent dead bodies wrapped in birch bark, cloth or other
kinds of ‘burial wrapping’ (e.g. Kashina 2009). This interpretation suggests that clay
figurines –which in themselves are made of earth and soil –are material indices of
the deceased or ancestors in the house.
The fact that clay figurines are literally of earth and soil would have further
emphasized the association between soil and ancestral presence and the idea that
there was some kind of a deep bond between people and soil; it is probably not a
coincidence that various creation myths, including the biblical story of Adam, iden-
tify first people as fashioned from clay or soil (see Clark 2009: 239). The practice
of clay work, in turn, can be understood as a means of working out the relationship
between people and soil, as will be discussed in the next section.
Clay work as a means of restructuring human–environment

relations
The amount of pottery increased significantly in the boreal zone of Europe around
4000 bc with the emergence of more permanent semi- subterranean houses.
The discarding patterns of pottery also seem to change at the same time with the
increased production of pottery. Pottery is very prominently present at settlement
sites in the Typical Comb Ware period (ca. 4000–3500 bc) –so much so, indeed,
that it looks like potsherds have intentionally been spread around. Pottery sherds
are also so prominent in the soil fills of contemporary red ochre graves that it has
been suggested that the soils containing a large amount of pottery were chosen
on purpose or that sherds were not just discarded refuse but a meaningful compo-
nent of the burial ritual (Nilsson Stutz 2013). This apparent ‘tempering’ of both
dwelling sites and graves with ceramics indicates that pottery was intentionally
used in place-making practices. Although its more specific meanings remain to
be studied, such an activity makes sense in the view that pottery embodies and
represents a range of broader themes related to complex entanglements between
people, pots, households, soils, fire, landscapes and modes of perceiving and being in
the world (Herva et al. 2017).
The dimensions of reality perceived to exist beneath the surface of the earth –
or the ‘Underworld’ –and their increasing incorporation as a part of human life-
world is a central theme that unites and connects many Neolithic practices, from
houses to burials to quarrying and pottery-making. Clay was certainly a substance
known to northern hunter-gatherers well before the introduction of ceramics, but
pottery-making necessitated a new kind of attentiveness to the real and perceived
properties of clays and their sources in the landscape. Likewise, preparing the paste
required knowledge about the ‘behaviour’ of clay. Drying and firing pottery called
for attentiveness to factors such as weather suitable for firing. Ethnographic sources
suggest, moreover, that pottery making has involved engagement with ‘supernatural’
agents, such as spirits of clay and water, which contributed to the success or failure
of pottery making (Fredriksen 2011).
A second general theme that seems to be characteristic of the northern Neolithic
is a fascination with exotic materials, particularly ones with visual or other sensory
properties that were ‘peculiar’ or unusual in a Stone Age context. This could be an
unusual colour of a mineral (such as the bright red or deep green of some slates), the
malleability and heat-conductivity of copper or the brilliance and translucence of
amber and rock crystal (cf. Chapter 9). Clay would also have been a special material
in the Stone Age world, which probably explains why it became something of a
‘type material’ of the Neolithic (Stevanovics 1997). Its centrality had not only to
do with the new cultural interest in land and soils but also the character and prop-
erties of clay that rendered it different from other materials commonly used in the
Stone Age.
Clay is a characteristically ambiguous or ‘indeterminate’ substance: it is neither
liquid nor solid, but somewhere in between; it is malleable and can be worked dir-
ectly by hand; it can be worked by adding (and not only reducing) material and
reworked endlessly; and it turns into a ‘different’ substance with very different prop-
erties when fired (Wengrow 1998; Gheorghiu 2008; Timmons and MacDonald
2008; Fredriksen 2011). These properties of clay arguably enabled and prompted
the new artefact forms and the ‘symbolic revolution’ associated with the Neolithic
(Boivin 2004b: 67–68; see also Wengrow 1998). And while clay itself may seem
visually rather dull, its properties could be ‘enhanced’ by adding various different
types of temper. For instance, Typical Comb Ware pottery is sometimes tempered
56 Land
with ground mica, which was probably chosen because of its gold-like sheen, and
the organic tempers of Late Comb Ware –such as seashells, feathers and plant
remains –probably carried symbolic references to the sea, the sky and the living
world, in addition to making the vessels more durable.
It is against this background that clay work emerges as a possible means of
reflecting on, and restructuring, human–environment relations. The responsiveness
of clay (it engages with people working on it) is critically important to this function
of clay work. That is, clay readily appears as a ‘living’ and sentient substance which
can feel, for instance, tired, vibrating or unpredictable (Bankson 2008: 12;Timmons
and MacDonald 2008: 88). In other words, there is a dialogic or social dimension
to clay work. This is why clay and clay work can engender numerous different
kinds of responses, sensations and emotions in people, explaining why clay work has
therapeutic properties, and indeed even spiritual and magical dimensions (Foster
1997; Sholt and Gavron 2006; Timmons and MacDonald 2008; Bat Or 2010). The
very practice of clay work can therefore be meaningful in itself as a kind of a medi-
tative activity which enables gaining an alternative perspective on oneself and the
surrounding world –a means of ‘working out’ things both literally and figuratively
(see Bankson 2008; Timmons and MacDonald 2008).
Archaeologically, this existential dimension of clay work is perhaps most obvious
in the making and handling of clay figurines (see Bailey 2007, 2014), as well as a
FIGURE 3.3 Neolithic clay figurines of an elk (a), an anthropomorph (?) (b) and an

ornitomorph (c) on the left and miscellaneous burned clay finds (lumps, balls, discs,
fragments of bars) on the right. Photo: Teemu Mökkönen.
variety of more obscure ceramic finds, such as fired clay balls and lumps, which
suggest that the very manipulation of clay was meaningful in itself (Figure 3.3). The
purpose of the apparently idle handling of clay can be understood as ‘meditating’
on human relationships with land, soils and the underground world. Touching
and feeling clay –rolling clay balls and other kinds of toying with the substance –
afforded developing and maintaining personal relationships with the land, which in
turn contributed to knowing soils on an ‘intimate’ level beyond the purely physical
properties of land and soils. The sense of touch produces situational knowledge
about the world and breaks down the division between self and the world (Bailey
2014), which feeds an awareness of the deeply interrelated nature of reality and
existence. Like animals, clay is ‘good to think with’ (cf. Levi-Strauss 1962) due to its
properties and associations. In this view, clay figurines would ultimately be –regard-
less of what they were intended to represent visually –about recognizing that land
and soils had such person-like qualities as sentiency and sociality.
Neolithic clay figurines and indeterminate ‘lumps’ of burnt clay finds can be
conceived as materialized ‘conversations’ between people, the land and the soils, in a
setting where the latter were taking on new meanings and becoming woven into the
lived world in a new manner. The restructuring of human–land relations through
clay work in the Neolithic can be compared to how clay sculpting, according to Bat
Or (2010), facilitates the development of the mother–child relationship. Bat Or’s
study suggests that the engagement of first-time mothers in sculpting themselves
and their child in clay activated and fostered parental mentalization. Clay would
have been a particularly good medium for the broadly similar processing of human-
land relations in the Neolithic not only because clay is earth but also because of its
malleability and active and responsive character as a substance.
Living in an inspirited world
The notion that earth and soils have väki –a ‘mana-like’ spiritual power –is well-
attested in later Finnish ethnographic sources. Finnish folklore describes väki as
an impersonal ‘supernatural’ potency of material things –not only of earth and
soils but also of water, forest, fire, death and iron, among others –and as spir-
itual entities associated with various constituents of the world. Väki illustrates in
a particularly clear manner how human life in the North unfolded in relation to
a rich ‘enchanted’ reality, which people shared with a host of non-human beings
and powers and where the material and spiritual were inextricably intertwined in
daily activities. Folklore accounts have been recorded mainly in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, but the concept of the spirits of natural and cultural places
can safely be assumed to date back several millennia, possibly all the way to the
Stone Age.
The perception of the environment as pregnant with spiritual presence is cen-
tral to the principle of mutuality and sociality that characterizes engagements with
the environment in northern cultures (see Ingold 2000). Importantly, this recip-
rocal relationship between people and the non-human world was embedded in
58 Land
experience rather than abstract belief. Encountering a nature spirit, for instance,
involved recognizing that a given tree or other landscape element behaved in a
manner characteristic of a sentient, conscious being (cf. Ingold 2000: 90–100;
2006: 16). Things were not always what they first seemed to be: certain animals
in certain situations could actually be witches, certain bodies of water could be
spiritual beings and so forth. Knowing this kind of environment, and engaging
with it appropriately, required continuous attentiveness to one’s surroundings. Folk
beliefs concerning non-human beings and the extraordinary properties of things
were embedded in and arose from people’s practical everyday engagement with the
world. Seemingly mundane activities, such as building a house or keeping livestock,
thus required that those properties were taken into account.
This is illustrated in Finnish folklore associated with the founding of a new
house or farmstead, which involved various considerations that are not practical
or ‘rational’ in a modern view. For example, certain types of places were preferred
or avoided for reasons that had to do with spiritual powers of certain landscape
elements, such as particular species of trees (Korhonen 2009: 262–263). It was also
advisable not to build at a site where a house had previously burned down, so
as to avoid the disaster from happening again. Sleeping at a prospective building
site was one means of finding out whether or not the place was suitable for a
house, because sleeping was a way of connecting with the spirit world. The world
experienced in sleep was apparently considered quite real in early modern Finland
(Eilola 2003: 178, 184–185; Vilkuna 1997), and sleeping can perhaps be under-
stood as a means of seeing ‘this world’ and its spiritual dimensions from a different
perspective than while awake (see also Greenwood 2009).
The inspirited house
Houses are universally invested with a plethora of symbolic and cosmological
meanings and likened to living beings (e.g. Blier 1983; Carsten and Hugh-Jones
1995; Rapoport 1969). As Mariconda (2007: 268) writes,
A house provides a sense of containment, of enclosure, warmth, protection

from the elements, a sense of intimacy and nurture. As such, it is an extension
of the Mother archetype. Home is the center of one’s existence and one’s
security. A profound affect inevitably accrues to one’s house over time; few
can leave their childhood homes without regret or feel a deep complex of
emotions upon seeing it again after a space of years.
This is also true to northern cultures in which the meanings of the house must
be considered against shamanistic–animistic cosmology. Combining archaeological,
historical and folklore materials within a relational framework affords insights
into the perception of and engagement with houses, that is, the shared lives and
entanglements of people and houses in the North that go beyond a mere subject–
object dualism.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of objects hidden in buildings have been documented

in the Nordic world both at archaeological excavations and from buildings that
are still standing. They were deposited in the course of various ritual activities
related, for example, to laying the foundations of a building, averting witchcraft
or offering protection from lighting. The specific functions and meanings of such
deposition practices have varied, even though they have usually been understood
in general terms as ‘offerings’ or ‘sacrifices’ to household spirits. But whatever the
culturally specific motivations of concealing objects, they nonetheless hint at a spe-
cial relationship between people and buildings in different times, places and cultural
contexts.
In a recent study, Hukantaival (2016) identified well over 200 concealed finds,
dating from the thirteenth to twentieth century, and closer to 800 mentions of such
finds in folklore accounts from Finland alone. The total number of the known
building concealments is difficult to estimate, but Swann (1996) listed over 1,000
finds from a number of European countries, the United States and Australia, in the
mid-1990s. While the phenomenon of hiding objects in the foundations or else-
where in the structure of buildings has attracted some scholarly attention since the
early twentieth century, and increasingly since the 1980s, characteristically ‘inter-
pretive’ and theoretically informed accounts of these finds from historical-period
contexts have begun to appear only fairly recently (e.g. Houlbrook 2013, 2017;
Hukantaival 2016). Although building concealments have been identified in the
northern European world from (later) prehistoric to recent-past contexts, early
modern finds seem to dominate the record.
The variety of concealed objects is substantial, and this variation can some-
times be observed even within single sites, as in the case of the foundation
deposits documented at the excavations of seventeenth-century Tornio on the
northernmost Baltic Sea coast. A number of finds, more or less securely iden-
tified as foundations deposits, have been discovered in Tornio, with the finds
ranging from a broken cooking pot buried under a corner of a house to an
iron bar and a set of bear claws placed in building foundations (Herva and
Ylimaunu 2009; Herva 2010a; Nurmi 2011). The variety of concealments not-
withstanding, certain objects are recurrently present. Shoes, garments and the
so-called witch bottles were frequently concealed in Britain (e.g. Merrifield
1987; Hoggard 2004), whereas quicksilver, coins and animal remains are most
commonly mentioned in Finnish folklore accounts, while tools and prehistoric
objects are most common among the documented concealments (Hukantaival
2016: 75–90).
Even if it is not always readily evident why particular objects were chosen to be
deposited, they must have all been considered as objects of some exceptional power
or quality. Prehistoric stone artefacts, for example, have widely been conceived as
materialized thunderbolts and thus, when incorporated in the structure of buildings,
as providing protection from lightning (Johanson 2009). In the same vein, iron was
regarded as having ‘supernatural’ or ‘spiritual’ potency in Finnish folklore, which
was presumably why iron objects commonly occur as concealments. Likewise, such
60 Land
seemingly mundane objects as shoes can be understood as special artefacts because

they are distinctly personal: they ‘retain the shape, the personality, the essence of the
wearer’ (Swann 1996: 56, quoted in Houlbrook 2013: 107). They can also be seen
as liminal objects, which in Houlbrooks’ (2013) view makes shoes as efficient ‘spirit
traps’ and hence suitable for concealments.
In early modern times, when the making of special building deposits flourished,
houses and households were considered to be permeable, porous and vulnerable,
which called for protective measures to strengthen the boundaries of houses –
not only physically but also through supernatural means. However, building
concealments can also be considered in somewhat broader terms of ‘inspiriting’
houses, which in turn needs to be seen in a yet broader framework of promoting
and maintaining intimate relationships between people and their houses in the
North. Some of the concealed artefacts –such as shoes and clothes –would seem to
relate directly to the idea of an intimate, personal relationship between people and
houses by making ‘parts of people’ as parts of houses (Hukantaival 2016: 128). The
same basic mechanism applies to the purpose of building concealments also more
generally: their deposition ‘infused’ buildings with the special powers or qualities
the deposited objects were considered to have. Concealments thus contributed to
the making of buildings into something more than just a backdrop of life or objects
composed of passive, ‘dead’ matter.
The Nordic folklore tradition of household spirits provides important insights
into how people understood and related with houses in the North until a recent
past (Haavio 1942; Sarmela 1994: 158–164; Jauhiainen 1999: 216–225). Spirits
were active in various domains of life, as they could take part in household work
as well as warn or save people in danger and guard the morals of the household
(Sarmela 1994: 160, 163; Jauhiainen 1999: 216–222). Their exact character, how-
ever, is curiously vague and ambiguous. Household spirits appear as invisible forces,
or they could be old men or animals, and were occasionally identified with parts
of buildings themselves, most commonly with the fireplace and sometimes also
with timber (Haavio 1942: 171–177, 192–196; Sarmela 1994: 159–160; Jauhiainen
1999: 225). Spirits were sometimes identified with the founder of the household
and thought to have come to being, for instance, when the first course of timber
was laid out or the first fire in the house was lit (Sarmela 1994: 159; Jauhiainen
1999: 216). The vagueness of the spirits notwithstanding, they were taken very
seriously. Spirits were critically important to the success of a household, and good
relations were maintained with spirits by, for instance, offering them food and drink
(Jauhiainen 1999: 226–228).
Most importantly, household spirits were perceived, rather than merely believed,
to exist. They were responsive and engaged with people, and encounters with them
were reported in a matter-of-factly fashion still in the early twentieth century (see
Haavio 1942: 72–109; Sarmela 1994: 162–163). In addition to occasionally seeing
them, people could hear the sounds that the spirits made or otherwise become
aware of their presence. In recent popular imagination, household spirits have often
been understood as gnome-like beings who cohabited houses with people, but
this image of household spirits is probably of a late date, mediated by fairytale

traditions (see Haavio 1942: 214; Sarmela 1994: 160; Jauhiainen 1999: 216–222).
Rather than reflecting a belief in some independent, immaterial spiritual entities,
the tradition of household spirits can be interpreted as reflecting the idea that
houses themselves, as material things, were perceived as living beings with person-
like characteristics. Houses were, in some respects, similar to people and the rela-
tionship between houses and their inhabitants thus of a social character, as befits the
traditional northern animistic–shamanistic cosmology (see further Herva 2010a). In
this view, concealed finds were not directed outwards to beings or forces external
to households but to the buildings themselves and contributed to the making of
buildings as living and social beings.
The traditional notions concerning household spirits seem to bear an interesting
resonance with the theme of ghosts and haunting, which has recently attracted
considerable attention especially in geography (e.g. Edensor 2005; Holloway and
Kneale 2008). It is also of an interest here that ghosts, according to Davidson (2005),
are a typically ‘northern’ cultural phenomenon (in however broad a definition of
the North), and northern folklore is indeed rich in accounts of the dead residing in
or visiting the world of the living (Figure 3.4).
The relationship between household spirits and ghosts –or haunted houses –
remains unclear, but both express a similar basic idea that there is more to houses
than just passive matter and that houses ‘abduct’ (cf. Gell 1998) properties from their
inhabitants and thus become, to some degree, continuous with them. Like house-
hold spirits, ghosts are most often experienced through auditory phenomena –such
FIGURE 3.4 The so-called ‘blue house’ is one of the many allegedly haunted
buildings in the northern city of Oulu, the ‘ghost capital’ of Finland. The author and
ethnographer Samuli Paulaharju lived in the house in the early twentieth century.
62 Land
as footsteps, knocking and music –or a vague sense of presence. Both seem to be

in the habit of throwing things around in fits of anger. It is also significant that
haunting experiences typically take place during the night and often in derelict
places, both of which can be understood as providing a setting for a heightened, or
altered, sense and awareness of the environment.
Whatever the ‘true’ nature and causes of ghostly experiences, their embedded-
ness in experience, rather than blind belief, highlights the relevance of relational
knowing and understanding of reality also in modern world contexts. Houses can
be seen to transcend the subject–object division and can be understood as person-
like beings, even if this transgression of modernist categories takes different forms
and expressions contingent to their specific broader cultural settings. Although
this applies to different times and cultures around the globe, it is perhaps especially
clearly recognized in the northern world, where the notion of houses as con-
scious and sentient beings is embedded in millennia-long shamanistic–animistic
understanding of the world.
4
FORESTS AND HUNTING
The forest in northern landscapes and mindscapes

Because woodlands comprise one of the dominant landscape types in Fennoscandia,
human life on this northern fringe of Europe has always unfolded in a close rela-
tionship with forests. Woodlands have been the scene for a host of different kinds
of activities, ranging from hunting, fishing, berry-and mushroom-picking to pas-
ture, swidden cultivation, logging and tar-making. In particular, hunting has been
critically important to northern ways of life and thought, and in regions outside
the ‘heartlands’ of Scandinavia continues to be so, as indicated, for example, by
the social prominence of hunting clubs in rural communities and the very high
numbers of hunting weapons owned by Norwegians, Finns and Swedes. However,
even though they tend to be associated with ‘wild’ nature and foraging societies,
and may appear untouched to the untrained eye, the vast northern forests have been
heavily modified cultural landscapes since time immemorial, used by both foraging
and agricultural communities.
The perceptions of and attitudes to forests are, and have presumably always been,
rich, diverse and contextual, but some general trends in ‘northern’ ways of relating
with forests can be identified. Traces of various prehistoric and historical activities
in northern woodlands have been identified archaeologically (ranging from the
so-called stray finds of Iron Age artefacts to culturally modified trees of the histor-
ical period), but many aspects of how forests were entangled within northern lived
worlds and mindscapes are still poorly understood. Forests have been regarded as a
source of timber and game, but the less tangible consequences of living in a forested
landscape –for example, related to movement, perception and an understanding
of life in general –have not been a major concern in the archaeology of northern
Fennoscandia, despite some exceptions (e.g. Holm 2002).
64 Land
Northern boreal forests have never been a pristine non- human wilderness
although their populace has often been overlooked in archaeological and historical
narratives. For example, archaeological maps of Iron Age Finland tend to show a
handful of small centres of occupation and give the impression that the rest of the
country was empty –which, as we know from such data as finds of cereal pollen
(e.g. Alenius et al. 2013; Alenius et al. 2017), toponyms and folklore sources is
simply not true. Historical narratives offer a romanticized view of agriculturalists
travelling bands of fur trappers from the South exploiting the northern wilderness
and gradually establishing human presence through forest clearance –a process
known by the Finnish term of eränkäynti. That there was a preexisting populace is
not explicitly denied, but it has been generally ignored as ‘wandering Lapps’ of little
consequence.
Historically, the northern forests have often been seen primarily as a material
resource. This notion of trees and woodlands as a source of wealth –the ‘green gold’
of the wilderness –has its roots in the tar industry of the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries and rose to prominence with the emergence of the lumber industry
in the first half of the nineteenth century. It has inevitably also affected the ways
archaeologists and historians have perceived the significance of forests in human
life in ancient times. For instance, commercial fur trapping has been routinely and
without much reflection described as the foundation of wealth for northern com-
munities in the Iron Age.
There can be little doubt that forests have been economically important in the
Nordic world at different times. The beginnings of industrial mining in Sweden –
a cornerstone of the Swedish economy and identity since the medieval period
(Chapter 2) –relied not only on the abundance of mineral riches but also of wood
and water. Likewise, the fact that some of the largest sawmills in Europe around the
turn of the twentieth century were located in Finland demonstrates the importance
of forests. However, this discourse of forests-as-wealth offers a decidedly one-sided
view of the role that forests –as an integral element of northern life-worlds –have
played at different times, and how northerners have perceived and engaged with
woodlands.
Folklore and symbolism associated with forests is extremely rich in northern
Europe, and both scholars and the general public are often familiar with it, but it
tends to be viewed as mere fairy-tales and disconnected and separate from ‘real’
forests. In other words, archaeologists and historians have regarded the forest in
‘objective’ terms, as a passive resource and backdrop of northern lives, with little
attention to the ‘phenomenology’ of forests (but see e.g. Holm 2002; Noble 2017).
Yet, living in or close to a forest has inevitable implications on how one perceives
and experiences the world, culturally signifies it and finds a way in a terrain where
wide vistas are typically not available (e.g. Turnbull 1961; Gell 1995). Folklorists,
anthropologists and geographers have explored the cognitive and experiential
dimensions of forests (and trees) from various perspectives (e.g. Rival 1998; Jones
and Cloke 2002) but often overlook its more practical aspects. In sum, the nor-
thern forests tend to be viewed either in purely utilitarian or symbolic terms –a
Forests and hunting 65
dichotomy that is likely to have been deeply alien to the forest-dwellers of the
premodern period.
Northern perceptions and meanings of forests, and relationships with them, are
very diverse and have varied through time. The Finns, for instance, have identified
themselves closely with forests. Although partly a product of nationalist rhetoric,
the close association between the Finns and forests has also been recognized by
other groups of people. It is reflected in early modern Scandinavian accounts of
the so-called ‘Forest Finns’, or slash-and-burn agriculturalists originally from the
Finnish province of Savo, who migrated to the wilderness areas of northern Sweden
and the Swedish–Norwegian border region in order to settle and increase the tax
revenue from those regions. Finns were ‘used’ for this purpose by the Swedish
Crown because unlike the peasants of more temperate regions, they possessed the
know-how of making a living through agriculture in the boreal forests.
The same narrative adheres to the seventeenth-century Swedish colony of New
Sweden in the Delaware Valley (present-day United States), where Finns according
to some accounts developed unusually close relations and mutual understanding
with the Native Americans because of their familiarity with living with the forest,
the institution of the sauna or sweat lodge and so on. Later on, Finns migrating
to Minnesota, Michigan, Ontario and other northern parts of North America
gained similar repute (Dorson 2008). As a testimony to the close relationships
that developed between later Finnish immigrants and the native Ojibwa, a small
descendant community that identifies themselves as ‘Finndians’ still thrives in
Minnesota and Ontario in the United States and Canada (Kettu and Seppälä 2016).
By contrast, Norwegians generally identify themselves with mountains, on the
one hand, and the sea on the other, and in Norse myth and folklore, forests emerge
as scary places inhabited by trolls. Both Scandinavian pre-Christian cosmology and
Norwegian nationalist rhetoric since the nineteenth century have portrayed the
farm as a proper domain of human life, whereas the forest is seen as a hostile and
dangerous place (Holm 2002, 2005). Indeed, the tripartite world of Norse myth-
ology –with gods living in Asgard, humans inhabiting Midgard and giants Utgard –
can be seen to reflect a sedentary farmer’s worldview and environmental relations
and appears to reproduce the cognitive organization of the farm (Holm 2002: 67;
2005: 176). Although the dualism between the human infield and non-human out-
field is probably an ideological construction, at least to a certain degree, the intimate
knowledge of and relationship with forests ascribed to the ‘Forest Finns’ –including
their alleged ability to control forests and transform themselves into animals –
seemed alien and frightening to historical-period Norwegians (Holm 2002, 2005).
The historically known Finnish perceptions of woodlands are quite different
from those of, say, Danes although such national-or ethnic-level characterizations
are necessarily somewhat simplistic and mask a wide spectrum of variation. For
example, hunters and fishermen in the North of present-day Finland have related
differently to forests from farmers in the south-western parts of the country –
and the very notion of a ‘Finnish’ ethnicity is a comparatively recent construct.
Nonetheless, there is a real and long-standing division between the North and
66 Land
South in the Nordic world. Southern parts of Scandinavia –especially Denmark

and Scania in present-day Sweden –have been distinctively agricultural regions
since at least the Bronze Age, with strong contacts to the central and southern
European cultural sphere. By contrast, the lifeways of the central and northern parts
of Fennoscandia have unfolded in a closer relation to the northern circumpolar
world until recently and, in some regions, up to the present day.
Agriculturalists have seen the forest as a strange and enchanted domain, as exem-
plified by the stories of the Brothers Grimm and H.C. Andersen (see further Jones
2011), which reflect an alienation from the forest-world. A farmer’s concern is
clearly reflected in, for instance, folklore themes such as domestic animals becoming
magically captured by the forces of the forest, whereas the eroticization of the forest,
discussed below, arguably originates in a hunter’s cultural world. That such themes
are found side by side in folklore is characteristic of the Nordic world, where
cosmological and folklore notions are often layered and mixed, reflecting ideas
from different time horizons and cultural contexts in a region that is in many ways
a borderland –between farming and foraging, circumpolar hunting cultures and
central European/Mediterranean influences and Indo-European and Finno-Ugric
language groups.
Engaging with trees
The prehistoric and early historical period populace of northernmost Europe shared
their world with a wide range of non-human beings (e.g. Pentikäinen 1995; Siikala
2013; Pulkkinen 2014). Early historical sources and folklore accounts reveal a world
where, for example, plants, animals, rocks or artefacts could have characteristics such
as personality, sentience, will and capacity to interact with people. This affected the
way people responded to their environment and acted as part of it: it was neces-
sary to consider also the other more or less human-like residents of the world –to
negotiate one’s place in the world.
Practices such as hugging trees and talking to them may sound like a New Age
cliché, but in northern Fennoscandia it was an ethnographic reality until recently.
In Finnish folk culture, the pine tree carried special significance: it was not only
associated with the bear (see below) but also with strength and permanence more
generally (Guenat 1994: 120–125; Sarmela 1994: 38–43). It was regarded as the
‘tree of life’, in some sense, and was typically chosen as a ‘karsikko’ tree –that is, a
tree that was modified (branches of standing trees cut off partly or completely and
crosses carved on the trunk) during funeral proceedings to mark off the boundary
between the domains of the living and the dead (Vilkuna 1992; Kovalainen and
Seppo 2006). The pine tree was by no means the only species of tree with cultural
meanings and symbolism, however, but there is a rich body of northern lore and
symbolism associated with basically all species of trees (e.g. Guenat 1994). Folklore
material provides insights into the shared lives and bond between people and trees
and shows that such bonds have been maintained until recently. Kovalainen and
Seppo (2006), for example, surveyed historical mentions of ‘special trees’ in Finland
and managed to identify a number of old ‘sacrificial trees’ still in the late 1990s.
Tree symbolism and ‘ritual’ practices directed to or involving trees are by no
means unique to the northern world but a universal phenomenon attested in
different parts of the globe from prehistory to the present day (e.g. Rival 1998;
Goodison 2010). There would appear to be something special to trees that makes
them attractive to people and susceptible to cultural signifying. Anthropologists
and archaeologists have long recognized the prominence of trees in the rituals and
mythologies of different cultures, as extensively and most famously explored by Sir
James Frazer (1890) in The Golden Bough already in the late nineteenth century.
Some well-known European examples of the cosmological and ritual associations
of trees include the Norse/Germanic concept of the world-tree, Yggdrasil, which
supports and binds together the different planes of the cosmos, the Great Oak
of Kalevala poems that has a similar function or the ‘sacred trees’ depicted in the
Bronze Age art of Minoan Crete.
The symbolic meanings of and engagements with Minoan trees are commonly
conceived in religious terms, such as ‘tree worship’, in one sense or the other, or as
objects symbolizing divine beings. A common problem with such readings, how-
ever, is that they tend to reduce trees into mere passive objects that people ‘paint
over’ with symbolic and religious ideas. Trees are seen as an empty canvas for cul-
tural projections rather than contributing to the signification process (cf. Cloke
and Jones 2002). Yet, in the light of northern ethnography, trees should be seen as
agents and active beings, which in turn calls for a closer attention to the materiality
and behaviour of trees. In other words, we should study how ‘meanings’ emerge in
dialogue between people and trees and are thus connected to the perception and
experience of trees and engagement with them in the context of the lived world.
Trees –some of them anyway –were regarded as inspirited person-like beings
because they manifested person-like behaviour in certain situations the way persons
do, such as taking contact with people in an apparently intentional manner. It is
clear that non-human inhabitants of woodlands were regarded as real-world entities
that were taken seriously and whom people could and did encounter. There are,
for instance, early modern court cases where people were charged of sleeping
with ‘Maidens of the Forest’ –spirit beings who were typically described as beau-
tiful women seen from the front but tree-like from behind (Liliequist 1992: 131).
Maidens of the Forest illustrate the broader concept of trees as potentially conscious
social beings who more or less actively engaged with people, even if the social char-
acter of trees, grounded on attentiveness to trees and what they do, probably took
subtler forms most of the time.
The Estonian folklorist Madis Arukask (2017) describes communication and
personal rituals with trees among two small Finno-Ugric peoples living in European
Russia, the Votes and the Veps, whose subsistence was until recently based on slash-
and-burn agriculture, with hunting and gathering as a large component. His field-
work demonstrated that an animistic worldview (intertwined with folk Orthodoxy),
in which trees could be active agents, persists even today among the older members
68 Land
of the community, despite the trials of World War II, Stalin’s minority policies and
state-propagated Soviet atheism. In 2010, Arukask interviewed a Vepsian woman
born in 1932, who described how she would make an offering of dried bread at
a birch tree and ask it for strength and energy when entering the forest to pick
mushrooms and berries:
I’ll make an offering […] for the master and the mistress […]. I reach in the
forest (a specific) place, I bow to this place: thank you masters and mistresses,
you’ve given me health, given strength, given berries, mushrooms. Thank you
my dear, my beloved forest, I say all this. I walk in the forest until I am tired.
At big birch trees, I stop, such a hillock, [so much] to climb to the top (?) […]
I hug the birch tree –you darling birch tree, you’ve got fresh leaves, you’ve
got thick branches, you’re my dear (???), you give me health, give strength,
help me to get home today.
[Arukask 2017: 174; question marks in the
original interview transcript]
Rather than ‘tree worship’, this kind of special relationship with trees –whether
specific individual trees or trees in general –might be better understood in terms of
attentiveness and knowledge: of how trees are in the world, what they do and how
they influence human life (cf. Bird-David 1999; Harvey 2005: 104–106). That is,
trees were perceived to do things and behave in a particular manner, suggesting that
they have special properties or powers and giving rise to the recognition of trees as
social and inspirited beings with person-like qualities. For instance, the association
of coniferous trees with durability, longevity and even eternity is grounded on
their evergreen nature, in contrast with deciduous trees. The latter were viewed as
being in some sense closer to human beings and also ‘wiser’ and more ‘feminine’ in
character than the ‘masculine’ pine and spruce (Guenat 1994; Puustjärvi 2013: 91–
94; Malinen 2015). Folklore sources also indicate that individual trees of the same
species may have been regarded as males or females depending on their shape or
other properties (Guenat 1994: 120–125), which reflects deep attentiveness to trees
and a recognition of their individuality.
Besides individuality, it was also recognized that trees are responsive beings and
affect human life, which is especially clear in the case of household trees and trees
that otherwise have a special bond with particular people. Folklore-sources provide
descriptions of how the destinies of a household were tied to its ‘guardian tree’,
which could be located in the yard, a nearby field or further away. Such a tree could
be of various different species –although the rowan features prominently, perhaps
because the intense red of its berries that may have evoked (human) blood –but
it usually had something distinctive about its shape or size (Haavio 1992: 47–49).
Members of the household were expected to be ‘obedient’ to the tree, treat it with
respect, give offerings to it and in no way harm it (Haavio 1992: 37–38, 40–42).
It has been suggested that the tree itself was not subject to veneration but rather
marked a household shrine where household spirits were worshipped (Haavio
1992: 42–43). However, from a relational perspective, it makes sense that the tree
itself was perceived as, or developed into, a being with person-like qualities, rather
than being associated with some ghost-like entity which was separate and different
from the tree itself.
The relationship between the household and the tree was a very close one –
the death of a branch, for example, was taken to mark the death of a family
member. Likewise, there is a tradition of planting or naming a tree after the
first-born of the family, which established a ‘causal’ link between a person and a
tree with its own life-force (Malinen 2015: 51, 54). Malinen (2015: 51) quotes a
story from the 1930s of an elderly woman who, in visiting her childhood home,
had embraced the large rowan tree that she herself had planted in her adoles-
cence and said that they would both die soon –and next spring the tree fell in
a storm and the woman died. The sacred tree, thus, was a family tree in a very
literal sense. It contributed to the success of the household, and the members of
the household in turn regarded it as a person-like being, engaging in a two-way
social relationship with it. In other words, social relations within the household
were extended or externalized to the very land and place where people lived
and intimately woven into the life of the household. Rather than symbols of the
family, sacred trees were family members. This is what, in our view, the spiritual
dimension of human–environment relations is ultimately about: recognizing that
the relationship between people and their surroundings is deeply reciprocal in a
way that cannot properly be understood in terms of subject–object dichotomy or
other related dualisms.
The perceptions of trees and ways of engaging with them are significantly more
difficult to assess in prehistoric contexts, but historical and folklore material can be
taken to provide some clues about the general character of human–tree relations
also in a deeper past of the northern world, particularly in the view of long-term
cultural and cosmological continuities in the North. One of the very earliest his-
torical sources to mention Finland, a papal bull sent out by Pope Gregory IX in
1229 to bishop Thomas of Finland, gave the latter the right to confiscate all pagan
sacred groves and cultic sites (luci et delubra), indicating that the pre-Christian reli-
gion of the Finns focused on sacred groves. A second letter, sent out by the Pope in
1237, suggests that some degree of confiscation had taken place and that the areas
confiscated were not small groves consisting of a handful of trees but rather large
stretches of woodland regarded as sacred (Viljamaa 2017). In the sixteenth century,
Bishop Mikael Agricola of Turku, south-western Finland, wrote a short poem on
the old Finnish ‘pagan gods’ which identified Tapio as the god of the forest and
game animals. At the end of the poem, Agricola observed that, besides the deities
he listed, many other things were ‘worshipped’ as well, including ‘rocks and tree-
stubs’. The practice of ‘tree worship’ continued beyond Agricola’s time, as indicated
by the ecclesiastical law that was passed in the late seventeenth century and specif-
ically forbade giving offerings to trees (Haavio 1992: 53–55), which proposes that
the practice was still common and therefore of a concern to the ecclesiastical and
secular authorities of Sweden.
70 Land
The Kalevala poetry indicates that Finns learned the ‘wisdom of the trees’ from
Sampsa Pellervoinen, the deity (or the guardian spirit) of the fertility of land and
forest, which encompassed intimate knowledge about different species of trees and
the places where they grow (Holm 2005: 177). Like certain other deities featuring
in the Kalevala poetry, such as Tapio the forest deity, Sampsa Pellervoinen can per-
haps be interpreted as a personification –possibly of a rather late date –of the life-
force, sentience, consciousness, spirituality and agency residing in the forest and its
manifold non-human constituents. In a similar manner, the various spiritual beings
inhabiting woodlands, such as the Maidens of the Forest mentioned above, can be
considered as reflecting, and arising from, a perception-and experience-based sense
of mutuality and reciprocity between people, trees and other elements of forest
environments.
Humans and animals in the North

Although agricultural practices were introduced in the northerly latitudes very
early on, possibly already in the sixth millennium bc, it was slow to advance or
replace hunting and fishing as the main sources of livelihood. Still in the nineteenth
century ad, hunting and trapping remained a crucial complementary source of
food in the more remote areas of Finland, Sweden and Karelia, and thus the impact
of southern agricultural social systems remained rather low in these regions until
the modern period. Wild animals continued to occupy an important role not just
for livelihood but also culturally, preserving elements of an archaic circumpolar
hunting culture.
Some animal species were clearly symbolically more important than others.
In the prehistoric art of northern Fennoscandia, two animal species completely
dominate the picture: the elk and the deer. There are some exceptions to this
rule, as for example at Lake Onega swans and other waterfowl are more common
than cervids (Lahelma 2012a) while belugas are prominent at River Vyg (Gjerde
2010), and in southern Scandinavia, the ox and the horse are commonly depicted
in representations of the Bronze Age and later. But overall, the there is no question
that the large cervid species most occupied the thoughts of hunter– gatherer
populations in northern Fennoscandia (and even throughout the entire circum-
polar zone). Humans and elk/deer are brought together not only as hunters and
prey but as sharing the same essence, and even in some sense interchangeable. This
interchangeability seems to be expressed in certain rock art images, where elks and
humans are merged or transform into each other, but also sometimes in portable art,
such as the bone comb from the Pitted Ware site of Gullrum at the Swedish island
of Gotland (Almgren 1907). This remarkable artefact (dated to ca. 3200–2300 bc)
shows an elk with a human head in the place of a tail, as if manifesting the essential
sameness of elks and humans (Figure 4.1).
As observed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998), such a notion of ‘sameness
of the soul’ of all living beings seems to be characteristic of hunter–gatherer peoples
throughout the world. Viveiros de Castro takes his examples from the Brazilian
FIGURE 4.1 A bone comb from the Middle Neolithic site of Gullrum (Gotland,
Sweden), showing an elk and a human seemingly merged together. Photo: Gunnel
Jansson/The Swedish History Museum.
Amazon, but as emphatically pointed out by Rane Willerslev (2007), who has
conducted fieldwork among the Siberian Yukaghirs,Viveiros de Castro’s ideas apply,
down to small detail, also to the worldview of the Yukaghirs and many other cir-
cumpolar hunting peoples. The perspectivist view holds that rather all living beings
share a ‘human perspective’, that is, from the point of view of each species, they are
humans and all the others seem like animals. While the soul is the same, bodies,
however, are unstable and ‘open’ –an outer appearance can be changed like a
piece of clothing –and when different species come into close contact (such as
in hunting) this sometimes happens (Figure 4.2). A person may find him-or her-
self as having transformed into an elk or a reindeer, often without at first realizing
it, marrying a reindeer girl, eating reindeer food with great pleasure, and so forth.
Only some subtle clues, such as the food consumed by the adopted band –and real-
izing that it is not meat but moss (Willerslev 2007: 470) –may provide a clue that
the perspectives have shifted.
72 Land
FIGURE 4.2 An older carving of a wild reindeer at Alta, northern Norway, has been
transformed into a bear (or a deer/bear hybrid) by the addition of a head and a back
hump characteristic of a bear. The two bear cubs and a row of bear tracks leading to
the animal are probably also later additions. Photo: Jan Magne Gjerde.
This essential sameness is reflected in numerous ways in the archaeology of the

region. To take just one example, in the Mesolithic burial ground of Skateholm,
Sweden, humans and dogs were given equally elaborate burials –the dogs receiving
exactly the same kinds of burial rites as humans, with red ochre and grave goods
deposited in ways that echo the human burials (Larsson 1990). Eleven dog burials
have been found, and given that the total number of burials at the site is around
ninety, it is clear that the practice was not rare, and the burials are not anomalous.
This suggests that at Skateholm, dogs were viewed as valued members of the band
and little different from the human members. Indeed, in terms of grave goods, one
of the dog burials at Skateholm ranked among the richest burials at the whole
site: it had been laid in a crouched sleeping position, a red deer antler by its side,
a decorated antler hammer lay on its chest and three flint knives were placed on
its thigh.
A second important element in the human–animal relations of the northern
circumpolar hunters is a phenomenon known as animal ceremonialism, which
entails the belief that if a killed animal is ritually sent to its ‘spirit owner’ it will
be reassembled and resurrected. Because there is a limited number of animal souls
in the universe, the continuity of the hunted species crucially rests on the proper
treatment of the cadaver by the hunters, often, for example, including the ritual
burial of the bones that must all be present. Probably the best known example of
animal ceremonialism involves the rituals surrounding bear hunting, which among
the Sámi, Finns and other circumpolar peoples is ritually moved to the spirit world
in a complex ceremony that follows the hunt (Hallowell 1926; Elgström and
Manker 1984). The ceremonial returning of animal bones to the keeper of the
animal is associated especially with large and comparatively rare catch, particularly
the elk and the bear. By contrast, herd animals such as deer normally did not receive
such treatment, except perhaps for the first catch of the hunting season (Siikala
2013: 369).
Seducing the prey
A wide range of rock art sites associated with hunter–gatherer populations in nor-
thern Fennoscandia depict scenes where men, women and animals (usually elk or
deer) are involved in a sexually charged act. For instance, at Nämforsen (Sweden)
and Kanozero (north-western Russia), elks appear to be ‘monitoring’ a human
couple having sex (Hallström 1960; Kolpakov and Shumkin 2012). Sexually aroused
males accompanied by animals are found at several sites, such as Kanozero, where a
phallic male figure brandishing an elk-headed staff is faced by a capercaillie. Even
acts of zoophilia, or humans penetrating animals, appear to be depicted at a number
of sites (Lahelma 2007).
Timo Miettinen (2000: 126–127) has noted that images of elks are sometimes
also combined with human figures. This is the case with the Pyhänpää painting,
Finland, where the human is merged with the back leg of the elk, but it is more
common to find a human figure positioned near the hind, sometimes extending a
hand towards the animal. Because of the rather suggestive position, these images are
here referred to as ‘bestiality scenes’. Examples of this theme are found in the Finnish
rock paintings of Tupavuori, Jyrkkävuori, Haukkavuori (Kotojärvi), Vierunvuori,
Saraakallio and Salmenvuori and occur also at the carvings of Nämforsen and at
least two Swedish rock painting sites, at lakes Åbosjön and Skärvången (Kivikäs
2003: 146). Remarkably similar images occur even in the Siberian rock carving site
of Tomskaya Pisanicha (Okladnikov and Martynov 1972), where bestiality scenes,
elk-boats, horned anthropomorphs, two-headed elks and other images familiar
from North European rock art are represented.
A variety of different interpretations can be offered to these strange scenes, and
they are not necessarily all related to the same phenomena. In any case, it is dif-
ficult to see them as depictions of real-world acts of bestiality, as from a purely
practical point of view, it is quite difficult to imagine how a human male could
penetrate a living elk cow without getting killed in the process. One of us (Lahelma
2007) has earlier argued that they may be related to the notion of shamanic flight,
which is often conceptualized as taking place ‘riding’ an elk or a deer into the
Otherworld. The practice of shamanism is steeped in corporeality and sexuality
(although this aspect of shamanism is often played down in older ethnographic
74 Land
accounts (Mandelstam Balzer 1996)), with shamans sometimes perceived as having

sexual relationships with their spirit helpers, and even the act of drumming is
likened to sexual intercourse. The argument was made that scenes of zoophilia –
or of touching the hind part of the elk or merging with the animal (as at sites like
Pyhänpää, Finland, and Nämforsen, Sweden) –could thus represent a sense of co-
essence and sexual attraction between the shaman and his/her spirit helper beings.
While this still seems like a possible interpretation –especially for scenes where
boats, elks and humans are all merged together –it may be enriched by considering
this imagery in the light of an animistic ontology and the notion of perspectivism
discussed by Viveiros de Castro (1998). Because non-human beings are deeply
entangled in social relations with human beings, the nature of these relations can
also be sexual. In particular, the relationship between the hunter and his (or some-
times her) prey is seen in sexual terms. As Willerslev (2007: 110) points out, the
association of hunting with sex is not only found among circumpolar cultures but
is reported among hunter-gatherers across the Amazon, Africa and South-east Asia.
This is related to the art of seduction, where the hunter has to arouse the prey to
entice to it give itself up, even at the cost of its life.
Willerslev (2007: 199) further notes that he uses the female ‘her’ of the elk in his
anthropological account of the Yukaghir hunters ‘because the hunters tend to con-
ceptualize the elk as a female lover’. This is a highly interesting observation, because
it sheds light on the ages-old problem of why the elk portrayed in rock art almost
never have antlers. Some have argued that the elk are bulls in their winter or spring
attire, when they drop their horns (e.g. Taavitsainen 1978; Mikkelsen 1986), but the
notion of the elks as ‘female lovers’ of the hunter is much better in line with other
aspects of rock art. In northern and eastern parts of Finland and Karelia, a similar
mentality towards hunting persisted well into the historical period, as evidenced by
hunting spells and ceremonies recorded in the nineteenth century (Tarkka 1994;
Ilomäki 2014). The spells address both the owner of the forest and the hunted
animals as persons, seeking the approval of the owner, and both are viewed as erotic
beings that the hunter has to seduce.
In the rural parts of the region, the relationship to domestic animals was like-
wise more based on social and personal exchanges than exploitation, allowing the
animals to be viewed as individuals and persons. This resulted in more intimate –
and quite often sexual –relations between humans and animals. The historians
Jonas Liliequist (1992) and Teemu Keskisarja (2006) have drawn attention to the
curious fact that in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Sweden (which then
included Finland), bestiality was extremely harshly persecuted and viewed as a grave
social and religious problem –probably to a greater extent than anywhere else in
the world. Offenders were commonly brought to court and very harshly punished,
exceeding even contemporary witchcraft trials in this respect.
Significantly, the animals were viewed, at least to some extent, responsible
accomplices in these crimes, as in addition to many of the perpetrators, the animal
partners were also executed or burnt at stake. Although the authorities justified this
as a necessary act because the animals had been ‘polluted’, the understanding that
animals could be actively involved in seducing men is also present. For example,
some court testimonies given by witnesses suggest that a mare or a cow had offered
loving glances to the perpetrator. Keskisarja (2006), who bases his analysis on
eighteenth-century court documents from Finland, is hesitant about speculating
the role of folk beliefs and pre-Christian worldview in these events, even if he
acknowledges the radically different conception of reality expressed in the court
documents. He does conclude, however, that the perceived boundary between
humans and animals was less clear than today, which undoubtedly contributed to
the phenomenon. Ethnographers and folklorists have, perhaps unsurprisingly, been
much more willing to interpret it as being related to ancient notions of the sexual
encounter between the hunter and his prey, human–animal metamorphosis and
totemic myths concerning animal ancestors of human clans (e.g. Laaksonen and
Timonen 1997).
Elk-headed staffs –symbols of Stone Age clans?

One of the most iconic types of artefact from the northern European hunter–
gatherer Stone Age are the so called elk-headed staffs found from contexts that date
from the Mesolithic to the late Neolithic (Carpelan 1977; Lindquist 1994; Kashina
and Zhulnikov 2011). Some of the artefacts have been made of stone (e.g. finds
from Huittinen and Säkkijärvi in Finland and Karelia, respectively) and have been
shafted to a hole drilled through the artefact –the rod, presumably made of wood,
is not preserved. Others are made of antler, with the head and the rod forming a
single artefact –famous finds come from the sites of Šventoji, Lithuania and Olenyi
Ostrov, Karelia. The latter two are approximately 40 cm long and thus can have
formed actual staffs. In addition, some authors include a number of miniature ‘staffs’
made of bone in the same artefact category, but they (such as a find from Zvejnieki,
Latvia, that is only 12 cm long) may have served a different purpose.
Staffs such as this are found in a region that covers Finland, the Baltic States
and the northern parts of European Russia. While the elk-headed staffs are mostly
missing in Sweden and Norway (a single artefact made of stone has been found
from Norrlövsta in Uppland, Sweden), scenes with people holding such staffs are
depicted at a number of rock art sites, most famously Nämforsen in Sweden and Alta
in northern Norway, suggesting that they were used more widely than indicated by
the finds –and that staffs made of organic materials simply have not been preserved.
In addition to the elk-headed staffs, some examples exist also of bear-headed staffs –
a famous example comes from Paltamo, northern Finland –but such artefacts are
never depicted in rock art.
The interpretation of these artefacts has attracted a lot of discussion over the
decades. While everyone seems to agree that they are ‘ritual staffs’, precisely what
kinds of ritual they were used for, and why, remains unclear. One of the most
popular theories suggests that they are totemic emblems of prehistoric elk and bear
clans, an idea apparently first coined by the folklorist Matti Kuusi (1963). Because of
certain variations in Finnish–Karelian folk culture, some ethnologists and folklorists
76 Land
have suspected the existence of prehistoric totemic clans related to the bear and the
elk, the former being concentrated in eastern Finland and Karelia, while the latter
would have inhabited areas further to the west. Other clans, including ones related
to the black woodpecker (Dryocopus martius), the common frog and the hare, may
also have existed (Sarmela 1994). The Latinist Tuomo Pekkanen (1983) referred to
the work of the Roman historian Tacitus, who in the last passage of Germania (c.
ad 98) writes about two semi-mythological peoples occupying the extreme north
of Europe:
What further accounts we have are fabulous: as that the Hellusians and
Oxiones have the countenances and aspect of men, with the bodies and limbs
of savage beasts. This, as a thing about which I have no certain information,
I shall leave untouched.
[Tac. Germ. 46,4 ]
Even though Tacitus wisely refrains from making conclusions based on what is
clearly obscure hearsay, Pekkanen wanted to go further and suggested that the
passage could refer to Baltic Finnic peoples named after their respective totemic
animals: Hellusians would be western Finnish elk-or deer-people, their name
derived from the Greek word for deer (ellós), while the name of Oxiones would
derive from an archaic Finnic word for the bear (ohto, aksi) and refer to eastern
Finns. More recently, the anthropologist Matti Sarmela (1991) and the historian of
religion Juha Pentikäinen (2005) have adopted and further developed these ideas in
their discussions of the role of the bear in northern cosmology.
Although the totemic reading of elk-and bear-headed staffs is not without
merit, there are several obvious difficulties with it as well, and the speculative
reading of ancient historians is not the only one. For instance, there is usually a
prohibition or a taboo against killing, eating or touching the totem animal. This
was one of the points made by Sarmela (1991), who argued that there seems to be
little evidence for bear-hunting rituals from eastern Finland (the supposed region
of the bear clan), but the taboo doesn’t seem to work both ways, as elk-hunt has
evidently been important in western (and eastern) Finland throughout the ages,
and it is difficult to imagine that any restrictions were made on hunting one of
the most important sources of meat in the boreal forests. This is why the species
represented by group totems typically have no economic worth for the com-
munities concerned. Moreover, group totems typically represent a large variety
of different species –rather than just two –although a distinction can be made
between principal totems and subsidiary ones, and elk and bear could in principle
represent the ‘principal’ totems of the region. But the main problem is that the
elk-headed artefacts are never contextualized in these discussions. While many of
them are stray finds, some have been found in burial contexts, and these provide
clues to interpretation. Even more importantly, the rock art evidence concerning
elk-headed staffs has been largely bypassed. Elk-headed staffs occur in rock art in a
wide range of significant contexts, which we now must turn to.
Sceptres of the shaman?

Another common interpretation of the staffs is associated with shamanism. The
Russian archaeologist Nina Gurina (1956), who published the definitive mono-
graph on the Olenyi Ostrov site, suggested that the elk-headed staffs were ritual
‘sceptres’ of the shaman, in part because they were found in what were designated
as ‘shaman graves’ (due to their exceptional features). However, she did not spe-
cify how and for what purpose the shamans would have used them. This view
was adopted also by Helskog (e.g. 1987, 2014) in discussing Alta rock art, but he
likewise hesitated to take the interpretation much further, even though the Alta
material offers some of the most important pointers in this respect. Tilley (1991)
and Zvelebil (1997) went a bit further, suggesting that the staffs may be likened to
the Evenk shaman’s turu –a word that refers to a piece of wood that represents the
World Tree, by climbing which the shaman could enter the Upper World. But the
connection between the elk and the World Tree was never really explained, and
neither of the authors discussed the rock carvings of Alta.
At Alta, people holding elk-headed staffs occur in various different kinds of situ-
ations that always seem to involve movement and action, suggesting that the staff is
not simply a ‘sceptre’ (i.e. an indicator of status) but an object used for some purpose.
For example, at the Ole Pedersen panel, two human figures bearing elk-headed
staffs are juxtaposed, brandishing them in what looks like a conflict-laden situation,
and accompanied by a drum-beating figure (Figure 4.3). Similar scenes of juxtapos-
ition between two staff-wielding figures can be found, for example, at the Kåfjord
panel, and they are characteristic of Phase II at Alta (c. 4800–4000 bc according to
Helskog 2014). These scenes of confrontation suggest a power struggle between
individuals wielding a staff; one scene, for example, shows a person wielding a huge
staff confronting another one wielding a tiny one (Helskog 2014, fig. 14), perhaps
indicating differences in rank or supernatural power. In other words, the artefacts
may indeed indicate status (a ‘priesthood’ of sorts), but they are also associated with
action. A second significant scene from Alta (found in the Bergbukten panel) shows
a human figure touching the muzzle of an elk with an elk-headed staff. Rather than
representing a physical encounter between the human and the animal, it probably
represents a ‘spiritual’ connection with the two, in which the staff acts as a medi-
ator. Staff-wielding humans are also associated with several hunting scenes, such as a
famous one showing a bear-hunt at the Bergbukten I panel (Helskog 2014, fig. 17)
and another one showing an elk hunt (Helskog 2014, fig. 64).
To wield a carved image of the elk in one’s hand may have provided a somatic
experience of communicating and engaging with the animal, but the staff may also
have been understood as a person and a source of potency in its own right –and
therefore used in the seduction of prey. At sites like Nämforsen, Kanozero, Alta and
Vingen, elk-headed staffs occur seemingly alone –that is, without anyone actually
holding the staff. At Nämforsen, staffs can be seen as ‘crew-members’ on a boat, and
at Vingen (if we are to believe Lødøen 2015), they actively ‘herd’ the red deer across
the cliff face. At Kanozero, as we have seen, a sexually aroused man juxtaposed with
78 Land
FIGURE 4.3 A scene from the rock carvings of Alta, northern Norway, showing two
figures holding elk-headed staffs, two drumming figures and an ‘unfinished’ elk that
seems to emerge out of nowhere, as if summoned to a séance. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
a capercaillie is lifting an elk-headed staff in a highly suggestive scene (Kolpakov

and Shumkin 2012), and at Nämforsen we find an elk-headed staff apparently
studying the sexual organs of a pregnant woman (Hallström 1960). A second fas-
cinating scene from Nämforsen shows a large boat with an elk head in the prow
making contact with an elk (Hallstöm 1960, fig. 79). The occupants include people
who wield an elk-headed staff, but there is also a free-standing elk staff on board,
giving the impression that the staff is one of the crew members.
In an animistic context, artefacts can acquire a subjectivity and agency, especially
if the artefact has a particular significance to its owner and a long history of inter-
action; ‘soul-essence’ in a sense flows from the owner to the artefact, and after the
person dies, the artefact must either be destroyed, purified ritually or deposited in
the grave. Significantly, several of the known elk-headed staffs have been found in
a burial context. The best preserved staff from Olenyi Ostrov, moreover, shows a
glossy polish on the rod (Kristiina Mannermaa, pers. comm.), apparently resulting
from extensive use by its owner and supporting the notion that a deep relationship
existed between the staff and the buried individual. Thus, rather than a turu, it then
seems that the elk-headed staffs may represent shaman’s staffs such as were used
by some Siberian peoples of in the historical period to contact the spirit animals.
In the ethnographic records of Siberian shamanism, animal-headed staffs emerge
widely as one of the main instruments of the shaman aside with the drum, used, for
example, by the Nganasan (Znamenski 2003: 143), Ket (Znamenski 2003: 139) and
Tuvans (Znamenski 2003: 266). Among the Buriats,
a staff was decorated with a horse head carved on its top and a horse hoof
carved on its bottom. A few small bells were attached to this stick as well as
braids of different colors, furs of small animals, and small stirrups, which made
the staff resemble a horse. Like the drum, the staff symbolized a horse, which
a shaman used to journey to the underworld, middle world, and upper world.
[Znamenski 2003: 44 ]
The fact that the staff-wielding humans at Alta are accompanied by individuals
beating a drum reinforces the shamanistic interpretation. The scenes of confron-
tation also fit in a shamanistic context, as spiritual battles between shamans appear
to have been commonplace among the Sámi of the historical period. The Danish
missionary Jens Kildal (1683–1767), who was active among the Sámi of northern
Norway, described these battles as follows:
When a shaman casts sorcery upon another, he uses especially Vuornes lodde
[‘predatory bird’], and Passe vare guli [‘holy mountain fish’], for it, and also
Passe vare lodde [‘holy mountain fish’]; or else, if it concerns great matters, he
uses Passe vare Sarva [‘holy mountain reindeer’], and Passe vare Olmaj [‘holy
mountain man’] … and then Passe vare Sarva is used on both sides, as they are
strong at fighting. The reason for this happening is that there is the custom
among Lapps, that whichever noaidi [shaman] is proficient with his magic,
in repulsing other noaidis, is chosen as the noaidi of the multitude, and then
receives the general noaidi wage from each man […] When two noaidis have
sent their sarvas out to fight against each other, then whatever happens to
these fighting sarvas as far as winning or losing is concerned, the very same
happens to the noaidis themselves for their victory, or defeat; if the one sarva
breaks the horn from the other sarva, then that noaidi becomes sick whose
sarva’s horn is broken off; if the one sarva slays the other, then the noaidi dies
whose sarva was killed; it also happens in this fight that however tired and
worn out a sarva becomes, the noaidi that the sarva is fighting for becomes
tired and worn out to the same extent.
[Translated by Tolley 1994: 149–150 ]
In the light of these two accounts, the elk-headed staffs can rather comfortably
be interpreted as shaman staffs comparable to those used by the Evenk and other
Siberian peoples still in the historical period. Their first occurrence in the late
Mesolithic and increased use towards the late Neolithic seems to correlate with the
emergence and rock art ‘mega-sites’ (indicating large seasonal gatherings), emer-
ging social complexity and stratification –and may thus be related to an early
occurrence of institutionalized shamanism. The scenes of juxtaposed staff-wielders
80 Land
may be associated with a power struggle or ritual display between shamans (mostly
men?) of a special rank, and scenes like Bergbukten may relate to contacting the
elk-shaped spirit helper beings of the shaman and/or seducing the prey (these
interpretations are not mutually exclusive). Finally, they also seem to be associated
with human reproduction, as at both at Nämforsen (Hallström 1960), Alta (Helskog
2014: 116) and Kanozero (Kolpakov and Shumkin 2012: 344), they are associated
with a scene showing a human couple: a man and a pregnant woman.
The Bear –the ‘Golden King of the Forest’

If cervids reign supreme in prehistoric art, in the historical-period folklore and
mythology relating to northern peoples, it is surely the brown bear (Ursus arctos)
that occupies centre stage. This is unlikely to be a recent shift in emphasis, however,
as the myths and rituals related to the bear are strikingly similar throughout the
northern circumpolar zone, as demonstrated already by Irving A. Hallowell (1926;
cf. Rydving 2010). Hallowell provided a detailed discussion of bear ceremonialism
among such geographically diverse peoples as the Ojibwa of Canada, the Ainu of
Japan, the Siberian Yukaghir and the Sámi of Fennoscandia. He suggested that these
similarities are due to a common origin in the belief systems of Palaeolithic hunters.
Indeed, the word ‘Arctic’ finds its origin in the Greek word for a bear (Gk. ἀρκτός),
which in turn relates to the Arctic, as ἀρκτικός (arktikos) means something that is
‘near the Bear’, or close to the constellation of the Bear (Ursa Major) –or, in other
words, something that is ‘northern’.
Although definitive proof of an Ice Age origin of the ‘bear cult’ is lacking, it
may be noted that one of the very earliest painted caves –the Grotte Chauvet in
Southern France (ca. 30,000 bc) –features what investigators have termed a ‘bear
skull altar’ (Chauvet et al. 1996). The ‘altar’ is a prominent flat boulder, on top of
which a cave bear skull has been positioned in a manner that suggests it was a focus
of worship. Combined with other parallels between Ice Age art and Holocene
hunter–gatherer rock art (such as the prominence of large herbivores, hand stencils,
‘x-ray style’ and possible evidence for shamanism; see Lewis-Williams 2000), the
Chauvet ‘altar’ offers a tenuous but nonetheless fascinating link to later practices,
where the bear skull was an object of veneration.
According to traditions recorded in seventeenth-century Finland, the brains and
flesh attaching to the skull were ritually consumed, because the soul of the animal
was thought to reside in it, and beer was drunk from the skull. At the end of the
ceremony, the cleaned-up skull was displayed in a prominent place, typically the
branch of an old pine tree (Sarmela 1994: 75). Such ‘bear-skull pines’ are known
throughout the northern circumpolar region –from northern Fennoscandia to
Russia, Siberia and Canada all the way to Québec, where they were venerated by
the Algonquian-speaking Ojibwa and Innu (Zawadzka 2015: 139–140). In Finnish
and circumpolar mythology, the bear was in essence viewed as the forest personi-
fied (Sarmela 1994: 80). This is reflected in the myriad names given to the bear
in Finnish and Sámi folk culture, used because the word ‘bear’ (Finn. karhu, North
Sámi bierdna) itself was taboo, and mentioning it could inadvertently summon the
beast. Many of the names used instead refer to the forest: the bear is known, for
example, as ‘Forest Apple’, ‘Keeper of the Forest’, ‘Golden King of the Forest’ or
even just ‘Forest’ (Pentikäinen 2005: 9).
In the ethnographic accounts, the bear also features in what appear to have been
originally totemic myths, such as a Skolt Sámi myth of a girl who spent the winter
in a bear’s den, became pregnant and gave birth to the first ancestor of the Skolts.
Hunting bear, as noted above, was thoroughly ritualized and regulated by taboos
and rules and culminated in a feast where the skull of the animal was given special
attention. The bear, moreover, had a cosmic role: in myths, it had a celestial origin
(the constellation of Ursa Major), was lowered down to earth in a golden cradle
and resurrected back to the heavens in the course of the sacrificial feast following
a bear hunt. The historian of religion Juha Pentikäinen (2005: 30–34) associates
the Greek myth of Artemis, the nymph Callisto and her son Arkas –of which the
latter two were transformed into bears and set among the stars as Ursa Major and
Ursa Minor by Zeus –and the celestial hunting drama of circumpolar myth, likewise
thought to be depicted in the constellations of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. The link
seems rather tenuous but may contain a kernel of truth, as it seems related to myths
concerning Apollo and the constellation of Cygnus, which likewise find parallels in
northern circumpolar cosmology (cf. Chapter 8). Moreover, Artemis –the Greek
goddess of the hunt –has a special relationship with the bear: her name may be
etymologically related to the Greek word for bear, and at her cult centre at Brauron
in Attica, she was worshipped as the Great She-Bear (Perlman 1989).
The special significance accorded to the bear is easy to understand, as it is a
powerful and potentially dangerous animal that commands respect and awe and
is in some respects rather human-like. Like humans, it is an omnivorous predator
that competes with the same food resources as humans do, and it also resembles
humans in terms of physiology and behaviour, adding to the fascination it has
always elicited among humans. It can stand on two legs and use its forepaws almost
as hands, it builds dens rather like humans build houses, its anatomy (when skinned)
resembles that of humans in many respects, and it is said to have facial expressions
and even emotions resembling those of humans. Indeed, many of the traditional
Finnish names used for the bear emphasize its perceived humanity: it is called ‘Old
Man of the Forest’, ‘Geezer’, ‘Big-headed’ or sometimes just ‘Man’. Perhaps because
of this similarity, metamorphoses from human to bear and vice versa were thought
to be commonplace (Pentikäinen 2005: 82–84).
In post-Ice Age rock art, depictions of the bear are comparatively rare but
not entirely absent: they occur especially in large Neolithic carving sites such as
Kanozero,Vyg and Alta (Gjerde 2010). The last mentioned features several scenes of
bear hunt and of rows of bear tracks criss-crossing the ‘hills’ and ‘ponds’ formed by
the undulations and small pools of water in the bedrock, a feature that Knut Helskog
(2012) has interpreted as depicting the bear’s ability to move between different levels
of the cosmos. By contrast, depictions of the bear are almost completely missing at
smaller sites, such as the rock paintings of Sweden, Finland and Norway. This makes
82 Land
sense if, as we have earlier suggested, the large carving sites were dedicated to com-
munal, calendrical meetings and rituals, because the ritual bear hunt was likewise a
communal, calendar undertaking. It took place on an annual basis and at a set time –
in early spring when nature begins to recover from the grip of winter –and was
apparently not principally motivated by a desire for meat, as bear meat was widely
regarded as rather foul tasting. Consuming bear meat was, instead, more akin to a
sacrament, in the course of which the divine animal died and was resurrected.
Indeed, the logic behind the bear sacrifice has been compared with the rites of
Dionysus, Osiris and the Christian Eucharist (Kuusi 1963), and some early mission-
aries to Lapland complained that the Sámi were much more convinced of the bear’s
resurrection than of their own resurrection at the Last Judgment. As noted, the final
stage of the bear ceremony involved taking the skull of the animal to a sacred pine
tree, on a branch of which it was hung (Sarmela 1994: 75). These ‘bear-skull pines’,
which perhaps represented the world tree and thus offered a route for the soul of
the bear to ascend back to the Heavens, are known from folklore and have been
widely documented in northern landscapes (Figure 4.4). Indeed, there is much to
suggest that a mythical relationship existed between the bear and the pine tree. For
example, the Kalevala poems mention a spirit or a divinity called Hongotar or the
‘Lady of the Pine’ as the ancestral mother or protectress of the bear, a theme that
according to Haavio (1967: 31) relates to the mythical first bear hunt and the first
bear-skull pine associated with it.
FIGURE 4.4 The ‘bear-pine’ (Finn. karhupetäjä) of Häkkilä at Saarijärvi, central

Finland, is one of the few that still stand in Finland. In the 1880s, five bear skulls were
recorded as hanging on its branches. Photo: Mikko Lemmetti.
To facilitate its resurrection, it was crucial that each bone of the bear was
meticulously collected and ceremoniously buried. In Finland, the burial was made
at the foot of the bear skull pine, while the Sámi of northern Sweden and Norway
buried their bears in rock cairns (Schanche 2000). Archaeological research of
bear-burials in Sweden and Norway has shown that the earliest of such cairns
date to the Roman Iron Age (c. ad 0–400), while historical sources indicate that
the practice continued at least until the late nineteenth century ad. According
to Schanche (2000: 269–270), these ‘bear cairns’ resemble, in most respects, con-
temporary human burials in cairns, both with regard to the burial rite and their
chronological and geographical distribution (cf. also Jennbert 2003). This special
treatment accorded to bear bones may account for the fact that –with the excep-
tion of claws and teeth –they are almost completely missing the osteological record
throughout Fennoscandia, from the Mesolithic until the historical period (Helskog
2012; Ukkonen and Mannermaa 2017). Together with the circumpolar distribu-
tion of the bear ceremony and the rock art depictions of bears, this may be counted
as evidence for the extreme antiquity of the ‘bear cult’ in the northern hemisphere.
Although the hunt itself was conducted by a few skilled hunters, the cadaver
was taken to the site of the feast in a large procession that involved singing ritual
songs and –according to one seventeenth-century account from Viitasaari in cen-
tral Finland –could even be accompanied by the ringing of church bells. Upon
arrival, a ritual ‘wedding’ that repeated many of the customs of ordinary weddings
was celebrated between the bear and one of the girls of the village, thus joining the
animal with humankind through bonds of kinship (Sarmela 1994: 76). It should be
noted here that regardless of the actual sex of the animal, the bear was conceived as
a ‘male’ being –much as the Yukaghir perceive all elks as ‘female’. Once the skull of
the bear had been boiled and the meat and brains had been extracted from it, and
divided between the hunters that participated in the kill, the teeth of the bear were
removed and distributed among the hunters and their families. The rationale seems
to have been that just as the soul of the bear resided in its skull, the supernatural
power (väki) of the animal was concentrated in its teeth and claws and could be
acquired by wearing them as amulets.
In the archaeological record of northern Fennoscandia, bear tooth pendants are a
recurring type of find that in an interesting way reflects the complex web relationships
between humans and animals, as well as the incredibly long-term continuities in
northern cosmology. Bear-tooth pendants occur already in the Mesolithic burials
of Olenyi Ostrov in Karelia, and their use seems to continue practically without a
break until the historical period. Bear-tooth pendants have been found for example
in the medieval strata of the town of Turku in south-western Finland, and bear teeth
feature prominently in folk magic and ‘sorcerer’s equipment’ as recorded in the nine-
teenth century and early twentieth century. During the Iron Age, imitations of bear
teeth cast in bronze appear in burial contexts in Finland (Figure 4.5). These artefacts,
which are a distinctly Finnish type, are according to Henrik Asplund (2005) found
only in women’s graves and are thus ‘gendered’ objects. Interestingly enough, they
do not appear to have been hung around the neck but were positioned on the hips
84 Land
FIGURE 4.5 An exhibit at the Finnish National Museum featuring prehistoric

artefacts related to the bear: perforated bear-head ‘maces’, a dagger made of
Scandinavian red slate, a bear-tooth pendant and bear claws found in a burial context,
possible clay representations of bears and bronze imitations of bear teeth attached to
women’s clothing in late Iron Age Finland. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
or the abdominal area, suggesting that they may be associated with female sexuality
and reproduction (Riikonen 2005).
In general, there seems to be a curious relationship between bears, sexuality
and women, evident in the ethnographic accounts, such as the myths concerning
the sexual union of an ancestral woman and a bear, or the ‘weddings’ arranged in
association with bear feasts. The bear-hunt was preceded by a period of celibacy,
and when the slain bear was taken to the site of feasting, women –particularly
those who were pregnant or in a fertile age –were expected to hide from the pro-
cession. It was, moreover, ‘common knowledge’ among both Sámi and Finns that
bears would not attack women as long as they recognized the person as a woman.
Exposing the female genitalia was thus believed to expel bears (Sarmela 1994: 82).
PART II
Sea
5
COASTAL LANDSCAPES AND THE SEA
Living with the sea

For a long time, Scandinavia was thought to be an island –at least, this is how the
extreme North or Ultima Thule is usually described in classical literary sources.
In early and later medieval sources, names such as Scandia or Scandza come up –
probably referring to the southernmost tip of Sweden or Scania –which, however,
from a continental perspective continued to be viewed as an island. This notion is
perhaps most famously recorded by the Gothic historian Jordanes, who in Getica
(ca. ad 551) described it as the original homeland of the Goths. The idea was
repeated by numerous subsequent authors and persisted until the early modern
period, when Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina first presented the shape of Scandinavia
in a generally correct geographical manner in 1539. In Olaus’ map, Fennoscandia
is connected to the North Sea in the west, the Arctic Ocean in the North, the
White Sea in the East, and the Baltic Sea in the middle. The vast lakes of Onega
and Ladoga delimit it in the East. In essence, although no longer conceived as an
island, the North was still seen as maritime world surrounded by water on all sides.
Different regions of Fennoscandia and their inhabitants have had varying relations
and engagements with maritime worlds, with Norway and Denmark perhaps par-
ticularly closely associated with the sea, whereas the northern interior of Sweden
and the northern and eastern interior of Finland are more indirectly connected to
maritime worlds. The regional differences notwithstanding, in general, the sea has
been very prominently present in Fennoscandian life-worlds, with coastal regions
comprising a central arena for human activities from the Mesolithic to the pre-
sent. Coastal areas and perspectives have indeed in some respects dominated the
archaeology of Fennoscandia –and the understanding of prehistoric and histor-
ical processes –over inland regions. This bias is problematic, but at the same time
there can be little doubt about the significance of the sea and coasts in northern
landscapes and mindscapes in a broad and long-term perspective.
88 Sea
People have always had an ambivalent relationship with the sea: it has fascinated
and terrified human minds throughout the recorded history (Cunliffe 2017: 1–13).
The sea is the ‘other’ –a different world, which contrasts with the land in many
ways. It is apparently timeless and yet constantly moving and changing. Unlike the
terrestrial world, the sea does not show or preserve traces of past human generations
(though this has recently changed due to large-scale pollution). The sea is a dan-
gerous and distinctively non-human domain, home to strange creatures and ultim-
ately unknown. The fundamental difference of the sea from the land has given a
birth to a wide range of cultural meanings about the sea and coasts around the globe
especially within premodern cultures (e.g. Gillis 2003; Rainbird 2007). Westerdahl
(2005) has even argued, in the context of the northern Baltic Sea, that the entire
cosmology in the region revolved around the land–sea division from the Stone Age
to early modern times. The sea has been subject to a rich symbolic construction
in northernmost Europe in the form of, for example, ship imagery in rock art, or
boat and ship burials from different periods. The Baltic Sea region comprises a par-
ticularly interesting setting for exploring the human relationship with the sea and
coast because coastal landscapes in the region have been undergoing a constant and
observable transformation due to postglacial land uplift and the associated environ-
mental processes.
The case of seals and sealing illustrates the enchanted character and perceptions
of the sea in the North. Sealing has been practiced on the Gulf of Bothnia from the
Stone Age until recent times, and the ways of engaging with seals, as described in
ethnographic and historical sources, reflects also perceptions of and attitudes to the
sea more generally. A euphemism-based ‘sea language’ has traditionally been used
when operating on the (Baltic) sea to avoid referring directly to taboo subjects and
drawing their harmful powers onto ships (Westerdahl 2005; see also Hole 1967). In
the specific context of seal hunting, it was particularly important for hunters to use
euphemisms and speak only indirectly about their intentions, because seals were
regarded as sentient and intelligent beings who could understand human speech
(Ylimaunu 2000: 351).
This was at least partly connected to the idea that seals were, in some sense,
drowned people –either in general or more specifically associated, for example,
with Pharaoh’s soldiers drowned in the biblical story of Exodus (Edlund 1989:
34–35;Ylimaunu 2000: 95; Westerdahl 2005: 9–10). Seals were related to mermen
and mermaids and so intimately connected with the sea that, according to Olaus
Magnus, the fur on the seal hide mirrored the weather on the sea. The sealskin
provided protection from lightning, whereas placing the right flipper of a seal under
the head ‘teased dreams’ (Olaus Magnus 1998 [1555]: XX, 4–6).Yet it was the seal
head or skull that was a particularly powerful object, for it could be used to drive
unwanted spirits away from a lake when dropped in it or to protect domestic
animals by hiding it in the animal shed (Edlund 1989: 36–37). While all these
concepts could be regarded as isolated superstitions, they are better understood as
a more overarching connectedness and animistic relationship between people and
the maritime environment (Herva and Salmi 2010).
Coastal landscapes and the sea 89
The two Mediterraneans

The Baltic Sea is an inland sea and as such bears a certain resemblance to the
Mediterranean. Throughout its 12,000-year existence, diverse peoples and cultures
have gravitated on and engaged with the Baltic Sea world. The southern shores of
the Baltic Sea are strongly affiliated with the Central European world, its eastern
shores manifest long-standing East European and even circumpolar connections,
the West is associated with the Scandinavian domain and the northern end of the
sea stretches to the threshold of the Arctic. The Baltic Sea thus connects, but it
also separates: this northern sea and, in particular, the northern and north-eastern
zones of boreal forest have functioned as something of a buffer for southern and
continental cultural influences, rendering the northern and eastern inland regions
of Fennoscandia a remote and relatively isolated or ‘peripheral’ area in a wider
European perspective.
The Baltic Sea has been called by many local names, which reflects the diversity
of the peoples, and their respective languages, living by this body of water. While
the Mediterranean was the birthplace of the ‘European’ civilization, the Baltic Sea
has played an important role in later transformations of the European world. The
Vikings first made the unknown northern fringes of the continent subject to a
wider European attention and concern, whereas the Hanseatic League emerged
as a northern European power in the Middle Ages. The Swedish Empire likewise
grew around the Baltic Sea in the sixteenth and seventeenth century to ultimately
march victoriously into the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) in the lands of the Holy
Roman Empire. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russia –a state born
out of the principalities established by the Vikings –defeated Sweden and broke
into the Baltic and European world, thus making the Baltic Sea a meeting zone
of what would today be identified as the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ worlds. In par-
ticular, the founding in 1703 of the city of St Petersburg at the eastern end of the
Gulf of Finland as the new, Europe-oriented capital of the Russian Empire –as
well as its first major seaport –heralded the development of Russia into a global
maritime power.
Cultural diversity is one of the key things that connects the Mediterranean
and the Baltic Sea, but they have also been merged –or pulled together and
superpositioned –on a mythological level. Curious as this intertwining may
seem, it is actually quite fitting in the light of the many similarities between the
two inland seas. At the same time, it also speaks of the appeal of the unknown
North, which enables employing northern Fennoscandia as a canvas for cultural
projections. The visions of the North conceived in classical Greece have gradually
become anchored on the actual northern geographies, but ancient imaginaries have
percolated through time up to the present day, blending classical motifs with the
‘northern Mediterranean’. Classical imaginaries and northern realities have become
deeply commingled in cases such as the northern sun worship (Chapter 9). Because
the North has been a domain of myths since ancient times, it is only appropriate
that the eleventh-century German bishop Adam of Bremen placed the land of the
90 Sea
Amazons in Scandinavia (Chapter 7), that Olaus Rudbeck the Elder (1630–1702)

situated Atlantis in Sweden and traced the journey of Jason and the Argonauts all
the way to the northernmost Gulf of Bothnia or that his son Olaus Rudbeck the
Younger (1660–1740) searched for the landing place of Noah’s Ark in the northern
Swedish mountains.
This mixing and blending of the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea worlds is not
as strange as it seems, as in an early modern relational understanding of reality,
time and place were conceived very differently from the modern understanding
(e.g. Herva and Nordin 2013, 2015; see also Nagel and Wood 2005; Wood 2008).
Accordingly, the scholarly work of people like Rudbeck the Elder should not be
seen as fabricating history but as an attempt to reveal previously hidden or unrec-
ognized affiliations between early modern Sweden and ancient Mediterranean
peoples and cultures. This mindset is neatly expressed in the frontispiece of
his Atlantica (1689), which shows the Rudbeck in front of the globe, peeling
away the modern surface of Scandinavia to reveal the location of Atlantis in
Sweden. He is surrounded by classical scholars, such as Tacitus and Plato, who are
gesturing excitedly and debating this revelation (Figure 5.1). Rudbeck’s work,
moreover, was not based solely upon interpreting classical sources or linguistic
speculations, but there was also a serious attempt to uncover history through
excavations and other observations of antiquities in the real world (Eriksson
2002; King 2005).
Identifying sympathies and correspondences between things was central to the
early modern knowledge of the world and the past. Everything in the world was
thought to be interconnected, with meaningful links between myths and pasts.
Thus, for instance, the ancient town of Uppsala in Sweden was linked to Atlantis and
Troy (Eriksson 2002; Herva and Nordin 2015). Alternative-historical explorations
focusing on the connections and conjunctions of the Mediterranean and Baltic Sea
worlds did not die out after the early modern period, however, but have continued
to modern times. In the early twentieth century, the Finnish artist and eccen-
tric Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspa (1935) developed a theory of the Finnish origins of
the ancient Egyptian civilization, although it is difficult to be sure how serious
he was about his sometimes rather comical etymological speculations (Halén and
Tukkinen 1984). A somewhat more serious example of the genre was published in
1976 by Lennart Meri, the Estonian historian and film-maker and later president
of Estonia (between 1992 and 2001). Titled Hõbevalge (‘Silver-White’), the book
blends ancient written sources, folklore and creative imagination into a reconstruc-
tion of the Baltic Sea region in ancient times and Estonia’s place in it. For example,
Meri identifies the Estonian island of Saaremaa with the ‘Ultima Thule’ mentioned
classical sources and argues that the Greek explorer Pytheas sailed in the Baltic Sea
and visited Saaremaa in the fourth century bc (Meri 1976). The Greek myth of
Phaethon –son of the Sun God Helios who lost control of the Chariot of the Sun
and burned large parts of the earth –he associates with the meteorite impact that
produced the Kaali crater on Saaremaa (see Chapter 9). Significantly, he, too, spends
much time with etymological reasoning.
FIGURE 5.1 Olaus Rudbeck ‘exposes’ Sweden in the frontispiece of his great work
Atlantica as the original location of the legendary Atlantis. The constellations of Ursa
Major and Ursa Minor, symbolizing the North, are depicted above his head.
92 Sea
In the Scandinavian archaeological discourse, the connection between the

Mediterranean and the Baltic has been a recurring theme throughout the twen-
tieth century and continues to be so. To highlight just one line of scholarly
investigation, the Swedish archaeologist Oscar Almgren (1927) argued in an
immensely influential study called Hällristningar och kultbruk (‘Rock carvings and
cultic activity’) that southern Scandinavian rock art reflected Mediterranean fer-
tility cults in the North. This line of investigation has continued in an essen-
tially unchanged form by many later Scandinavian archaeologists, such as
Kristiansen and Larsson (2005; cf. also Kristiansen 2010), who associate it with
the Mycenaean world, as well as Flemming Kaul (2004), who finds a connection
with ancient Egypt.
Perhaps the most intriguing modern example of drawing together the
Mediterranean and Baltic Sea, however, is the work of the Italian amateur historian
Felipe Vinci, who has identified the Baltic Sea and North Atlantic as the setting of
the events described in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Vinci’s book The Baltic Origins
of Homer’s Epic Tales: The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Migration of Myth (published
in several editions since 1995; for an updated version of the argument, see Vinci
2017) suggests that the ancient (Mycenaean) Greek world was originally located in
the Baltic Sea region, but the worsening climate forced the Mycenaeans (or their
ancestors) to migrate to the eastern Mediterranean around 1500 bc. When they
settled their new homeland, the newcomers named places after the original nor-
thern toponyms, and thus the Homeric Troy (Troia), for example, originally stood in
the Finnish village of Toija, the original Mycenae was in present-day Copenhagen,
Athens near the Swedish town of Karlskrona and Odysseus’s adventures unfolded
along the Norwegian coast.
The Trojan War, in Vinci’s view, took place in this Baltic Sea world sometime
in the early second millennium bc, and the two epics were passed on orally for
many centuries before they were transcribed in the Mediterranean.Vinci’s fanciful
hypothesis builds on the long-known incongruences between the Mediterranean
geographies and those described in the epics, on the one hand, and the (seemingly
northern) climatic and weather conditions of the Homeric tales, on the other. The
recurrent conflating of the historical and mythological Mediterranean and Baltic
Sea worlds, however fanciful specific forms it may have taken, illustrates the more
general issue of how northern lands have always lingered between myths and reality
and how the classical tradition has affected the perceptions of the North in both
ancient and modern times.
Engaging with changing coastal environments

The Baltic Sea is a young sea, formed after the Ice Age by glacial meltwaters in
the hundreds of metres deep dent that the more than 2 km thick glacier pressed
on Earth’s surface. The Baltic Sea has gone through consecutive stages of varying
salinity, which have caused environmental changes and also affected human
populations. The dent has been rebounding (‘isostatic uplift’) since the melting of
the glacier, which renders the Baltic Sea region as highly dynamic and constantly
transforming environment (e.g. Breilin et al. 2005).
One implication of the rebound has been that, as the land rose, the outlets of
the Baltic to the North Sea have changed several times. It began as a freshwater
basin (Baltic Ice Lake), was connected to the North Sea during the Yoldia phase,
once again became a freshwater basin in the Mesolithic (Ancylus Lake) and was
transformed into a sea yet again in the late Mesolithic (Litorina phase) when the
Danish Straits formed a new outlet to the ocean. In addition to land uplift, other
glacial and postglacial environmental processes have shaped the landscapes of north-
ernmost Europe in a multitude of ways. The ice sheet grinded and polished nor-
thern bedrocks, the melting of the glacier assorted soils and formed certain landscape
elements, such as eskers and boulder fields. Huge inland lake systems were formed
when the coastline retreated, clayey soils developed in ancient seafloors (forming
fertile lands that are, however, hard to till) and glacial rivers formed ridges and flu-
vial planes and moved about the huge erratic boulders that dot the Fennoscandian
landscape. The legacy of the Ice Age can be seen and experienced everywhere in
Fennoscandia.
Regional and temporal variation in the process notwithstanding, land uplift has
generally been fast enough to be readily observable over the lifespan of a single
human individual. This was so particularly in the prehistoric period –in the early
Holocene the uplift could be as much as a metre in a decade –but the phenom-
enon is still notable in some parts of the Gulf of Bothnia, where the current rate
of uplift is 7 mm per year (Påsse and Andersson 2005). Within a lifetime of eighty
years, the land thus rises more than half a metre, and because the Ostrobothnian
region is famously flat, the shoreline can easily recede by 10 m or more, eventually
making harbours unusable, the location of dwellings impracticable and once-good
fishing-waters overgrown shallows. But not all effects were negative, of course,
as the uplift also generates more land. Because its ownership was unclear, court
records from early modern Ostrobothnia record quarrels over ownership of newly
exposed land.
One impact of land uplift on the archaeological record of the central Baltic Sea
region is that originally shore-bound sites have gradually become removed from
their coastal settings and can nowadays be found at a considerable distance in the
forested inland. This has also contributed to the preservation of prehistoric sites, as
inland regions tend to have been subject to less intensive land use in modern times
than the coastal zone. There is, in other words, a ‘halo’ of ancient shore-bound sites
of about the same age around the present-day central and northern Baltic Sea basin.
Although the local and regional dynamics of land uplift have varied, older sites
are generally found on higher elevations than more recent ones. This relationship
between elevation and age has been recognized for a long time and shore displace-
ment chronology has been subject to an intensive interest for decades in Finnish
and Swedish archaeology (e.g. Ailio 1909; Europaeus-Äyräpää 1930; Mökkönen
2011) and continues to produce fundamental, new data. To cite just one example,
the recent shift from an ‘agrarian’ paradigm towards a maritime understanding of
94 Sea
South Scandinavian rock art was initiated by Johan Ling’s (2014) careful study based
on precise elevation measurements and updated shoreline curves.
Some attempts have recently been made to grasp the significance of chan-
ging coastal landscapes in sociocultural and systemic terms. Núñez and Okkonen
(1999) proposed a scenario which linked sociocultural changes in Ostrobothnia
(the north-eastern coastal region of the Gulf of Bothnia) between 4000–2000 bc
to environmental changes associated with land uplift. They argued that the emer-
gence of villages, large stone enclosures (so-called ‘giants’ churches’) and other
manifestations of social complexity during this period were linked to the specific
topography of Ostrobothnia, which resulted in a particularly rapid exposure of
new land between the early fourth and early third millennium bc. Although they
postulate a connection between environmental and cultural change, Núñez and
Okkonen (1999: 111) admit that it is not clear precisely how one led to the other.
They suggest that the expanding deltas of river mouths, with their floodplains and
estuaries, would have been resource-rich environments, which ‘could have been
responsible for the powerful rise of cultural manifestations that took place in the
area around 3500 bc’. The disappearance of floodplains around 2000 bc, which
resulted from the local topography, may conversely have ‘led to the observed rapid
decline of North Ostrobothnian society’ (Núñez and Okkonen 1999: 114).
Samuel Vaneeckhout and others (2008, 2010; Costopoulos et al. 2012) have
pursued this scenario further in a more detailed and less deterministic (or economy-
dictated) manner and with more emphasis on social factors. They observe that
the specific reverse-S shape of the eastern side of the Gulf of Bothnia resulted in
the shortening of the coastline in the northern part of the area (and lengthening
in the South), which in turn brought resource-rich river mouths, where village-
like settlements emerged, closer to one another. This resulted in higher popu-
lation densities in certain hotspots –without necessitating significant population
growth –which promoted the rise of social complexity and the birth of ‘house
societies’ on the north-eastern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia.
The impact of shore displacement was not limited to coastal environments
but affected also the inland lake regions due to the tilting of the Fennoscandian
landmass associated with land uplift. Changes in lake water levels were generally
slow and gradual but every now and then resulted in rapid and singular ‘cata-
strophic’ events, when the level of a lake could drop by metres almost overnight.
Probably the best known of the latter is the formation of River Vuoksi around
4000 bc, which today connects the great lakes of Saimaa and Ladoga. When the
rising waters of Saimaa discharged through a new outlet, the event affected a vast
area around Lakes Saimaa (which regressed) and Ladoga (which transgressed), with
major consequences to both the natural environment and the human populations
that depended on it (Mökkönen 2011; Oinonen et al. 2014). At Ladoga, the event
would have submerged dwellings and forced people on higher ground, while at
Saimaa it created thousands of square kilometres of new residual wetlands, opening
new grazing grounds for elks, new shallows for water birds and in general enriching
the ecosystem. Such abrupt changes undoubtedly shook human societies and may
also have triggered cultural changes, even if the argument for a direct causal rela-
tionship (e.g. Oinonen et al. 2014) between the event and the spreading of Typical
Comb Ware seems rather weak. The reasoning follows the familiar pattern of iden-
tifying an environmental ‘crisis event’ (a volcanic eruption, a climatic cold spell
or similar) which can be dated, checking the archaeological record for any pos-
sible contemporary events and concluding that one follows from the other –even
though completely unrelated factors may be at play. In the case of Typical Comb
Ware, the reasons for its spreading appear not to be local but rather related to
developments in western Russia (Mökkönen and Nordqvist 2014).
The temporality of Baltic coastal landscapes

In his classic article, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, Tim Ingold (1993)
sought to replace the naturalistic and cognitivist-symbolistic understanding of the
landscape with
a ‘dwelling perspective’, according to which the landscape is constituted as

an enduring record of –and testimony to –the lives and works of past
generations who have dwelt within it, and in so doing, have left there some-
thing of themselves.
[Ingold 1993: 152 ]
In this view, human life and landscape are understood as processes. Ingold has
developed this line of thought further in his subsequent work, arguing that the
world, and all entities that it is composed of, are in a constant process of coming into
being, rather than simply existing, and that this coming into being is profoundly
dialogic or reciprocal in nature –entities and their environments co-generate each
other (e.g. Ingold 2000, 2011, 2013).
While Ingold’s view applies to all things and environments, the idea that the
landscape or environment is constantly coming into being fits the situation at the
Baltic Sea particularly well, as it is characteristically ‘moving’ and ‘alive’. As noted,
in certain times and places, the change in Baltic coastal landscapes has been so rapid
that observable changes in the environment have taken place almost overnight.
There can be little doubt that the continuous transformation of northern Baltic
coastal landscapes was recognized in prehistory just as it was recognized in historical
times, and there are some indications that non-coastal landscapes were understood
to represent ancient coastal landscapes (Holmblad 2010: 104). The instability or
dynamism of the coastal and lacustrine environments must have had a significant
impact on the how people perceived and related with their environments, but this
aspect of shore displacement has so far mostly been ignored (but see Herva and
Ylimaunu 2014; Ling 2014).
It is indeed striking how northern European archaeologists seem to have
viewed land uplift in purely geological, economic or ‘ergonomic’ terms. It has
been understood narrowly as affecting the practicalities of coastal life, such as
96 Sea
possible travel routes, available land or food resources. It has forced communi-
ties to repeatedly move their houses, villages and towns closer to the receding
shoreline. Living close to the shore has been understood, albeit mostly impli-
citly, as some kind of a practical-economic imperative, but there is not much
thoughtful reflection on the metaphysical implications of this shore connection.
The cultural meanings of the landscape have been addressed, especially since
the 2000s and particularly in relation to ‘ritual’ places, such as rock art sites and
burial sites (e.g. Helskog 1999; Lahelma 2005; Wessman 2009; Gjerde 2010; Ahola
2017b). However, the more fundamental or rudimentary ‘deeper level’ issue of
what it means to live in a highly dynamic and rapidly changing environment has
attracted less attention. How did living with a constantly changing environment
affect the ways of life and thinking of coastal communities? How did meanings
attributed to various landscape elements stem from –or resonate with –the
observed dynamics of the environment?
In Finno-Ugric mythology, the world was born from the primeval sea. There
are two main versions of Finno-Ugric cosmogonic myths, but water-birds play a
central role in both (Siikala 2013). One version holds that the world came into
being when a duck dived into the bottom of the World Sea and brought back mud
of which land was made. The other main version holds that the world was born
when a waterfowl laid an egg on a mythical island on the primordial sea. The egg
broke in an upheaval, and the world was formed of the contents of the egg. Neither
of these myths is specific to Finno-Ugric peoples but have a much wider Eurasian
distribution, with the earth-diver motif finding interesting parallels also in North
America (Berezkin 2010). However, the myth has a particularly close relation to the
archaeological materials of eastern Fennoscandia, as well as the dynamics of envir-
onmental change in the Baltic Sea region.
Birds, and especially water- birds, are prominently present in the symbolic
expressions (and diet) of Neolithic cultures of eastern Fennoscandia (see Chapter 8).
In particular, avian imagery dominates the important concentration of rock art
sites on the eastern shore of Lake Onega in Russian Karelia (Lahelma 2012a: 15).
Most intriguingly, the notion that the world came into being from a water-bird’s
egg appears to be reflected in one scene made on the little island Bolshoy Guri
(Figure 5.2).
The dating of Onega rock art is not entirely clear but current estimates place it
between ca. 5000 and 2000 bc (Gjerde 2010: 395), and there are, then, thousands
of years between the Onega rock art and the historically recorded Finno-Ugric
myths. While the Onega rock carvings rarely feature obvious narrative content,
there is an image which can plausibly be interpreted as reflecting the cosmogonic
myth where the world comes into being from a bird’s egg (Lahelma 2012a: 16, 27).
This scene, furthermore, is located on a rocky island which has smooth, rounded
and shiny bedrock that make the island look like it was made of gigantic eggshell
fragment (Lahelma 2012a: 27–28). This is a typical feature to the Onega bedrock
also more generally which, moreover, often fractures in large sheets of rock (again
FIGURE 5.2 A scenepossibly depicting the ancient Finno-Ugric creation myth at the

carvings of Lake Onega, Karelia. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
recalling shells) due to frost action and occasional small earthquakes (Figure 5.3).
The interpretation may thus be put forward that ‘the egg-shell shaped cliffs and
islands would have actualized the myth’ where the world is born from an egg,
and that ‘the cliffs may have been viewed as a place where the world was created’
(Lahelma 2012a: 28).
The geological factors and mechanisms behind the rebound-related landscape
transformations were of course unknown to prehistoric people, but since the process
had such a significant impact on their lived world, it surely must have inspired cul-
tural explanations. Islands were seen to emerge from the sea, to grow larger, become
joined with the mainland and gradually turn into hills off the coast. Cosmogonic
myths that explain the land emerging from the primordial sea would certainly have
resonated with the actual perceived dynamics of environmental change.
Observing the life cycle of shore formation –how islands emerged, became
peninsulas and turned into hills –afforded a metaphorical link between the life
cycles of people and coastal landscapes. It is widely accepted that dwellings at
coastal sites were generally located near the shoreline, as demonstrated, for
example, by the successive rows of buildings at slightly different elevations (e.g.
Kankaanpää 2002; Vaneeckhout 2008; Mökkönen 2011; Costopoulos et al. 2012).
When the first buildings at a site grew old –in perhaps two or three decades –new
buildings were constructed closer to the retreated shoreline. Based on northern
ethnographies, Kankaanpää (2002: 74–75) suggests that they were built closer to
98 Sea
FIGURE 5.3 A view from the rock carvings of Gazhi Nos on the eastern shore of
Lake Onega. The rounded and fractured bedrock evokes the shape of gigantic eggshell
fragments. The lake itself is large enough to give the impression of a limitless ocean or
‘World Sea’. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
the shoreline by each consecutive generation, while the parents and grandparents
continued to live in the old houses a bit further away. Moving closer to the shore
would thus have marked a transition in life and recreation of social identities
(Gerritsen 2008: 158; Holmblad 2010: 102–103). When the old houses eventually
became uninhabitable, they could still be used as a storage or working space. Later
still, when the houses were reduced to ruins, their remains would have served as
visual and material signs of land ownership (Kankaanpää 2002: 75), or at least sig-
nified continued inhabitation of –and association with –the site by a particular
group of people.
Building new houses and abandoning old ones inscribed landscapes with
memory and tangible cues of the temporalities of landscapes, where the direction
away from the sea –with its ruined houses and other ‘fossilized’ marks of human
presence –may have come to be associated with ancestors and conceived as an
ancestral landscape. In the same way, geologically ‘young’ formations like islands had
become old ‘fossilized’ hills further inland. Moving in a coastal environment, then,
was not just about moving in a physical space but also involved moving in time,
which was spatially or ‘horizontally’ present in the landscape. The lives of earlier
generations and ancestors could be observed in the form of abandoned house sites,
burials, scatters of pottery, cairns and other tangible traces of past activities (cf.
Gerritsen 2008: 156–158).
Cairns in northern coastal landscapes

The coastline of the northern Baltic Sea has been subject to archaeologically visible
symbolic construction since the emergence of more permanent settlement around
4000 bc (e.g. Núñez and Okkonen 2005), and cairn building is a paramount
example of this (Figure 5.4). Cairns have been constructed in the region from
the Neolithic to modern times (Okkonen 2003; Mökkönen 2013). Although the
forms, functions and meanings of coastal cairns vary, on a general level they argu-
ably reflect ‘the importance of the mental image of a boundary between land and
sea, and perhaps between other states of existence: the journey between different
worlds, between a state of life and death’ (Rönnby 2007: 78). The millennia-long
practice of building coastal cairns provides important insights into how people
understood and related with places where the land and sea meet. Cairns bring
together different dimensions of reality and different time horizons, or ‘[pull]
together different points in the temporal fabric’ (Nagel and Wood 2005: 408), in
a particularly distinctive manner. They thus also comprise an arena where archae-
ology, history and folklore meet in the context of the ‘temporality of the landscape’.
FIGURE 5.4 The monumental cairn of Bredarör at Kivik, southern Sweden, is the

largest surviving cairn of the Scandinavian Bronze Age and features a cist grave with
elaborately carved scenes. The curving passageway and gate –which seem to echo
Mycenaean tombs –have no prehistoric antecedent but were built in the 1930s to
enable visiting the inner chamber. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
100 Sea
In other words, the millennia-long tradition of constructing and signifying cairns

has created a setting in which different time horizons and meanings are fused.
Cairns come in many forms and sizes and have been constructed for various
reasons on the northern Baltic coast over time. Yet regardless of their age or
specific purposes and meanings, they were also a constant element of the lived
Fennoscandian landscapes; something that binds together people living in coastal
environments across time, forming meeting points between the past and present.
There are reasons to believe, as will be seen below, that people in later times –and
quite probably also in prehistory –have associated cairns with past generations and
identified in them some kind of a link between their own lives and past lives, as they
unfolded in relation with the dynamic coastal setting.
In northern Fennoscandia, cairns are typically associated with the Bronze and
Iron Ages and often identified as burials, even though we know that cairns have
been built for many other purposes as well (e.g. Muhonen 2008) and that cairn-
building began already during the Stone age and continued into the historical
period (Mökkönen 2013; Muhonen 2010). For field archaeologists, cairns often
present a difficult problem. Unless a cairn can clearly be identified as a burial, as in
the case of many excavated Iron Age cairns, the nature and function of the rock heap
can be very elusive. Cairns with an ‘unclear purpose’ have thus been interpreted as,
for instance, territorial or border markers or other reference points in the landscape,
sacrificial sites, middens or rubbish heaps and field-clearance cairns (Baudou 1968;
Taavitsainen 1992, 2003; Tuovinen 2002; Okkonen 2003; Wessman 2010).
Some cairns have apparently been built in one go, whereas others have
accumulated or grown gradually. If the cairn was a site of burial, a new burial may
have been added to the fringes –resulting in a larger cairn –while in the case of
sacrificial cairns or cairns associated with wayfaring, visitors and passers-by have
added stones to the cairn over an extended period of time (Muhonen 2008). There
is also evidence of various secondary uses of prehistoric cairns. As noted, burials
were sometimes made in the monumental early Bronze Age cairns; in much later
times, smaller cairns were constructed in their vicinity, and small sacrifices (such as
stones, twigs and coins) were made at prehistoric burial cairns still in the historical
period (Okkonen 2003: 33, 41).
The meanings associated with the cairns come from different directions: they
were associated with the perceived qualities of rock as a substance; their type of con-
struction was associated with death, the supernatural and fireplaces (cf. the Finnish
word for a cairn, hiidenkiuas, meaning ‘troll’s hearth’), and the loci where they were
built (such as high cliffs, islands and peninsulas) were liminal spaces between the
domestic sphere and the wilderness. The simple structure of the cairn probably
accounts to the fact that they have been cross-culturally evocative and attracted
diverse interpretations. Cairns have almost universally been associated with the
supernatural and otherworldliness (e.g. Varner 2004), and this is the predom-
inant theme in the northern folklore concerning cairns as well, but they are also
ambiguous by nature. Even cairns that were originally purely ‘profane’ in character
have been treated as if they were burials (Okkonen 2003: 40), but they have also
been associated with past dwellings, that is, identified as remains of old fireplaces
(e.g. Rundqvist 1994).
It is not quite clear why cairns have been so prominently associated with death
and the supernatural in historic times. Drowned people have sometimes been
buried in cairns still in the nineteenth century (Westerdahl 2005: 11), and the trad-
ition of ‘strengthening’ border-mark cairns by depositing human bones in them
has been recorded in historical times (Taavitsainen 2003). Building cairns at various
spatial boundaries in the landscape further added to the perceived liminal char-
acter of cairns. A sense of an ancestral presence was perhaps associated also with
the cairns conceived as the remains of the fireplaces of houses that had otherwise
vanished, and thus indirectly linked to past generations and dead people (Muhonen
2008: 311). It is conceivable, furthermore, that a memory of burying people in
cairns in a deep past persisted in some form through centuries from the Iron Age
to a recent part. It seems likely that prehistoric burial cairns have been opened now
and then in later times –in search of treasure, for instance, or to acquire building
material for other stone constructions –and subsequently interpreted as ancient
graves.
The idea that cairns were infused with a special power was partly embedded in the
perceived qualities and agency of stone, as reflected in folklore which attributes väki
to stones. Muhonen (2013) has discussed the mythical birth of stone, as described in
Finnic poetry, which links stone to a primeval non-human entity known as Kimmo
or Kammo. According to Christfrid Ganander’s (1741–1790) eighteenth-century
treatise of Finnish mythology, Mythologia Fennica (1789), it was a fearsome and hor-
rific spectre that was believed to dwell in cairns (Ganander 1984: 31). There was
duality, or neutrality, to stone in that its special powers could be tapped for harmful
as well as beneficial purposes; the heaps of used sauna-stove stones, for example,
could be a source of diseases but also suitable for healing practices. Stones were
considered as having intentionality and agency, as their ‘wraths’ could hurt people,
and stones were also thought to grow in the soil, which lent to the notion that
at one point within the sphere of traditional agriculture, clearance cairns

were not just piles of inanimate matter removed from the field. Their stones
rather were parts of living nature, born in the earth and providing an abode
for a supernatural being when they were first heaped up.
[Muhonen 2013: 118 ]
A significant aspect of cairns is their long-term presence in northern landscapes

and their ability to draw different times and dimensions of reality together. Cairns
allude simultaneously to houses, burials and fields in the past and represent important
nodes in ‘congealed taskscapes’ (Conneller 2010) co-authored by generations of
people. Moreover, according to folklore accounts, various non-human beings were
associated with cairns and were involved in the formation of many other features
of ancient landscapes. Cairns supported a sense and memory of continued inhab-
itation through time, but they were not only about the temporality: as loci of
102 Sea
non-human spiritual power on the border of the different dimensions of reality,

they vibrated with a living presence of an ancestral past and the otherworldly in
the landscape.
The specific placing of cairns in the ancient landscape and their association with
topographic features, as reconstructed through shore displacement studies, varies
considerably. Baudou (1968; cf. Forsberg 1999: 254–255) showed in a pioneering
regional study that cairns tend to be clustered and occur predominantly close to
ancient seashore in three main types of locations: passageways between two islands,
between islands and mainland and loci oriented on the sea. More precise and
detailed spatial analyses of cairns have subsequently been conducted in different
areas of the northern Baltic Sea region (e.g. Tuovinen 2002; Okkonen 2003).
The variation in the specific loci of cairns and their other characteristics notwith-
standing, it seems clear on a general level that cairns were closely associated with the
shore in terms of spatiality and meaning, in some cases demonstrably constructed
on the very waterline (Forsberg 1999). It also appears that prehistoric cairns were
recurrently built on off-shore islands, and this island connection provides some
interesting perspectives on the possible meaningful relationship between cairns and
the changing coastal landscapes.
Otherworldly islands
Speculating on the origins of the cairn-building tradition on the northern Baltic
Sea region, Bradley (2009: 178) takes up the possibility that cairns might imitate,
or could have been inspired, by the rocky islands that the Ice Age glaciers had
carved and rounded up into mound-like shapes. This is a compelling suggestion,
as it contributes to an understanding of why cairns were frequently constructed
on islands, and it opens up a host of other meaningful connections between cairns,
landscapes and northern cosmologies. As noted, most prehistoric cairns around the
northern Baltic Sea are places of burial and have been associated with death (even
in many cases where the cairn was not originally a burial), which resonates with the
perception of islands as places of death, liminality and the supernatural in northern
cultures (e.g. Brink 2001: 92–98; Westerdahl 2005). Islands have recurrently been
used as burial places in the North, all the way from the later Mesolithic to the later
historical period (see Bradley 2000: 5, 143; Rainbird 2007: 12–15; Manker 1957;
Westerdahl 2005: 4–6; Broadbent 2010: 196; Ruohonen 2010).
Islands were not only perceivably ‘apart’ from the proper land and the primary
domain of human life, but the dynamics of coastal change in the northern Baltic
Sea region would have underlined the link between islands and underworld espe-
cially in prehistoric times when burying in cairns was a common practice. That
is, islands could actually be seen to emerge from under water due to land uplift,
which suggested a connection between islands and the shamanistic notion of an
Underworld. An association between the Underworld and the world under water
can be identified already in Neolithic and Bronze Age rock art, and islands continue
to be perceived as otherworldly places (from a mainland perspective) in later poetry
and folklore. One of the most important mythological topoi of Kalevala poetry is
known simply as Saari or ‘The Island’, a place beyond distance and a manifestation
of otherness (Ahola 2014). This has sometimes been interpreted as referring to the
Åland islands that lie between Finland and Sweden, but even if that were so, the
Island is clearly also a mythical locale. It is associated particularly with the story of
the hero Kaukomieli (‘Far-minded’), who escapes his enemies to the island and
seduces all of the women there (‘Laid a hundred maids, knew a thousand brides’)
and is then of course banished by the men of the island. Ahola (2014: 64–65) points
out that the mythic theme of a wandering hero having erotic adventures on an
island is rare in both Old Norse and medieval European sources but well known in
Mediterranean myths such as that concerning Odysseus and Circe.
Islands on the northern Baltic Sea literally arose from the Otherworld beneath
the surface of water. The process of land uplift tied maritime, coastal and terrestrial
landscapes –as well as different time horizons –together. Accordingly, even cairns
that were constructed on elevated loci on the mainland may have been associated
with ‘fossilized islands’. Bradley (2000: 136–145) has argued that some Bronze
Age ship imagery in the rock carvings of Bohuslän, in south-western Sweden,
was associated with inland cairn sites and meant to convey the idea that water
surrounded the burial sites even when they were located in the inland.
In northern cosmology, the Land of the Dead was thought to lie both along a
vertical and horizontal axes –that is, it could be located ‘down’ (e.g. bottom of a
lake), but at the same time also ‘up north’ and accessible by travelling far enough
north (e.g. by following a river or sailing across the sea). The latter or a ‘horizontal
cosmology’ has contributed to a notion of an Island of the Dead, which according
to the comparative research carried out by Napolskikh (1992) is one of the elem-
ents of Finno-Ugric cosmology that can be traced all the way back to the Proto-
Uralic period –or possibly as far back as the Neolithic –although the dating of
Proto-Uralic is a contested issue. In his reconstruction, the Proto-Uralic Land of the
Dead was an island located at the mouth of the ‘world river’, high up in the North.
Archaeological evidence lends credence to the great antiquity of island burial, as
some (though not all) of the most famous Stone Age burial grounds –such as Olenyi
Ostrov (‘Deer Island’) on Lake Onega and Zvejnieki in Latvia –were located on
islands. As noted, the tradition of island burial persists in Bronze Age cairn burials,
and at least in the inland regions extends to the Iron Age, where so called ‘Lapp
cairns’ and cremation cemeteries are often located on islands (e.g. Saipio 2015).
In the historical period, the practice of island burial persisted among both
Finns and the Sámi, especially in remote areas where churchyards were few and far
between (Ruohonen 2010). This practice may in part have been dictated by neces-
sity and hygiene, as particularly during spring and autumn –with weak ice and bad
roads –transporting a dead body to faraway consecrated ground would have been
well-nigh impossible. However, as Marek Zvelebil (1997: 45) has observed in his
discussion of Olenyi Ostrov, the historical-period island burials may also bear an
echo of prehistoric island burials and circumpolar cosmology with roots going as
104 Sea
far back as the Mesolithic. The Catholic Church certainly rejected island burial as
a ‘pagan abomination’ and sought to sanction the practice (Ruohonen 2005: 256).
Coastal mazes in the North

Stone mazes (or labyrinths) are prominently present on the northern Baltic Sea coast,
with some 350 mazes known from Sweden and 200 from Finland, dating from the
Middle Ages to the early modern period (Westerdahl 1995: 267). Their size varies
but is typically several metres in diameter, although the largest known one, located
on the island of Bolshoi Zayatskyi in the White Sea, is about 25 m in diameter
(Figure 5.5). Some writers make a distinction between a ‘maze’ (with an entrance
and an exit) and a ‘labyrinth’ (in which the entrance leads to the centre), but here
the two words are used as synonyms. While some mazes are known from inland
contexts, associated with Iron Age burials, they are typically a coastal phenomenon
in northernmost Europe. More specifically, labyrinths tend to be associated with
sites associated with maritime-oriented activities –particularly fishing and sailing –
and are historically linked to the expansion (and Christianization) of the Nordic
states into the central and northern parts of Fennoscandia from the thirteenth cen-
tury onwards (Westerdahl 1995: 267–269). Northern mazes are also attested in
Sámi burial sites on the coast of the Arctic Ocean and in the White Sea region in
north-western Russia (Olsen 1991; Shumkin 2000). Northern stone and turf mazes
comprise an intriguing category of archaeological sites for a number of reasons.
First, there is no direct historical information about their purpose although they
are quite common and of a relatively young age (Olsen 1991). Second, mazes mix
up different time horizons and regions in various different ways and weave together
different temporalities, geographies and dimensions of reality. The labyrinth motif
is known from contexts spanning from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age and up to
FIGURE 5.5 One of the stone and turf labyrinths of Bolshoi Zayatskyi island on the
White Sea. Photo: Vitold Muratov/Wikimedia Commons.
modern times, from the pre-classical Mediterranean world to medieval ecclesiastical

contexts and all the way to the northernmost reaches of early modern Europe –
and they are widely known outside the European world as well (Kern 2000). The
origins of the word ‘maze’ (as indeed that of ‘labyrinth’) remains uncertain, but it
is likely of a Scandinavian origin, with the original meaning referring to a state of
being confused, bewildered or losing consciousness (Russell and Russell 1991: 77;
McCullough 2005: 15), which may indeed give a clue about the meaning of mazes.
In modern European mindscapes, the maze is most prominently associated with
Crete. Classical Greek authors identified Daedalus as the inventor of maze, in which
the Minotaur was imprisoned on Crete, and associated mazes with cavern systems in
Cretan mountains –indeed Daedalus’s design was supposed to have been fashioned
after the maze leading to Underworld (Ingold 2007: 53). Although there is no his-
torical information about the use of mazes in the northern world, they do feature
in folklore which indicates that the maze retained its eastern Mediterranean asso-
ciations. One of the popular names used for labyrinths in Swedish was Trojaborg or
‘Troy Castle’ (English turf labyrinths were similarly known as ‘Troy Towns’), a name
that occurs already in seventeenth-century antiquarian accounts, while a second
term recorded in the Swedish-speaking coastal areas of Finland was jungfrudans
or ‘Maiden Dance’. The name is probably related to a game known from ethno-
graphic accounts, where the boys of a village tried to drag a maiden from the centre
of the labyrinth (Kraft 1985), but the theme of a maiden in a labyrinth raises an
obvious parallel with the Greek myth concerning Theseus, who rescued Ariadne
from the Minotaur’s labyrinth.
This theme finds a pictorial representation in a fifteenth-century fresco from the
church of Korppoo in the archipelago of Turku, south-western Finland, where a
woman has been painted in the middle of a labyrinth. The association of labyrinths
with Troy may perhaps be explained by the fact that in both Troy and the Cretan
labyrinth there was a ‘damsel in distress’ that was rescued by a hero. Confusing the
two is thus understandable, and in any case both the labyrinth and the town of Troy
refer to a mythologized faraway place in the Mediterranean. Other names occasion-
ally used for the labyrinths include Jerusalem, Jericho, Babylon,Viborg, Trondheim
and even ‘Paris in France’ (Pietiläinen 1999); the name of the faraway place was
thus of little consequence. In continental churches, mazes were nonetheless also
identified with the mythical labyrinth of Crete (Russell and Russell 1991: 78),
and it is worth pointing out that classical and Hellenistic coins minted by the city
of Knossos in Crete often feature a labyrinth with a cross-shaped centre –exactly
the same form as in the Korppoo fresco –and that the ground plan of the Minoan
palace of Knossos, the ruins of which may have been visible in antiquity, resembles
a maze. A labyrinth with a cross-shaped centre design also decorates an Etruscan
vase from the seventh century bc, in which the labyrinth is associated with the
word ‘TRUIA’.
It is probably unrealistic to assume that the northern labyrinths had a single,
definite meaning and purpose (Olsen 1991). The period of constructing mazes
lasted for at least 500 years and covered a vast geographical region. If the labyrinths
106 Sea
had Mediterranean and maritime associations in the Baltic, their purpose may have
been quite different further up North. Spangen (2016: 91–92) cites early written
accounts, according to which both the Sámi reindeer herders and North Swedish
farmers used the labyrinths in rituals to protect their herds from predators and
evil spirits, as well as for ‘offerings and sorcery’, especially to affect other people’s
reindeer herds.
Journeying and movement, in their different forms, emerge as a central theme
related to mazes in the North. For example, Westerdahl (1995) has considered the
possible connection between coastal mazes and maritime navigation in the context
of the medieval and early modern Swedish expansion northwards. On a more sym-
bolic level, names like Troy and Jerusalem indicate a connection with distant and
(semi-)mythical lands, although journeying itself is not directly implied, whereas
terms like ‘Maiden Dance’ (jungfrudans) suggest movement. Likewise, mazes as
designs are effectively pathways implying movement through them (Eichberg
2009). Eichberg has mapped the possible impacts of engagements with mazes. He
observes that the maze design induces visual confusion, while ‘walking in a laby-
rinth, with its turns creates an unconscious rhythm’, which in turn induces altered
states of consciousness (Eichberg 2009). Or as Artress (1995: 97) puts it, chronicling
his own and observed religious-spiritual experiences:
Small miracles can happen in the labyrinth. We can strengthen ourselves by

shedding tears, feeling the anger and hurt that keep us from experiencing our
soul level’ (p. 75) […] ‘people on the labyrinth seem to gravitate toward what
I have come to call a process meditation’ […] We enter the terrain of memory
and dreams (p. 77) […] It works through the imagination and the senses, cre-
ating an awareness of how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the Holy.
All this resonates with the etymological association of the word maze with bewil-
derment (see above). Mazes, then, are not merely symbols but devices of spiritu-
ality, which supposedly explains their appearance and use in Christian religious
contexts. However, mazes as loci of spirituality would also have had a meaningful
relationship with northern non-Christian cosmologies which rendered the coast
as a liminal zone –a meeting place of different worlds, particularly the land and
the otherworldly sea (e.g. Westerdahl 2005). The handful of mazes known on the
Arctic Ocean coast in Norway are associated with Sámi burial grounds and Olsen
(1991: 53) argues that the meaning of these mazes has to do with the boundary
between the domains of the living and the dead, or a transition from one to another.
This idea is not specific to Arctic Sámi, but mazes are widely associated with way-
faring in the world of the dead; they ‘are portals that take the traveller to someplace
else’ (Ingold 2007: 56). Or as Olsen (1991: 55) puts it, ‘in the labyrinth a person is
outside normal time and place and outside society’.
Moving in a labyrinth can induce altered states of consciousness, which in turn
are associated with journeys to the Otherworld, which in the liminal setting of the
coast was particularly close to ‘this world’. For this reason, various magical practices
were considered to be particularly powerful at the seashore (Westerdahl 2005;

Cunliffe 2017: 7). Like venturing into a cave, entering a maze marked dissolving the
boundary between oneself and the world –an integral element of an ‘alternative’
perspective on reality offered by altered states of consciousness (see Greenwood
2009; Luke 2010). Transgressing the boundaries between the worlds is an elemen-
tary component of shamanic travels into other planes and dimensions of existence.
It is of interest here that, in folklore, circular movement in general –in the form of
circular dances for example –has been associated with moving between different
worlds or planes of existence, as ‘unscrewing the barrier between the natural and
the supernatural’ and thus opening a portal to an otherworld (Menefee 1985: 9).
While it seems plausible that northern labyrinths are meaningfully connected
to the boundaries between the worlds –the terrestrial and marine world, or this
world and the Otherworld –their more specific meanings still remain elusive. On
a general level, mazes make sense in both their pan-European Christian and nor-
thern non-Christian spiritual contexts. They even adapted to Christian notions
with ease, when the maze came to be associated with pilgrimage (or, more gener-
ally, the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’). This is all grounded on the very lived and experienced
properties of mazes, and moving in them. They could be interpreted in a similar
fashion as Neolithic pottery-making, discussed in Chapter 3, in that engagement
with mazes brought together bodily practices and more abstract concepts about
the world.
Many aspects of the mazes remain unclear, including reasons why mazes were
constructed in the specific locations where they were constructed, and there seems
to be little consensus on any aspect of the phenomenon –a state of affairs that seems
rather fitting when researching labyrinths. Westerdahl (2014) has explored the pos-
sible connection between the historically known shipwrecks and the construction
of mazes in specific locations of the coastal landscape on the northern Baltic Sea
world, but the results remain speculative at best. At the same time, however, he is
probably on a right track in that there seems to be something ‘special’ (in terms of
historical events) to the loci where mazes were constructed. Mazes comprise a type
of archaeological sites that, even if their specific meanings elude us, demonstrates
the cosmological significance of the coast also in more recent historical times –and
are thus comparable to, say, the tradition of building cairns. Mazes bring together
a number of different worlds and offer evidence of a deep link to the ‘European’
world, while at the same time reflecting northern traditions and worldviews.
6
BOATS AND WATERWAYS
The mystery object from a Lapland bog

In the fall of 1955, a temporary workhand at a farm in the village of Lehtojärvi,
close to the Arctic Circle in Finnish Lapland, was digging a ditch into a bog on the
shore of Lake Lehtojärvi. At the depth of ca. 60 cm, his shovel hit a carved wooden
object resembling an elk head. He dug up the artefact, which was damaged in the
process –for example, the lower jaw and one of the earlobes went missing –and
left it lying on top of a pile of mud. A few days later, the master of the house he
was working for came and collected the find, placing it in a barn attic, where it lay
for a few years until purchased by the Finnish National Museum in 1957. A small
investigation carried out by Aarni Erä-Esko (1958) at the find site failed to produce
any more remains associated with the find, but based on the bog sediment stratig-
raphy, established that the object must be Mesolithic. A subsequent 14C-dating has
narrowed down the dating at 5790 cal bc.
The object is outwardly rather humble looking, partly because it was damaged
when it was dug up, but it is really one of the most remarkable discoveries of
the North European Mesolithic. Because it portrays an elk head and has been
painted with red ochre, one might think that it is related to the ritual staffs with
carved elk-heads, such as the famous discoveries from the roughly contemporary
late Mesolithic burial site of Olenyi Ostrov at Lake Onega, north-western Russia
(Gurina 1956). However, details of the carving differ from all known elk-headed
staffs: the neck of the elk has been hollowed for insertion into a stem of some sort,
and it also features a drilled hole, probably for attaching the object with a cord to
some larger structure. Together with the fact that it was found on the boggy shore
of a lake that lies along the Ounasjoki river system –a major travel route from the
Gulf of Bothnia to the Finnish interior, these features have been taken to mean that
the Lehtojärvi elk head originally adorned the prow of an ‘elk-headed boat’.
Boats and waterways 109
Elk-headed boats are a characteristic feature of northern European rock art,

occurring in great numbers at most major hunter–gatherer rock art sites, such as
Alta in Norway, Nämforsen in Sweden and Lake Onega, River Vyg and Kanozero
in north-western Russia (see e.g. Gjerde 2010). The distribution is not limited to
northern Europe, as scattered examples of elk-headed boats can also be found in
Siberian rock art, even as far to the east as Chukhotka near the Bering Strait (Devlet
and Devlet 2005; Kulikova 2014; Lahelma 2017). The sites are dated between
the late Mesolithic and late Neolithic periods and thus cover a period of at least
3,000–4,000 years, although some of the Russian and Siberian sites could be much
younger and the timeframe thus wider. Together with the immense geographic
distribution, the longevity of the image attests to its potency as a symbol and crucial
significance among the northern foragers.
For a long time, it was anyone’s guess whether the elk-boats of rock art depicted
real or mythological boats, although this did not stop the issue from being hotly
debated. The Lehtojärvi find, which still remains a singular discovery, demonstrated
that such boats really did exist. But while the Lehtojärvi find shows that elk-boats
could be concrete objects (Figure 6.1), the rock art also offers evidence pointing to
a wholly different, spiritual or mythological notion of elk-boats. In some cases, for
instance, we encounter elk-boats that feature not just the head of the elk but also
the legs of the animal (Lahelma 2007), and it seems doubtful that such boats will
ever be found in bogs. Others feature the boat integrated into an elk figure, forming
its antlers as it were. Such images must mean that the ‘real’ and ‘mythological’ were
intertwined in a complex manner –as is so often the case in the North.
FIGURE 6.1 A reconstruction of a skin-boat with an elk or deer effigy in the prow

being paddled in the Alta fjord, northern Norway. Photo: World Heritage Rock Art
Centre – Alta Museum.
110 Sea
Water and the Otherworld in a northern context

The primordial forests of northern Fennoscandia made overland travel challen-
ging, a situation that persisted well into the historical period. This, however, was
compensated by an extensive network of water routes formed by the rivers and
labyrinthine lake regions of especially Sweden and Finland. With lightweight
watercraft that can be carried over portages and rapids, the water routes offer access
from the Baltic Sea to the Arctic Ocean, the North Sea and the White Sea, as well
as all the huge freshwater basins of Sweden, Finland and Karelia –Lakes Vättern,
Vänern, Päijänne, Saimaa, Onega and Ladoga. For more seaworthy vessels, the rela-
tively placid and narrow Baltic Sea formed an inland sea with countless oppor-
tunities for long-distance trade and contacts. When land hunting failed, fishing,
sealing and whaling provided a reliable basis for subsistence. It is not surprising,
then, that the boat emerged as the central symbol Stone Age hunter societies in the
North –and continued to remain so for the Bronze and Iron Age farming cultures,
persisting in some respects to the present day.
But why did the Stone Age hunter–fishermen choose to depict an elk –a land
animal –on the prows of their boats? This is a question that has puzzled the maritime
archaeologist Christer Westerdahl, who has pointed out that in recent Scandinavian
folklore the large land animals (especially the horse) were ‘taboo’ to mention or name
at sea –but were still regularly used in navigation and name-giving in connection
with dangerous passages (e.g. Westerdahl 2005). Images of elk could thus be seen as
liminal agents at the sea, which had an apotropaic or protective and averting effect
when associated with watercraft. The choice of elk as the depicted animal underlines
the central role played by the animal in circumpolar cosmology, although, as pointed
out by Gjerde (2010), in some cases wild reindeer and birds appear to have been
depicted as well. In Bronze Age rock carvings of southern Scandinavia, the horse
seems to take over the role of the elk, as some of the carved ships feature a horse head
in the prow (but others perhaps still continue to represent an elk). Although difficult
to prove, the famous animal heads of Viking Age ‘dragon ships’ may well continue
the same archaic tradition dating back to the Mesolithic.
Boats and waterways offered great benefits to Stone Age forager societies, but the
acute danger of drowning was the flip side of the coin and must not be forgotten
when investigating boat symbolism. To board a vessel was to tightrope between
life and sudden death. Although rock art portrays seagoing vessels used for hunting
whales, sometimes with more than twenty people on board, the most common type
of boat were likely simple dugout canoes or haapio-type boats (dugouts extended by
adding a couple of planks on the sides) that could easily topple over or be filled with
water even by smallish waves because of the low gunwales. Although such boats
float even when filled with water, a plunge into the chilly sea or lake could easily
lead to hypothermia. The famous early Mesolithic find of Antrea in the Karelian
Isthmus, which included a fishing net and various types of hunting equipment
buried in the clayey sea bottom, probably represents just such an incident (Pälsi
1920). Even the large boats used for whale-hunt, such as depicted in rock art at Vyg
and Kanozero –probably skin-boats resembling Inuit umiaks –could be punctured

and broken in the heat of the hunt, or be overturned in a sudden storm, causing mass
drowning. And yet, at the same time, water is the prerequisite of all life, and lakes and
seas provide an invaluable source of food –making it a deeply ambivalent element.
Perhaps it is due to this ambivalence and the everyday association of water with
death, as well as life, that has made water the liminal element par excellence for
northern peoples. In particular, the Land of the Dead is typically located under
water or accessed through a navigable body of water, such as a river. The Sámi
of Finnish Lapland, for instance, held that certain lakes had a hole in the bottom
(Figure 6.2), through which the Land of the Dead (saivo) could be reached
(Pentikäinen 1995: 146–149). Everyday observance was thought to support this
notion, as in saivo-lakes the fish could suddenly disappear –having escaped the fish-
ermen through the hole in the lake bottom.
In the Finnish–Karelian Kalevala-poems, in order to access the Land of the
Dead (Tuonela), the River of Tuonela needs to be crossed. The main protagonist
of the poems, the sage Väinämöinen, accomplishes this by transforming himself
into a snake and swimming through the nets in the river. The far-off mythical
country of Pohjola or ‘Northland’, to which the heroes of Kalevala poems ven-
ture in search of adventure –and which in effect is another version of the Land of
the Dead –is in turn accessed by a sea journey on board a ship. Among Finno-
Ugric peoples, these notions of the Otherworld lying beyond water are according
to Napolskikh (1992) among the most ancient components of Finno-Ugric cos-
mology. Scandinavian myths are less coherent in this respect, describing various
realms of afterlife for various groups of people (warriors, seafarers, etc.), but water is
nonetheless a frequent component. For example, the realm of the goddess Hel was
separated from the land of the living by the fast-running river Gjöll, not unlike the
River of Tuonela, while people drowned at sea were caught in the nets of Rán and
taken to her underwater realm (Ellis Davidson 2013).
Travelling as a spirit fish
The liminal character of bodies of water is reflected in accounts of shamanic travel,
which often either feature transformation into a fish or take place using a ‘boat
of song’. The very first surviving account of a Sámi shamanic séance, recorded in
the twelfth-century Historia Norvegiae (Tolley 1994), involves shamans transforming
themselves into ‘water beasts’. The lively story describes how a Sámi shaman
attempts to resurrect a woman, the hostess of a friendly get-together between
Norwegian and Sámi traders, who suddenly falls dead in the middle of the party.
The Sámi are not at all worried about the situation and proceed to resurrect the
lady by a shamanic séance, but then the shaman sent to fetch her soul also dies in
the course of the séance, his stomach ripped open, mouth foaming and face black.
A second shaman follows him in order to find out what had happened and tells the
audience that
112 Sea
the deceased sorcerer had perished by the following sort of accident: his
gandus [spirit helper being], transformed into the shape of a water beast, had
by ill luck struck against an enemy’s gandus changed into sharpened stakes
as it was rushing across a lake, for the stakes lying set up in the depths of
that same lake had pierced his stomach, as appeared on the dead magician
at home.
[Tolley 1994: 136–137 ]
FIGURE 6.2 The canyon lake of Pakasaivo in Finnish Lapland is one of the saivo-lakes
which the Sámi thought provided access to the Underworld. The lake is exceptionally
deep (ca. 60 m), and its water is crystal clear. Photo: Vesa-Pekka Herva.
The same account also describes the drum of the shaman, on which were depicted
‘diagrams of whales and deer with bridles and snow-shoes and even a ship with oars,
vehicles which that devilish gandus uses to go across the depths of snow and slopes
of mountains or the deep waters’ (Tolley 1994: 136–137). Since, as Tolley (1994)
points out, the setting of the aquatic journey is a freshwater lake, the Latin term
cetus, above translated as a ‘water beast’ or a ‘whale’, may in fact refer to a pike (Esox
lucius), as this seems to have been a fish species particularly associated with shamans
in later accounts. In the ethnographic accounts, the Sámi shamans were widely
believed to be able to transform themselves into fish (Itkonen 1946: 332–333).
For instance, folklore accounts of the early twentieth century collected by Samuli
Paulaharju describe how a powerful noiaidi (shaman) called Päiviö of Peltovuoma –
a semi-legendary figure who may have lived in Kittilä in Finnish Lapland during
the seventeenth century –commonly transformed himself into a pike in order to
reach faraway places. According to some accounts, he once swam as a pike across
the Gulf of Bothnia to cure the Swedish king in Stockholm. On the return journey,
he is said to have been caught in a net and almost drowned. According a second
account, he finally met his fate while travelling in the shape of a pike, because his
assistant –a young boy –fell asleep during the séance and did not wake him up –
causing the shaman to rot to death inside the guts of the fish.
Knud Leem (1697–1774), a Norwegian missionary active among the Sámi of
Finnmark in the eighteenth century, confirms that one of the main spirit helper
beings of the Sámi shaman (noaidi) was a spirit fish or passevare guelie (‘holy mountain
fish’), the shape of which the noaidi could assume in his otherworldly travels (Leem
1767; see also Bäckman 1975). The account given in Historia Norvegiae suggests
that this notion goes back at least 1,000 years, but images found in Finnish rock
paintings suggest that the notion of shamanic travel in the shape of a fish has been
around much longer. For example, the rock painting of Juusjärvi, near Helsinki,
shows a human figure depicted in a 45-degree position, accompanied by a fish that
can probably be identified as a pike. The tilted pose of the person may reasonably
be associated with a scene of falling into trance –a shamanistic séance, that is –with
the pike representing the summoned spirit-helper being (Lahelma 2008: 53). Other
sites, such as Haukkavuori at Mäntyharju or the Hahlavuori painting at Hirvensalmi,
feature scenes where a human being is depicted upside-down –as if diving into the
lake below the painted cliff. Finally, the site of Kapasaari in Finland appears to show
a scene from an aquatic underworld, with a human being surrounded by a shoal of
fish (possibly pike). Taken together, these sites can be taken as a sequence depicting
the various stages of the séance, perhaps intended to commemorate a journey or
pass on information to apprentices (Lahelma 2008: 52–53).
The reason why both Neolithic and much later Sámi shamans ventured under
water is of course related to northern cosmology, where a notion of an underwater
Land of the Dead was common, but it may also relate to universal experiences
related to trance. Shamanic trance has been claimed to include universal features,
such as particular types of geometric visual hallucinations (‘entoptics’) deriving
114 Sea
from the visual cortex (e.g. Lewis-Williams and Dowson 1988). If such diagnostic
geometric and metamorphotic shapes can be identified in prehistoric art, the
proponents of the theory argue, this may indicate that the art was inspired by trance
experiences. Because of widespread and sometimes misguided use of the ‘neuro-
psychological theory’, this line of argument has been viciously attacked by some
researchers (e.g. Bahn 2010) and as a result has fallen out of fashion. Critics have
accused the neuropsychological model of relying on clinical tests made using LSD
or other hallucinogenic substances and interpreting prehistoric art in terms of such
drug-related ‘visuals’ –only to be expected of the representatives of a generation of
scholars who graduated in the 1960s.
But regardless of how the visual effects of trance may or may not manifest in
art, it needs to be acknowledged that a state of trance involves not only visual
hallucinations but also certain somatic experiences and shared sensations also derive
from the central nervous system (Chippindale et al. 2000), and this observation is
not based on drug-induced experiments. Among the most common somatic phe-
nomena associated with altered states of consciousness are experiences of weight-
lessness, breathlessness and the mental perception of departing from the physical
body. Interpretations given to these experiences are culturally determined but are
almost universally described as being akin to flying and diving, and are in shaman-
istic traditions usually interpreted as such. The under-water journeys related in
Sámi ethnographic accounts and apparently depicted in rock art may thus be related
to the universal characteristics of trance experiences.
Blue elks and flying boats

Knud Leem also offers us a second important clue related to the liminal nature
of water in northern cosmology. He writes that the Sámi shamans of Norwegian
Finnmark began their séance singing: ‘Valamastit herke: sjaattjalit vanas’ (‘harness
the reindeer bull, push the boat to water’) (Leem 1767: 475; our translation). In
the ethnographic sources, the spirit reindeer bull (saiva sarva) almost always occu-
pies centre stage, but in the song cited by Leem, a boat has an analogous role as a
spirit helper being. As we have seen, the same situation is described already in the
twelfth-century Historia Norvegiae, where the Sámi shaman drum is said to have
featured images of reindeer, water-beasts, snow-shoes and ‘a ship with oars’, all of
them said to be ‘vehicles of the gandus’. In other words, in Sámi pre-Christian reli-
gion, all of these vehicles used for travel were seen as spirit helper beings capable of
taking the noaidi to faraway places. In later historical sources, the Sámi sometimes
likewise described the shaman drum as a boat (Itkonen 1946: 121).
The notion of travelling to the Otherworld both in the shape of an elk and
onboard a boat can also be found in Finnish pre-Christian religious tradition. The
main protagonist of Kalevala poetry, the shaman Väinämöinen, commonly mounts
a ‘blue elk’ or a ‘stallion of straw’ on his journeys to the Otherworld. In a poem
relating a shamanic battle, he is ambushed by Sámi rival while riding his elk on the
open sea:
Now comes Väinämöinen

Galloping along
On the back of a blue elk,
Stroking its back,
Patting its hide,
Steadfast old Väinämöinen.
[The Sámi] Spied a black speck on the sea,
A bluish speck on the wave:
Now comes Väinämöinen;
He flexed his bow
[…]
Did not hit Väinämöinen
But hit his horse
Under its arms
Through the warm flesh.
[SKVR I: 11, lines 19–29, 35–38; our translation]
The image of Väinämöinen riding a blue elk on the sea has baffled generations of
folklorists but seems less impenetrable in the light of the archaeological record.
As noted above, elk-headed boats were depicted in rock art and probably existed
as real vessels as well, but people riding elk and deer are also portrayed at a
number of rock art sites, such as Alta in Norway, Skärvången in Sweden and
Verla in Finland (Lahelma 2007). As Felix Oinas (1985: 154–159) has correctly
observed, Väinämöinen’s blue elk is to be understood as the supernatural steed
of the shaman, comparable to the saiva sarva of the Sámi shaman. But why is the
elk flying above water?
Here, again, Leem’s note about the introductory words of the shamanic séance
come useful: for the eighteenth-century Sámi shaman, the reindeer bull and the
boat fulfilled the same function and were thus, in some respects, interchangeable. In
the Kalevala poems,Väinämöinen’s magical boat-building is a recurring theme. His
boat is described as being made of animal bones belonging to a bird, fish or reindeer
(Kuusi et. al. 1977: 532) –an obvious parallel with the zoomorphic spirit helpers of
the noaidi –and he makes it through magical singing:
Sturdy old Väinämöinen

Made a boat with his knowledge
Built a craft with his singing:
Three words were lacking.
[Kuusi et. al. 1977: 183 ]
The missing esoteric knowledge (‘three words’) he acquires by visiting the grave
of Antero Vipunen, the mythical first shaman (Haavio 1952: 106–139). At first
Vipunen swallows Väinämöinen but eventually has to give in and utter the words
that allow Väinämöinen to ‘finish off his boat’ (Kuusi et. al. 1977: 185). That this
116 Sea
was no ordinary boat but a vessel for otherworldly travel is indicated by a poem in
which Väinämöinen
Sang a copper-bottomed boat
Plunged to the depths of the sea
To the earth-mothers below
Up to the heavens above
Into the whirlpool’s gullet.
[Kuusi et. al. 1977: 279–280 ]
Väinämöinen typically sings or plays ‘on a rocky hill by the shore, or on a joy-stone,
sometimes on a music-boulder or on a play-rock’ (Haavio 1952: 157). Remarkably, he
is described as sitting on a large boulder even while he is on a boat journey –a rather
bizarre image that makes it clear that the boat journey is not to be taken literally but
is in fact a shamanic metaphor. In the same vein, the carving of the boat is described as
taking place on a cliff, mountain or rocky hill (Haavio 1952: 215) –strange locations
for building boats but easier to understand if ‘building a boat’ is understood as a meta-
phor for the shamanic séance. Singing and playing at boulders and rocky cliffs also
suggests a comparison with the Saami noaidi, who sometimes visited sacred rocks or
cliffs (sieidi) in order to sing and fall into a trance. This was done because the spirit
helpers of the noaidi were thought to live in such places (Bäckman 1975).
In rock art, the boat evidently occurs in various different roles; some of them more
mundane than others. The large whaling scenes of River Vyg, which show boats and
crews co-operating in killing the belugas, seem to celebrate the strength of different
communities working for a single goal. They belong to a ritual context (Gjerde
2010), but the ships depicted are not spirit boats but real life vessels. But even at River
Vyg, most boats have an elk-head in the prow, and the semantic association of elks and
boats –with its roots in shamanistic thinking –provides a much better explanation
for this fact than simply arguing that the elk figurehead has an apotropaic function
(which may also be true). It also neatly explains some of the stranger images of rock
art boats, such as the large painting of Pyhänpää in central Finland, where a boat, a
human and an elk are merged into a single image (Lahelma 2007), or the painting of
Ruominkapia in south-eastern Finland, where a boat is shown moving on a vertical
axis, either up or down. It could depict a boating accident, of course, but that seems
highly unlikely, as unlike at River Vyg scenes of mundane activities never appear to be
depicted in Finnish rock art. A more viable interpretation is that this is a ‘spirit boat’
on its way ‘into the whirlpool’s gullet’ or the ‘heavens above’, as sung by the Karelian
bards and depicted by Finnish National Romantic artists (Figure 6.3).
In the same vein, while some of the boats depicted at Alta in northern Norway
seem to be participating in hunting and fishing, other can be readily associated with
shamanism. A few images of boats carry people who appear to be beating drums,
with a round object in one hand and the other hand raised, while one panel at the
carving locale of Apana Gård seems to show a man flying above the boat; the hands
of both the flying man and the occupants of the boat suggest wings, and the shape
of their heads suggests a beak.
FIGURE 6.3 The sage Väinämöinen embarks his flying boat in a painting by Finnish
national-romantic artist Akseli Gallén-Kallela (Väinämöinen’s departure, ca. 1893–1894).
Photo: Finnish National Gallery.
118 Sea
Solar boats in razors and rock art

A boat is an apt symbol for movement, travel and transition –both in this world
and to the World Beyond. Indeed, the notion of a spirit boat as a shamanic vessel is
a circumpolar concept (Vastokas and Vastokas 1973; Lahelma 2017). But because the
boat was the primary means for movement in the North, it came to be associated
also with the movement of the heavenly bodies –in particular the sun. This image
of the cosmic ‘sun ship’ also seems to arise from a circumpolar background.
Depictions of what have been interpreted as sun ships are among the most
famous motifs of south Scandinavian Bronze Age rock art, although they are in
fact quite rare (Coles 2005). Typically they consist of a globular device –or some-
times a ring-cross –attached to a boat by a line or hovering directly above it. No
doubt contributing to the fame of this motif is the fact that it seems to provide
a link between southern Scandinavia and the ancient civilizations further south,
thus lending the carvings an air of prestige quite unlike the hunter’s art of the
North. In the course of nearly a century of research into the carvings, authors
like Oscar Almgren (1927), Flemming Kaul (2004) and Kristian Kristiansen (2010)
have rested heavily on this particular motif in forging their narratives concerning
the links between Bronze Age Scandinavia and the Mediterranean world. The sun
ship is indeed a mythological theme well known especially from ancient Egypt,
where the sun-god Ra was thought to journey across the skies in a solar boat. The
theme is commonly depicted in frescoes and other art forms, and actual wooden
vessels interpreted as solar barks have been discovered at several Egyptian sites, most
famous of them being the Khufu ship that dates to ca. 2500 bc.
In addition to Bronze Age rock art, images of sun ships are a recurring motif in
contemporary bronze razors. In his careful and widely acclaimed analysis of razor
iconography, Flemming Kaul (1998) has been able to identify a narrative of the
sun’s journey across the sky on a ‘day-ship’, its descent beneath the sea at dusk as
a ‘night-ship’ and continued journey again at dawn, accompanied variously by a
snake, a fish or a horse. Kaul initially declined to relate the myth to any historically
known myths, but Kristiansen and Larsson (2005) have connected it to elements
of Indo-European mythology, associating it particularly with the Twin Gods (the
Dioscuri of classical mythology), who rescue the sun maiden from the monsters of
the night on their divine ship.
Yet, even if one acknowledges the links to the Mediterranean, it is striking
how throughout this long history of research, Scandinavian scholars appear to have
been unable (or unwilling) to consider the option that rather than being first-
hand imported from the South, South Scandinavian rock art may in fact be a nor-
thern phenomenon with its roots firmly in the older, Stone Age rock art (Lahelma
2017). The most obvious argument for this is, of course, the prevalence of boat
imagery. Even though many of the boats depicted in Bronze Age rock art appear
to be plank-built sea-going ships rather than humble dugouts, and there is a fair
amount of variation in the way the ships are depicted, the basic iconographic ren-
dition remains the same. The animal at the prow is perhaps sometimes a horse, as
maintained by Scandinavian scholars, although it is often difficult to identify the

species with any certainty. The depictions are schematic, but many of the animal
heads in fact have a strongly curved muzzle that more evokes an elk than a horse.
However that may be, one thing is clear: boats do not have anywhere the same
centrality in the artistic traditions of the contemporary Mediterranean world –and
in the rock art of central and southern Europe they barely occur at all. Boat images
are thus a characteristically northern element of rock art.
As for solar boats, it is not necessary to search for parallels in Ancient Egypt,
because like boat imagery in general, rock art depictions of sun ships appear to be
a circumpolar phenomenon. This argument was made already by Joan and Romas
Vastokas (1973) in their discussion of the Peterborough petroglyphs of Ontario,
Canada. One of the central images of that carving site is a large (105 cm long and
75 cm high) image of a boat with a ‘mast’ topped by a globular or solar device.
Because it closely resembles South Scandinavian rock art images, such as a famous
solar boat from Bottna in Bohuslän, Sweden, theories have emerged of Bronze
Age ‘Vikings’ reaching America and producing the Peterborough carvings (Vastokas
2004). But as Vastokas and Vastokas have observed, similar imagery can be found in
rock art throughout the northern circumpolar zone, and what is more, the motif
itself finds a logical explanation in circumpolar notions of shamanic travel on a soul
boat. The Cosmic Axis, along which the shaman ascends to the celestial realm, may
be topped by an image of the sun: ‘Hence, the soul-boat becomes also a vehicle of
the sun’ (Vastokas and Vastokas 1973: 127).
Admittedly, while boat figures are extremely common in the circumpolar region
(e.g. Kulikova 2014), images identifiable as solar boats occur only sporadically along
this vast region. Boats and solar images appear commonly together in Karelian rock
carvings, as well as those of Kanozero on the Kola peninsula, but they are never
joined by a line into a single figure. However, in western Siberia, the large carving
site of Tomskaya Pisanicha does feature boats with globular devices (Okladnikov
and Martynov 1972), as do the sites of Shalabolino and Shishkino in eastern Siberia
(Devlet and Devlet 2005: 216). One of the most remarkable sites in this respect is
that of River Olekma (Okladnikov and Mazin 1976), where the boats appear to fly
among the heavenly bodies, and at least one boat is integrated with a circular figure
(for a more comprehensive review, see Lahelma 2017). Even if such images are rare
in Siberia and North America (as they are in Scandinavia as well), they provide suf-
ficient evidence for arguing that solar symbolism associated with boats may arise
from a northern circumpolar tradition.
Boats for the dead

If the boat can carry the sun on its daily journey, and thus assume a cosmic role, it
seems only fitting that it has also become associated with the most fundamental of
all transitions: from life to death. As with elk-boats, here too the earliest evidence
can be found already in late Mesolithic burials, and the association of boats with
death continues almost to the present day. Underwater investigations at the site of
120 Sea
Møllegabet II in Denmark brought to light a boat burial of a young man wrapped

in birch bark and placed in a dugout canoe, which was 14C-dated to 4790 cal bc
(Grøn and Skaarup 1991). The most astonishing aspect of this discovery is the
fact that the site had been submerged already at the time of burial: the boat had
been fastened to the bottom of a shallow bay with wooden stakes. Remains of
artefacts, including fragments of two paddles, were found associated with the
boat –as if placed there for the deceased for his last paddling journey to the Land
of the Dead.
A similar find is known from Øgård, also in Denmark, where a Neolithic (3360
cal bc) dugout canoe was found in the course of peat extraction (Troels-Smith
1946). There was a small hearth in the stern of the boat, located in a layer of clay,
and this boat was likewise held in position by wooden rods. A skeleton of a man was
found immediately in front of the boat and appears to have originally been placed
inside the boat. The great similarity of the two burials is striking, given that they are
separated by 1,500 years, and a testimony to the longevity and conservative nature of
the boat burial rite. Finds of wooden boats, of course, require exceptional conditions,
so one should not be surprised that they are few and far between but may have been
fairly common. At several Stone Age burial sites, such as Skateholm (Larsson 1988)
and a number of sites in Finland (Ahola 2017a),‘shadows’ of blackened soil –possible
remains of a dugout canoe –have been observed in the burial pit.
The tradition seems to continue, in a somewhat altered form, during the early
Bronze Age, when in Denmark in a large number of cases a boat-shaped burial
pit was made underneath the round barrow (Artelius 1996). They have been well
preserved because the Danish barrows are constructed of turf, whereas elsewhere in
the region rock cairns were prominent, and if boats were present in cairns they have
long since disappeared. It should be pointed out, though, that in several instances in
Sweden, images of ships are associated with rock cairns, such as that of Hjortekrog
in Småland, where fourteen ships had been carved in the bedrock before the cairn
was built on top of the carvings (Bradley and Widholm 2007). Images of ships were
also among the motifs depicted in the carved slabs of the famous cairns of Kivik
in Sweden (Goldhahn 2013), Mjeltehaugen in Norway (Goldhahn 2008) and the
barrow of Sagaholm in Sweden (Goldhahn 2016). In some cases, a boat-shaped
stone setting has been found inside a cairn.
A more durable type of boat burial emerges in the Middle Bronze Age
(Montelius’ period III), when the first ‘ship settings’ (Sw. skeppsättning) are found
in the southern parts Sweden, and to a lesser extent also in Denmark and Norway
(e.g. Capelle 1986; Artelius 1996; Skoglund 2008). The ship settings are essentially
elongated, boat-shaped cairns that in addition to their oval shape sometimes feature
elements that further enhance the resemblance to ships, such as tall blocks of stone
at each end, giving the impression of a prow and a stem (Figure 6.4). They coin-
cide with a transition from inhumation to cremation among the farming societies
and sometimes feature urn burials. In one case at least, the urn was decorated with
a drawing of a boat (Ballard et al. 2003: 389). Ship settings become more common
in the Iron Age, when they sometimes reach monumental proportions (the one
FIGURE 6.4 The monumental Iron Age ship setting of Ale Stenar in southern
Sweden. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
at Jelling, Denmark, seems to have been 354 m long; Randsborg 2008), and may
well have been a burial type restricted to the highest elites. The same is of course
true of the famous ship burials of Oseberg and Gokstad in Norway, which yielded
sumptuous grave goods, but especially in Norway, ship or boat burial spread among
all social levels during the Viking Age, with vessels ranging from seaworthy ships to
humble rowing boats.
With the advent of Christianity, ship burial came to an end in those parts of nor-
thern Europe that fell within the Catholic sphere, but in the more remote parts of
Finland, Lapland and particularly in Greek Orthodox Karelia, aspects of boat burial
were preserved in a Christian context almost until the present day. In the White
Sea region, the Karelian populace would still in the nineteenth century sometimes
place a boat or a part of a boat on top of the grave. According to Zhulnikov (2006),
if the deceased was a woman, a prow of a boat was placed on the grave, and if it
was a man, the aft part was used. Drawings and photographs taken in the 1930s by
the ethnographer Auvo Hirsjärvi at the village cemetery of Suistamo, Karelia, show
whole wooden vessels on top of graves, as well as Greek Orthodox grave crosses
featuring a miniature boat and paddle on top of the cross (Figure 6.5). Even the
Karelian language, which is closely related to Finnish, preserves a memory of boat
burial. In Finnish, the word ruuhi refers to a dugout canoe, but in Karelian it means
a ‘coffin’ (Siikala 1992: 103).
FIGURE 6.5 A drawing made in 1935 of a Greek Orthodox cross topped with a
boat and a paddle at the village cemetery of Suistamo, Karelia. The cross marked the
grave of Jehkin Nikolai Shemeikka who died on 26 December 1915. Image: Auvo
Hirsjärvi/Finnish Heritage Agency.
7
RIVER MOUTHS AND
CENTRAL PLACES
The real and mythical rivers

In the northern, boreal world –dotted with innumerable lakes left behind by the
glaciers –rivers were links not just between different lake systems but also between
different worlds in both a geographical and spiritual sense. They structured
movement and thus also the perception and experience of the world (e.g. Korpela
2011). The rich northern folklore concerning ‘water spirits’ –such as the Swedish
lore concerning näcken, a spirit who plays a violin at rapids and sometimes captures
humans to his underwater realm –mirrors the importance of ‘waterscapes’ in the
lived environment, as well as the manner in which human lives were entangled with
them. It is interesting and rather surprising to note that the main culture-hero of
the Kalevala poems, the sage Väinämöinen (whose instrument is not a violin but the
‘Finnish zither’ or kantele), is etymologically associated with a riverine landscape, as
the word väinä is an archaic Finnish word for a stream pool or a river mouth. The
names of several major rivers in northern Europe, such as Dvina (Finn. Vienanjoki)
in Karelia and Daugava (Finn. Väinäjoki) in Latvia are derived from the same word.
And while Väinämöinen’s weapon is typically a sword, he strangely enough uses
a paddle to defeat the mythical bird Kokko (cf. Chapter 9). It is thus conceivable
that in some very remote prehistoric past Väinämöinen may in fact have been a
‘water-spirit’ associated with rivers, or perhaps the ‘first paddler’ and a protector of
travellers along the northern rivers.
It is rather easy to see how rivers may appear as living and inspirited entities, as
they move and behave in ways that suggest intentionality and will. Rivers are in a
constant process of transformation: they change seasonally –of which flooding is
the clearest example –and shift their courses gradually over longer periods of time.
Moreover, as campers know, rivers and springs may appear to start talking when one
spends time alone by them. Living close to and with rivers required attentiveness
124 Sea
and a deep knowledge of their behaviour. The ‘ritual’ deposits of axes, adzes and
other types of artefacts made in the rivers of north-eastern Europe since the Stone
Age reflect this intimate and multidimensional relationship between people and
rivers, even if the specific rationale of the depositional practices is unknown, though
the traditional explanation is that they are sacrifices to ‘river spirits’. Rapids and
waterfalls attracted special attention, as exemplified by the site of Nämforsen in
northern Sweden, which in addition to being a major rock carving site also features
one of the largest Neolithic residential sites of northern Sweden (Baudou 1992).
Many ‘stray finds’ of stone artefacts have also been recovered from the rapids of
Nämforsen. The Losevo rapids and the Kivach cascade (Figure 7.1) in Russian
Karelia are similarly associated with dozens of axe and adze deposits of the Stone
Age, as well as an unusual number of residential sites (Seitsonen et al. 2016: 123;
Nordqvist et al. 2019).
Associated with the significance of rivers, river mouths have likewise become
invested with cultural meanings and continuous settlement in Fennoscandia. They
were ecologically rich environments and acted as gateways between different
regions but were also symbolically fertile as places where the land and the sea meet
(Helskog 1999; Westerdahl 2005). In addition, they connected coastal worlds to
faraway lands in the inland, serving as entry points to completely different cultural
and environmental realms. River mouths linked, for example, the eastern Baltic
Sea coast to the White Sea and Karelia; the Gulf of Finland with Lake Ladoga,
FIGURE 7.1 With its 11 m fall, the Kivach cascade is perhaps the most impressive
of its kind in the relatively flat landscape of Karelia. Photo: Travel Pictures, Russia/
Wikimedia Commons.
River mouths and central places 125
the Russian river systems and ultimately all the way to the Black Sea; and the
southern shores of the Baltic with central Europe and the Mediterranean. These
river connections have been integral to various cultural phenomena and changes
from the Neolithic to the Iron Age and up to modern times. Rivers featured prom-
inently in, for instance, the ‘Typical Comb Ware phenomenon’ (cf. Chapter 3),
which marked a significant cultural transformation from northern Fennoscandia
to the Urals in the early fourth millennium bc and were central to the east-bound
expansion and commercial activities of the Vikings.
The emergence of a strong Russian state effectively put an end to Scandinavian
travels along the Russian rivers, but rivers remained important travel routes particu-
larly in the Swedish and Finnish interior, connecting the labyrinthine lake systems,
and retained their mythological associations well into the historical period. As an
example, we may consider early modern theories concerning the travels of Jason
and the Argonauts. If the Vikings had used the river systems of European Russia
such as the Don and Volga to reach the Black Sea, the argument went, then perhaps
the ancient Greeks could have used the same rivers to reach the North. This was
the reasoning on which the early modern Swedish antiquarian Olaus Rudbeck
based his theory that the voyage of Jason in search of the Golden Fleece –far from
being mythological –was a real historical event that moreover brought the Greek
hero to the shores of the Baltic Sea.
Rudbeck had stumbled upon the Greek poem Argonautica Orphica, today dated
to the fifth or sixth century ad but in Rudbeck’s days thought to predate Homer
and indeed to have been written by none other than Orpheus himself (King 2005).
Its description of Jason’s travel routes mesmerized Rudbeck, who believed he could
identify Swedish place names among the sites visited by Jason; for example, ‘Leulo’
was Luleå and ‘Pacto’ Piteå, both of them located in northern Sweden. He even
proceeded to build three boats that –in addition to being used for commercial pas-
senger transport –were used to carry out experiments set out to prove his hypoth-
esis. Because moving from one major river to another sometimes required crossing
dry land, something done by Viking voyagers in the past and by Russian peasants
still in Rudbeck’s day, various means of transporting large seaworthy vessels across
stretches of land were tried out in order to calculate how many men were required
for the task and how much time it took. A close reading of the Argonautica gave
an approximate distance covered by the Argonauts in a journey that took twelve
days. The aim of Rudbeck’s experiments was to establish whether it was possible
to travel from the Mediterranean to Sweden and back within the said time limit (it
turned out to be).
As King (2005) points out, in spite of all their ‘crazy’ outlandishness, Rudbeck’s
ideas and the method by which he tested them anticipates what we now know as
experimental archaeology. In particular, they predate but, in many ways, resemble
the highly publicized voyages of the twentieth-century Norwegian explorer Thor
Heyerdahl, aimed to demonstrate the prospect that similarly ‘incredible’ ancient
voyages actually took place. Heyerdahl is best known for his sea voyages across
the Atlantic on rafts of various type, but on his last investigation project before his
126 Sea
death in 2002, he set out in Rudbeck’s footprints to trace possible early Germanic
contacts between the Black Sea and Scandinavia via the river systems of European
Russia. Heyerdahl was fascinated with the rock carvings of Gobustan in present-
day Azerbaijan, believing that especially the so-called ‘sun-ships’ depicted at the
site were related to similar images in South Scandinavian rock art (Heyerdahl and
Lillieström 2001; for a detailed, critical examination of the argument, see Roggen
2014). He became convinced that the account given by the medieval Icelandic
chronicler Snorri Sturluson on how the Aesir –one of the mythological ‘families’
of gods of Old Norse myth –migrated to Scandinavia from a ‘country called Aser’
located somewhere in the South, was in fact a real historical event. They were
according to Snorri led by their chieftain Odin, whom Heyerdahl (in line with
Snorri) believed to have been a historical person rather than a god or character
of mythology. In addition to having an archaeological and experimental element,
Heyerdahl’s investigations on the matter closely resemble those of Rudbeck also in
drawing heavily on etymological speculation. He suggested, for example, that the
name of the Sea of Azov, located east of the Black Sea, derives its name from an Old
Norse word Ás-hof, or the ‘temple of the Aesir’, and he associated the Udi people
of the Caucasus with Odin.
Both Rudbeck’s take on Jason and Heyerdahl’s exploration of the wandering
Aesir resonate with a more general association of rivers with mythical elements
and illustrate how rivers have been considered to connect, or transgress, times and
places. The best known ‘purely mythological’ river is perhaps the River of Dead
that separates (and connects) the ordinary world with the underworld in both
Ancient Greek mythology (River Styx) and the Kalevala poems (River of Tuonela).
However, in northern cultures moving along real rivers was inextricably entangled
with the mythological dimension of rivers and has therefore involved engaging
with different dimensions of reality. Napolskikh (1992: 7) offers an example from
the ethnography of the Udmurts, a small Finno-Ugric people living adjacent to
the two major rivers of Kama and Vyatka in eastern Russia. In an Udmurt ritual,
a tame pair of swans was sent upstream to carry prayers to the sky-god Inmar,
equipped with silver coins tied across the necks of the birds that were offerings
to the god. However, if the birds turned downstream, the prayers ended up in the
Lower World (thought to be located downstream), which was considered an ill
omen. Thus the River Vyatka, in addition to being a real-world river also acted as
a route to different levels of the cosmos.
Similar notions concerning rivers as connecting this world and the Land of
the Dead may be reflected in the Neolithic practice of making burials in associ-
ation with rivers. This is evident for example at the Neolithic red ochre burial
sites of Tainiaro in northern Finland, where the burials clearly follow the banks of
River Simojoki, the rich burial site of Kukkarkoski rapids in south-western Finland
(Torvinen 1979), and the Jönsas burial site at the mouth of River Vantaa close to
Helsinki (Ahola 2017b), to name a few. Many of the graves at Jönsas, moreover,
featured water-worn cobbles taken from the nearby riverbed –evidently a symbolic
reference to the cosmic role of the real-world river running close to the graves.
Occasionally, the notion can perhaps also be glimpsed in contemporary rock art.
Gjerde (2006) has drawn attention to a small elk-headed boat figure at the rock
carvings of Besov Nos at Lake Onega, Karelia. The image is otherwise unremark-
able, but is given new meaning by its context in the bedrock: it has been clearly
intentionally carved inside a black lava feature that resembles a swirling river. A few
hundred metres to the south of the carving, a river known as Chernaya Rechka or
‘Black River’ flows into Lake Onega. The name is no doubt recent, but it derives
from the colour of the water of said river, which is unusually dark because it flows
through marshlands. The lava formation may thus conceivably refer to said river,
and the boat floating in it to travels both in this world and to the worlds beyond
(cf. Chapter 2).
River mouths as liminal spaces and central places

While rivers in general were pregnant with mythological and cosmological asso-
ciations, such meanings were particularly concentrated on river mouths, which
have functioned –both literally and metaphorically –as gateways to distant lands
with mythical or otherworldly dimensions (cf. Helms 1988). They saw the earliest
formation of Neolithic-type village settlements in the northern Baltic Sea region
around 4000 bc, a process that was the westernmost manifestation of an essentially
‘eastern’ Neolithic, rather than reflecting the ‘western’ or southern Scandinavian
and central European developments. Since then, river mouths have always been as
central places in the northern world, eventually forming ‘hubs’ of northern trade
in the later Iron Age and primary locations for market places and towns in medi-
eval and early modern times. River mouths served as arenas for diverse encounters
of people with different cultural backgrounds. Such meeting places existed, to a
certain degree, outside the norms of everyday society, with plenty of evidence
(including rock art) for ritualized exchanges ranging from the Neolithic to the
modern period.
The ancient mouth of the River Ii (which according to Rudbeck received its
name from the goddess Isis), which flows into the northern end of the Gulf of
Bothnia, exemplifies the significance of rivers as channels of East–West influences
in the longue durée. The mouth of Ii comprised a particularly intensive area of cul-
tural activity in the Neolithic, as evidenced by the rich find assemblages from the
extensive excavations conducted in the area since the 1990s. An unusual abundance
of amber finds –indicating accumulation of wealth and coordination of amber
trade –is a characteristic of the Neolithic assemblages of the mouth of River Ii
and demonstrates the wide contact networks of the communities settled in the area
(Núñez and Franzén 2011). Amber has been viewed as an emblematically ‘nor-
thern’ substance in the European world at least since classical antiquity (Chapter 9),
even though from a northern Baltic Sea point of view its origins lie in the ‘South’.
Intriguingly, although amber is fairly commonly found as far north as the Arctic
Circle, the mouth of River Ii nonetheless stands out as an exceptionally rich con-
centration of amber finds (Franzén 2009). For example, finds from sites along the
128 Sea
River Kemi, a second important artery that runs some 70 km to the north of Ii, are
numerically far fewer than those from Ii.
It is not clear why the mouth of River Ii (rather than mouths of some other
major rivers of the North) developed into what is clearly a special ‘hub’ of nor-
thern Fennoscandian Neolithic settlement, but it nonetheless demonstrates the
importance of river mouths as central places in the fourth and third millennia bc.
Moreover, there appears to be rather prominent differences between the specific
sites and their find profiles at the area of the river mouth. One site that particularly
stands out is the river island of Kierikkisaari, which was excavated in the 1960s
and was already then recognized as puzzling and anomalous. The main excavated
structure has been reconstructed as a Neolithic, timber-built ‘fortress’ measuring ca.
32 m x 32 m, with an inner court of 20 m x 20 m (Koivunen 2002). Because the
island was partially submerged during spring floods, the ‘fortress’ was evidently a
pile-dwelling located above ground. Numerous finds of stone projectile points from
the site have been interpreted as evidence of a prehistoric battle, as they represent
two different types (made of flint and slate, respectively) that have distinct distribu-
tion patterns.
Moreover, the Kierikkisaari site has produced a special type of pottery that was
originally designated as ‘Kierikki Ware’ (Siiriäinen 1967). However, more recent
research by Mökkönen and Nordqvist (2018) has shown that finds of this ware in
Finland are essentially limited to Kierikkisaari island and do not represent a distinct
type of pottery but is rather the outcome of the special nature and function of the
site, and reflects qualities that find parallels in the Russian Karelia, in pottery types
known as Voynavolok Ware and (to a lesser extent) Orovnavolok Ware. Although
this research is suggestive rather than conclusive at the moment, the available data
can be taken to indicate that Kierikkisaari was inhabited by a Neolithic commu-
nity with roots in what is today Russian Karelia. The settlement may thus represent
a group of people who travelled along the northern river-ways and established a
settlement at the mouth of River Ii near the Gulf of Bothnia, among people with
a different cultural background and an apparently hostile attitude towards outside
intruders.
As noted, rivers connected different worlds in a geographical sense, but
river mouths were also contact points between worlds in a metaphysical sense,
as demonstrated by a number of important rock art sites. Indeed, most of the
major hunter-gatherer rock art sites of Northern Fennoscandia –Alta in Norway,
Nämforsen in Sweden, Kanozero in Kola Peninsula, Vyg and Onega in Karelia –
are associated with major rivers and were all probably sites of yearly congregations
of people from the surrounding region. Most are associated with large residential
sites, and indeed Alta was a site of yearly gathering by the Sámi still in the histor-
ical period. In his important paper on the ‘soundscape’ of the Nämforsen carvings,
located at what during the Neolithic was the mouth of the Ångerman river,
Goldhahn (2002) argues that river mouths were ‘natural’ entry points or gateways
between different worlds in part due to their unusual perceptual and experiential
qualities. The deafening sound of rapids, such as Nämforsen, promoted a sense
of detachment from ‘this world’ and mediated –like drumming and other mind-
altering techniques –a transition to an altered state of consciousness central to tra-
versing into otherworlds within a shamanistic setting. The rhythmic ‘breathing’ of
the rapids, moreover, would have resonated with the rhythmic pecking of carvings,
and the liminal nature of the carving sites (some of the central ones being located
in places that were dangerous to access) further contributed to the special nature of
sites like Nämforsen and Vyg.
As signs of social complexity and long-distance trade diminish in northern
Fennoscandia towards the end of the third millennium, so does the role of river
mouths as trading sites and population centres. Whether this reflects a significantly
decreased population, the rise of more mobile lifeways or some other significant
change remains unknown. The Nordic Bronze Age reached its first blossoming
in the first half the second millennium bc, but with the exception of a thin strip
of Baltic coastline, much of northern Fennoscandia was left outside this cultural
sphere. While much less studied and more poorly known than the contemporan-
eous Bronze Age of southern Scandinavia, it seems that influences from European
Russia continued to be important in north-eastern parts of Fennoscandia, as exem-
plified by the spread of the so-called Textile Ware in the region (Lavento 2000). The
available material is limited and difficult to interpret, but there are some indications
that these northern reaches were connected to vast contact networks and that river
mouths to some extent retained their role as significant places.
For instance, the earliest evidence of bronze-working in Finland (dated to ca.
1800 bc) has been found from the site of Halosentörmä, located by what was then
the mouth of the river Oulujoki. Halosentörmä has produced rich and diverse
finds, with imported stone material featuring prominently, but no remains of
buildings have been identified and the character of the site remains elusive (Herva
and Ikäheimo 2002). Indeed, this is a common feature of Bronze and Iron Age sites
in north-eastern Fennoscandia in general: hundreds of sites are known, but they
have been fairly little studied, and the excavated material is usually difficult to inter-
pret. Distinctively Scandinavian influence was more strongly felt along the western
and southern coastal regions of Finland, and local centres developed particularly
at the valleys of rivers flowing into the Baltic. They bear some hallmarks of social
complexity, such as rock cairns that sometimes reached monumental proportions,
as well as the occasional bronze artefact of South Scandinavian type. However, they
remained what Tapio Seger (1982) called ‘emerging chiefdoms’, never amassing
material wealth or human resources on a scale comparable to the central regions of
Denmark and southern Sweden.
Towards the end of the Bronze Age, clusters of cooking pits appear on northern
river mouths, possibly associated with periodic seal oil production and/or feasting
(Kuusela 2013), but again, little is known about the wider sociocultural context
of this phenomenon. Likewise, the peculiar site of Rakanmäki at the mouth of
River Kemi provides an isolated example of river mouths as special places during
this time. Rakanmäki was an offshore island when it was used between ca. ad 0
and 400, and it has yielded signs of metalworking and trade –with evidence for
130 Sea
contacts towards the Lake Mälaren region in Sweden –in addition to which there
were burial cairns on highest point of the island. However, there is no evidence for
permanent occupation, leading the excavators to suggest that it may have been an
early marketplace. Such market places at river mouths regained a much more con-
spicuous role as central places in the northern Baltic Sea world in the following, late
Iron Age and the early medieval period (Kuusela et al. 2016, 2018; Kuusela 2018).
Mythical kingdoms in later prehistory

The increased significance of northern river mouths in the later first millennium ad
was connected to a much broader restructuring of the European world following
the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The emergence of distinctive central and
market places around the Gulf of Bothnia in the late Iron Age and early medieval
period has been known from historical and archaeological evidence for a long time.
However, the nature, significance and implications of this process have recently
become subject to a reassessment, and this holds a promise of opening novel insights
into the place of the North in the continent-wide transformations, on the one
hand, and the more local myths, folklore, histories and archaeologies on the other.
Real and imagined northern lands have fascinated European minds since the
dawn of history. An expression of this interest is the locating of various imaginary
or semi-mythological realms in the North, ranging from classical Greek Hyperborea
to the present-day portrayal of the Finnish Lapland as the homeland of Santa Claus.
While for the Greeks Hyperborea was an utopian land of plenty, where the sun
always shone on its peaceful and happy inhabitants, in early Christian imagination
the North was transformed into the dark land of Satan populated by heathens and
monsters (Andersson Burnett 2010). Similar themes recurred in the later medieval
period, when Scandinavia began to be incorporated in the European world through
incipient state formation and Christianization. It was in this context that Adam of
Bremen, the eleventh-century ‘Apostle of the North’, reported in his work Gesta
Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum (Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church, ad
1075) that there was a Terra Feminarum or a ‘land of women’ (or Amazons?) that lay
on the coasts of the Baltic Sea, east of the realm of the Swedes and not far from
an island called Aestland. Adam’s description consists of a few brief anecdotes that
could easily be dismissed, were it not for the fact they appear to be connected to
a wide web of similarly obscure references and observations concerning northern
Fennoscandia at the dawn of history.
Medieval Norse and Anglo- Saxon accounts make references to the elusive
people and realms of Bjarmaland (Old English Beormaland) and Kvenland, whose
character and territories –and indeed their historical reality –have intrigued
scholars for centuries. Even though its location was never very clear, Bjarmia
features prominently still in Olaus Magnus’ sixteenth-century map of northern
Europe (Figure 7.2). Mythical lands or realms are also known from northern folk-
lore, some of the prime examples of which are Kalevala (‘The Land of Heroes’)
and Pohjola (‘Northland’) described in the Finnish Kalevala poetry. Some of these
newgenrtpdf
FIGURE 7.2 Northern parts of Fennoscandia, as portrayed in Carta marina et descriptio septentrionalium terrarum (1539) by Olaus Magnus. Carta
marina was the first map to represent the geography of the Nordic world in a generally correct manner. It also included rich information about
place names and ‘ethnographic’ insights into northern cultures.
132 Sea
realms are obviously fabulous, even if the recurrent mixing of classical and nor-
thern geographies and cultures in such contexts is intriguing and important in
its own right. It demonstrates how different worlds and times have converged in
the context of the northern world, resulting in an amalgam of reality and fanta-
sies, which has characterized the perceptions of the European North. At the same
time, northern scholars, too, have contributed to these speculations. The prime
example is, again, Olaus Rudbeck who discussed the question of Kvenland and
Bjarmaland, but this tradition continues in one form or another until the pre-
sent day. For example, Finnish academics have argued for and against the histor-
ical reality of places mentioned in the Kalevala from the days of its compiler Elias
Lönnrot (1802–1884) –who situated Pohjola to the east of the White Sea –at least
until the 1980s, when renowned historians such as Matti Klinge (1983) and Kyösti
Julku (1986) explored the topic in extensive treatises. Even if the debate has since
waned in academic circles, it is certainly alive and well on various Internet forums
dedicated to various forms of (pseudo-)historical speculation.
The historical sources alone do not allow for many firm conclusions to be
drawn, of which historian Kyösti Julku’s (1986) study of Kvenland is an illustrative
example. He produced a scholarly and careful analysis of all the relevant documents
from different periods related to Kvenland, including Adam of Bremen’s notion of
a northern Terra Feminarum, which according to him may stem from a misinter-
pretation of the Old Norse word kven (‘woman’). Rather than a ‘land of women’,
Adam’s informants may have spoken of a ‘Land of the Kvens’, as the word cwenas
occurs already in the ninth-century account of Ottar –a Norwegian seafarer who
visited the court of King Alfred of Wessex –as the name of a people living in cwena
land that was located to the north of the Swedes. Adam of Bremen’s interpretation
may also echo a similar notion derived from the Roman historian Tacitus, who
in Germania (ad 98) maintained that the sithones –who lived next to the sueones
(possibly svear or ‘Swedes’) –were otherwise similar to their neighbours, but had
become ‘degenerated’ to such an extent that they were ruled by a woman. The
Kalevala poetry likewise describes Pohjola or Northland as a ‘matriarchy’ ruled by
the witch-queen Louhi –an aspect that may relate to Pohjola’s mythical role as a
Land of the Dead, which in northern myth was often overseen by a Mistress of the
Dead, such as the Old Norse goddess Hél. Even so, it seems like a curious parallel
to the historical accounts.
Whatever lies behind the stories of a Terra Feminarum ruled by women, Julku
(1986) concluded that Kvenland as such probably really was an actual proto-historic
realm located around the northern Gulf of Bothnia but was forced to leave open
many questions of its nature and character. In addition to the historical sources, he
also briefly considered the potentially relevant archaeological material, including
some of the then-recently excavated central places on northern river mouths, such
as the Iron Age site of Rakanmäki at the mouth of River Tornio, but he admitted
that it was scarce and, in some ways, incongruent with the historical snippets of
information about Kvenland. The recent discovery of more such sites dating
to the late Iron Age and early medieval period has, however, prompted a rather
fundamental reassessment of the character of river-mouth sites and how they are
linked to the semi-mythical northern realms, on the one hand, and historical real-
ities on the other (Kuusela 2013, 2018; Kuusela et al. 2016, 2018).
Changing views about the North have been facilitated by postcolonial thinking
and the associated scrutinizing of the southern vantage point, which has tradition-
ally dominated the understanding of northern pasts. Not only northern lands and
people but also pasts have effectively been colonized by the Nordic states since the
early modern period, a process that has shaped the way northern (pre)histories have
been seen and represented since the days of the seventeenth-century antiquarians
onwards (e.g. Herva et al. 2017, 2018). Northern parts of Fennoscandia –or areas
largely beyond the sphere of intensive field cultivation and medieval urbanization –
have been regarded as subordinate to the South and developments taking place
there. Practically all (pre)historic sociocultural changes in the North have been
taken to passively reflect events taking place in the South or even brought about
by southerners forcing those changes on the North –and this also applies to our
traditional understanding of sites at northern river mouths.
The traditional and still largely prevailing view holds that the emergence of cen-
tral places at northern river mouths resulted from increased activities of southerners
in the northern ‘wilderness’, attracted by rich fishing waters and fresh opportunities
for fur trapping. A second explanation has attributed them to the expansion of
the Swedish kingdom towards the North –particularly from the thirteenth cen-
tury onwards –but recent research has shown that the central places of the Gulf
of Bothnia came into being long before that, perhaps around ninth century ad
onwards, but with roots perhaps extending all the way to the Neolithic, as discussed
earlier in this chapter. This is roughly contemporary with the first Viking raids
and the emergence of Viking trade centres, such as Ribe and Hedeby in Denmark,
suggesting that both phenomena can be related to much broader processes in the
Eurasian world.
The ‘trader kingdom’ of the birkarls

The enigmatic but undoubtedly historical group of people known as birkarls, who
apparently controlled –or at very least acted as important middlemen in –northern
trade in the Middle Ages, have similarly been regarded as tradesmen originating in
south-western parts of present-day Finland. They had the exclusive right to trade
with the Sámi, granted by the king of Sweden, but somewhat paradoxically also
forcibly collected taxes from them on behalf of the king, thus seemingly under-
mining a trust-based relationship required in trade. Birkarls as tax collectors and
agents of the king is probably a later development, however, and the birkarl institu-
tion was likely an independent and indigenous northern trading ‘organization’ in
the Middle Ages, and not originally under the Swedish king’s control (Bergman
and Edlund 2016).
Birkarls feature in very early Swedish documents and are mentioned still in the
seventeenth-century sources, but they are poorly known archaeologically –partly
134 Sea
no doubt because it is unclear what ‘birkarl material culture’ should look like. Only
one site associated with a historically known birkarl chief has been excavated: a
dwelling at Oravaisensaari, an island close to the mouth of River Tornio that served
as the abode of the sixteenth-century tradesman and bailiff of Swedish Lapland
Nils Orawain (or Niilo Oravainen, ca. 1520–1597; see Niskanen 2007). Ingela
Bergman and Lars Edlund (2016) have recently analysed in depth the character
and different aspects of the birkarl trade and its organization. Their study shows
that birkarls –who were apparently elected by their communities –divided their
time and operated between the northern Baltic Sea coast and inland and were in
charge of constructing and maintaining the infrastructure that the trade required.
This system presumably operated in a more or less similar manner already in the
Iron Age under the semi-mythical Kvens (see also Kuusela et al. 2018).
The late Iron Age and early medieval finds from northern Fennoscandia indi-
cate connections to different directions and faraway lands. While these finds have
traditionally been attributed to non-locals operating in the North, they should
probably be rather understood as indications of northerners themselves operating
within a vast exchange network. Whatever the ethnic background of the birkarls
or the more elusive Kvens (though Sámi seems most likely; see Bergman and
Edlund 2016), their subsistence was evidently based on traditional non-farming
economies, and their relationship with the other indigenous communities in the
North was one of mutual dependence (see Kuusela et al. 2018). It should be
noted, too, that the birkarls and Kvens may have been one and the same group
of people; this, in any case, seems to have been the view held by the sixteenth-
century Swedish bishop and chronicler Olaus Magnus, who had personally trav-
elled in Lapland.
The trade system run by the birkarls obviously predates the thirteenth-century
Swedish documents in which they are first mentioned, leading us back to the
sources concerning Kvens and Kvenland, which give the impression that Kvens
were in control of a territory that covered much of northern Fennoscandia. Kuusela
and his colleagues (2016) have recently shown based on archaeological evidence
that there was a clear boundary between Swedish and ‘northern’ territories in the
first centuries of the second millennium, which suggests that there was indeed a
local power in control of the North. Snorri Sturluson’s Egil’s Saga relates how
the Norsemen struck a deal with Kvens so as to arrange a raiding party against
Karelians. According to the saga, the Kvens summoned a substantial group of some
hundreds of armed men, led by a ‘king’ called Faravid (‘Far-Wanderer’). While
Egil’s saga emphasizes the military force of the Kvens, their power may actually
have been embedded in knowledge of the environments, conditions and people in
the vast interior of northern Fennoscandia, which also made them unconquerable
by force. It was this knowledge that provided the Kvens, and later birkarls, with the
competence to organize and run the trade of northern goods such as furs.
In the context of historical master narratives of northernmost Europe, the key
implication of the above is that northern Fennoscandia was not simply a play-
ground between the emerging states of Sweden and Novgorod, but that there was
an indigenous ‘third power’ in the North in the late Iron Age and medieval period.
Although it was ultimately overtaken by the expanding kingdom of Sweden, it
probably looms behind Adam of Bremen’s notion of the land of the Amazons, as
well as the references in Norse and other sources to the Kvens and Kvenland –a
case that again demonstrates the intriguing fusing of an actual northern world
and its long-standing cultural imaginaries and fantasies. Sites at river mouths were
integral to this ‘trader kingdom’, as they marked gateways to the northern interior.
Archaeological material from the excavated river-mouth ‘hubs’ provide, at the
moment, only glimpses into the activities at these sites, but it is worth noting that
they often feature cemeteries. There was thus an ancestral presence at the central
places, and the markets arranged there similarly carried otherworldly connotations;
they could, for example, be symbolically separated from the ‘normal space’ by out-
lining the borders of the market with fresh birch branches. The same basic idea
continued into the medieval and early modern period, when the earliest churches
in the North were built at the ancient marketplaces.
Marketplaces
Trade has been an important part of northern cultures and societies in different
times, but trade in the late Iron Age and early Middle Ages –or indeed any
period –was not simply a practical and economic question, but intertwined
with broader cultural and cosmological matters, including the significance of
mobilities, intercultural encounters and the symbolic capital accumulated in
exotic goods. Northerners could be understood as ‘natural’ traders inasmuch as
their traditional mode of being in the world involved moving over long distances
and co-inhabiting their world with myriad entities –that is, interacting and nego-
tiating with beings ‘other-than-themselves’. The various activities involved in
trade would thus have readily resonated with these more general characteristics
of northern cultures.
The notion of rivers separating different worlds is perhaps also reflected in the
spatial organization of certain historical period sites, as in the case of the Hedenäs-
Kainuunkylä complex (see Wallerström 1995 for further details of the site). This
medieval and early modern site is located on the river Tornio, on both sides of the
modern Finnish–Swedish state border, some 40 km north of the present-day river
mouth and the town of Tornio. River Tornio has been a main route from the Baltic
Sea to the interior of the Lapland and the Arctic Ocean since ancient times –it is
still locally known as ‘The Route’ (Finn. väylä) –and therefore a highly significant
landscape element. The site of Hedenäs-Kainuunkylä was inhabited from the early
second millennium ad to the early modern period and represents an early phase of
colonization of the North by farming communities from more southerly parts of
Fennoscandia. What makes it particularly interesting in this context is that different
types of activities are associated with different sides of the river: the actual dwellings
are on the eastern bank, whereas the graves and the marketplace –as well as the
first church of the community, built in 1617 –are on the western bank. Situating
136 Sea
FIGURE 7.3 The marketplace of Tornio, located on an island at the mouth of the

river Tornio, an important route from the Baltic Sea to the interior of Lapland and
ultimately to the Arctic Ocean. A vignette from Olaus Magnus’ Historia de gentibus
septentrionalibus (1555).
graves and a marketplace adjacent to each other may at first seem rather peculiar,
as markets could be rowdy and noisy, while respectful and restrained behaviour is
typically expected at burial sites, but makes sense in that the two share a ‘liminal’
association and were separated from everyday life, both concretely (by the river)
and symbolically.
Fairly little can directly be said about the specific activities that took place at
coastal hubs in the Iron Age and Middle Age, but later historical accounts of nor-
thern marketplaces and fairs provide some insights into the character of these
events in earlier times as well. Most importantly, historical accounts show that fairs
were seasonal special events, which gathered people with different cultures from
near and far around Fennoscandia and the Baltic Sea world. Beside their com-
mercial and economic purpose, the northern fairs had administrative, social and
religious functions (Ylimaunu 2007: 26–28; Symonds et al. 2015) and were gen-
erally comparable to early medieval central European fairs discussed by Theuws
(2004), who characterizes them as ‘a total social phenomenon’. Olaus Magnus
(1973 [1555]: XX.1) provides a brief, personal account of the important fairs and
marketplace of Tornio (Figure 7.3) –which he describes as a town –in the six-
teenth century, highlighting its busy and multicultural atmosphere, whereas the
nineteenth-century priests and scholars Jakob Fellman (1980) and Mathias Castrén
(1954 [1802]) offer vivid and reprehending narratives of misbehaviour and drunk-
enness at the fairs in Kemi in the nineteenth century.
These and many other similar accounts indicate that the normal social order
broke down or did not quite apply at fairs. Besides establishing and maintaining
relationships, people practiced vices such as drinking and in general behaved dif-
ferently from ordinary everyday life (Cleve 1955;Ylimaunu 2007: 27–28). In other
words, fairs comprised spatiotemporally bounded special events, associated with

dimensions of liminality and ‘otherness’. It may not be a coincidence, then, that
northern marketplaces were often located on islands close to river mouths. Islands
have long been associated with liminality and otherness in northern cultures (see
Chapter 5) and beyond, which perhaps rendered them as particularly suitable arenas
for special activities, with cemeteries and churches at or near marketplaces further
emphasizing the otherworldly dimensions of fairs.
PART III
Sky
8
BIRDS AND COSMOLOGY
Migratory birds and changing seasons

Although migratory birds can be seen at all latitudes, their presence and absence is
nowhere felt as concretely and acutely as in the North. Birds migrate because the
coming winter renders food resources scarce. Especially water-birds and waders
are forced to leave, as the lakes and the sea freeze over. For humans, their departure
thus signals the coming of autumn and the lean times of the year, months of cold
and frost that posed a very real threat of death by starvation (Zvelebil and Jordan
1999: 199). Although this threat is no longer real, the mass migration of birds can
inspire awe and a sense of melancholy at the passing of the summer even today. In
prehistory, the effect must have been more pronounced, as bird populations were
much larger and fowling was an important source of food.
Conversely, the return of migratory birds indicated spring and life –both con-
cretely, in providing an important food resource for fowlers and egg poachers, as
well as symbolically, with the courtship rituals and calls of birds reaffirming life and
fertility. Migratory birds flying in large formations, such as ducks, swans and cranes,
have thus been intertwined with the cyclical character of life, which is particularly
prominent in high latitudes –reflecting the perception of the North as the world
of extremes and contrasts. It is not surprising that several northern peoples (such as
the Nganasan, Enets and Dolgans) have special rites for welcoming migratory ducks
and swans in the spring (Napolskikh 1992: 9). It may even be that the migratory
routes of birds are in part responsible for the general association of South with life
and North with death, so omnipresent in northern circumpolar cosmologies. The
ancient roots of this notion are represented in the orientation of graves in northern
Fennoscandia, which almost throughout prehistory were oriented roughly along
the north–south axis. Only with the advent of Christianity towards the late Iron
Age did an east–west orientation become standard.
142 Sky
However, not all migratory birds inspired similar interest, either economically or
symbolically. Although there has undoubtedly been much regional variation –for
example, at some sites jays and ospreys seem to have been symbolically significant
(Mannermaa 2013) –the emphasis seems to lie in those species that mass migrate
in V-shaped formations consisting of thousands of birds, such as ducks, geese, cranes
and swans. From a southerly perspective, swans particularly have been regarded as
symbols of the North. For instance, in myths concerning the Hyperborean Apollo
(i.e. Apollo of a northern origin), which go back to Homer and Hesiod, the god
of light left Greece in the fall to spend the winter in the Far North and returned in
the spring in a chariot drawn by northern swans (Figure 8.1).
Osteological studies (e.g. Mannermaa 2003; Mannermaa and Lõugas 2005) dem-
onstrate the significance of fowling in the northern Baltic Sea region throughout
prehistory, and while egg collecting is more difficult to attest, ethnographic sources
indicate that it likewise formed an important part of the diet.Various ducks, gallin-
aceous species (such as grouses and capercaillies) and swans clearly dominate osteo-
logical material and appear to have been the species preferred by hunters, but the
same species also feature prominently in iconography and various ritual contexts,
indicating that the relationship between humans and birds went far beyond that of
hunter and prey.
As we have seen (Chapter 5), water birds feature in the very birth of the world in
Finno-Uralian mythologies and are possibly depicted in that function in Neolithic
FIGURE 8.1 Apollo depicted as riding on a swan on a Greek red-figured krater (c.

400–380 bc). Photo: British Museum.
Birds and cosmology 143
rock art of Lake Onega. It is interesting to note that their depiction in rock art is
mostly restricted to eastern Fennoscandia, where bird imagery occurs also in con-
temporary Typical Comb Ware pottery decoration (see Figure 3.2). Moreover, the
ability of water birds to both fly, walk on dry land and dive underwater resonated
with the circumboreal notion of a tripartite universe, rendering them the messengers
par excellence between the different levels of cosmos –both real and imagined, geo-
graphical and spiritual.
In shamanistic understandings, travels to the upper world often take place in the
shape of supernatural bird (Bäckman 1975), called sáiva leddie by the Sámi, whereas
divers such as the common goldeneye (Bucephala clangula) were associated with
the subaquatic lower world (Napolskikh 1992). The supernatural spirit-helper bird
was often a capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), and a recurring story recorded in Lapland
relates a ‘hunting accident’, where a hunter shoots a flying capercaillie, but when
he inspects the place where the bird fell, he finds a dead shaman instead. This folk-
lore motif appears to have a very long history, as one of the scenes at the complex
Bergbukten 1 panel at Alta (dated to ca. 4200 bc) may describe a similar incident.
It shows a group of eight human figures arranged in a row, one on top of the other,
with the last one touching the head of the second-to-last figure and oriented in a
different way (Figure 8.2).
FIGURE 8.2 A scene from the rock carvings of Alta, northern Norway, which may
be interpreted as showing a shamanic flight interrupted by an archer. Photo: Antti
Lahelma.
144 Sky
Rather than a group of people walking, this may well be a case of time-sequenced
action, as Gjerde (2010: 128) has suggested. Some reindeer figures are nearby, and
Gjerde interprets the scene as representing a flying shaman who transforms from a
reindeer to a shaman and then back into a reindeer. The two reindeer figures may or
may not be associated with the scene –it is hard to be sure. However, it seems certain
that a large human figure wielding a bow and arrow facing the group is, in fact, a part
of the scene, because the fifth human figure in the ‘flying’ group appears to have an
arrow embedded in the stomach region. The scene thus appears to depict a person
shooting another person flying in the air and subsequently falling down from the sky.
Birds as persons
Swan bones feature particularly prominently in the Danish Mesolithic faunal
material of the Ertebølle period, both as refuse and in burial contexts. For instance,
the site of Aggersund has been suggested to be specialized camp for hunting swan
(Møhl 1978), as all of the faunal material found consisted of Whooper swan bones,
and swans occur also in Finnish Mesolithic and Neolithic finds (Ukkonen and
Mannermaa 2017). This seems natural, as swans are large birds and, because they are
slow and not very afraid of humans, fairly easy to catch. An adult Whooper swan
yields about 5 kg of meat and was an important source of nutrition in Lapland until
the early twentieth century when it was nearly hunted to extinction (Leinonen
2000). The Sámi also used swan bones, skin and feathers to produce various utensils.
At the same time, though, there is much to indicate that the interaction between
humans and birds such as swans and capercaillies was just as complex as –and in
many ways resembled –that between humans and elk, as discussed in Chapter 4.
The famous Danish Mesolithic burial site of Vedbæk Bøgebakken, which is
roughly contemporary with Aggersund, shows evidence of a very different or ‘non-
economic’ relation with swans (Albrethsen and Brinch Petersen 1976). In Grave 8,
the archaeologists uncovered a double burial of a roughly 18-year old woman and
a newborn baby that had been placed on a swan’s wing. Overton and Hamilakis
(2013) have discussed the Danish sites in their ‘manifesto’ for a social zooarchaeology
as an example of the sensuous and affective relationship between two different –
but sentient and autonomous –species, in an effort to move beyond the notion of
animals as an exclusively nutritional or symbolic resource for humans. According
to them, skinning a killed swan was an emotionally charged event, which involved
sensory experiences such as seeing the red blood on white plumage, touching the
skinned corpses with soft white skins and in general engaging with the dead animal
(Overton and Hamilakis 2013: 218). Placing a dead baby on the wing of the animal,
however, suggests a nurturing and protecting relationship.
The Neolithic carvings of Lake Onega are dominated by images of waterfowl,
with at least 44% representing either swans or geese (Poikalainen 2004). Their
‘meaning’ evidently varies greatly depending on the compositional context, details
of execution and relation to the physical features of the rock (see Lahelma 2012a),
but some of these images seem to imply a co-essence between swans and humans.
Poikalainen (2006) has identified a series of images that seem to represent different
stages of metamorphosis from swans with human features (such as a human foot
instead of a webbed foot) to humans with swan features (such as a beak and a
curved shape suggesting a swan’s neck), signifying a type of ontological fluidity
between the two species. Zhulnikov (2006: 42) also cites an example of a site from
Neolithic Karelia, where all other faunal remains were buried scattered in the same
refuse pit, while a skeleton of a swan was deposited complete in a separate pit –in
effect given a proper burial.
Just as hunting elk was a sexually charged act, in which physical metamorphosis
was an ever-present danger, fowling may likewise have involved imitating and sedu-
cing the prey. Tubular bone artefacts interpreted as flutes have been found in both
Mesolithic and Neolithic contexts. While the interpretation of these artefacts is some-
times uncertain, experimental research carried out by the Rainio and Mannermaa
(2014) on perforated artefacts found at the Middle Neolithic hunter-gatherer site
of Ajvide on the Swedish island of Gotland confirmed that at least in that case they
have indeed formed a two-piece flute. Use-wear analysis and ethnographic parallels
from North America suggest that this type of flute was used for imitating bird calls.
The authors suggest that the flutes of Ajvide were used in fowling to attract
birds towards the hunter but also consider the possibility that birds were imitated
in religious rituals (Rainio and Mannermaa 2014: 96), as is common among
Siberian foraging peoples (e.g. Siikala 1978: 134–136, 167–170). However, these
purposes are not mutually exclusive, and the fact that the flute is made of swan
bones seems significant as it brought the flute-player into intimate sensuous
contact with the bird’s physical remains. Mimicking a bird may have formed a
part of both shamanic séances, ritual dances or plays and the effort of ‘courting’
the animal in connection with fowling. Such courting may be depicted in a
famous rock art scene from Kanozero, Kola Peninsula, where a sexually aroused
man wielding an elk-headed staff is shown facing a capercaillie (Kolpakov and
Shumkin 2012).
Birds as guides and soul-birds

In most Indo-European languages, the name of the Milky Way associate its stars
either with a road consisting of either milk (e.g. Via Lactaea in Latin) or snow (Sw.
Vintergatan, or the ‘winter road’), but among the Finno-Ugric peoples, the Milky
Way was conceptualized as a huge flock of migratory birds (Kuperjanov 2002).
Each star in the galaxy was thought to represent a bird-shaped human soul on its
way to the otherworld that lay beyond the horizon, at the south-western end of the
‘Pathway of Birds’ (Finn. Linnunrata). The Estonian folklorist Andres Kuperjanov
(2002: 52) cites a folklore account recorded at the parish of Keila, close to Tallinn,
according to which:
The birds are led by a white bird, similar to a swan, with the head of a pretty
maiden that all birds of prey fear. Hawks and eagles hide in the clouds from
146 Sky
it. In the summer it lives on top of a boulder in the North, watches the mid-
night sun and is fed sweet northern berries by big birds. My grandmother’s
third husband, Jüri Nõmberg, was an old seaman and he saw how this white
bird led a big herd of birds over the great sea towards land. It flew so low that
its young maiden’s face could be seen and a big tired hawk flew away from
the ship’s mast in fright.
It is worth noting that the constellation of Cygnus or Swan lies on the plane of
the Milky Way, and the maiden-faced ‘lead bird’ mentioned in the story above may
conceivably refer to the constellation. Its shape is readily recognizable as cross-or
bird-like, and its stars are among the brightest in the night sky. Its present name and
association with a swan is derived from the classical world, but Finno-Ugric peoples
appear to have likewise recognized it and interpreted it as a long-necked water bird,
and interestingly a second major constellation –that of the Great Bear –likewise
finds a similar identification and interpretation in both Ancient Greece and the
Finno-Ugric world (cf. Chapter 4). Heikki Simola (2001) points out that the orien-
tation of the constellation, as it were, seems to ‘show the way’ to migratory birds,
because the migratory path of Arctic geese at Lake Onega goes from south-west
towards the north-east. In the April night sky, Cygnus lies close to the northern
horizon and is oriented towards the north-east, whereas in October it lies close to
the zenith and ‘flies’ towards the south-west.
In a Uralic context, water birds emerge both as symbols of the soul and as
messengers between this world and the other. The Udmurts, for example, capture
swans and send them swimming along the River Vyatka to deliver prayers to the
Supreme Deity (Napolskikh 1992: 7), and the Khanty place carved wooden birds
in graves to guide the deceased to the Otherworld (Zvelebil and Jordan 1999,
fig. 6.11). Zhulnikov (2008: 41) describes a different type of present-day Khanty
death ritual, in which a small hut was constructed to house a wooden effigy of
the deceased. A duck was then killed and left in front of the doorway of the hut,
its head oriented towards the north or the direction of the Land of Death. At the
end of the ritual, the hut and the effigy were burned and the duck was boiled
and eaten.
The Vepsians of southern Lake Onega region still maintain beliefs concerning
swans and ducks as ‘soul- birds’ and taboos against hunting them (Vinokurova
2005). When a person slept, his or her ‘free-soul’ was thought to fly about in the
shape of a bird, and when a person died, the soul escaped in the form of a bird.
Wooden bird-sculptures that represent the soul of the deceased can sometimes still
be seen on top of the wooden Orthodox crosses at Vepsian and Karelian ceme-
teries (Figure 8.3). In modern Finnish cemeteries, images of birds (typically small
bronze sculptures of sparrows or swallows) are one of the most common symbols
on tombstones, even though they bear no relation to Christian symbolism. While
this may in part be rooted in national-romantic imagery, such as Zachris Topelius’
(1818–1898) popular poem on a ‘sparrow at Christmas morning’ –in which a girl’s
deceased little brother appears as a sparrow –it nonetheless echoes ancient beliefs
FIGURE 8.3 A Greek Orthodox cross at the village cemetery of Suistamo, Karelia,

with a bird symbol or ‘soul bird’ on top. Photo: Auvo Hirsjärvi/Finnish Heritage
Agency.
and practices concerning soul-birds that were part of Finnish folk culture still in the
early twentieth century (Haavio 1950).
Archaeologically, similar notions related particularly to water birds appear to
emerge already in the Mesolithic, as exemplified by the burials of Vedbæk, Zvejnieki
and Olenyi Ostrov, where bird body parts –and in some cases complete duck
skeletons –have been argued to reflect the role of these animals in guiding the dead
to the Otherworld (e.g. Zvelebil 2003; Mannermaa 2006). Bird’s wings and duck
feet found at the Mesolithic cremation burial of Gøngehusvej 7 at Vedbæk (Brinch
148 Sky
Petersen and Meiklejohn 2003) may have served a similar purpose. The trend seems
to continue into the Neolithic, as most finds of bird bones at Ajvide derive from
wings of water-birds (Mannermaa 2008). In addition to bird bones, small carved
figurines representing birds are occasionally found in Neolithic graves (Antanaitis
1998), such as Tamula in Estonia, where a bird figurine and two wing bones of a
crane were found near the hands of a child (Jaanits et al. 1982; Kriiska et al. 2007).
Various early and later Neolithic pottery styles in the region also refer to water-
birds, the most obvious examples being the occasionally occurring rows of swan or
duck motifs in Typical Comb Ware pottery decoration (Utkin 1989; Pesonen 1996).
In a few cases the birds are accompanied by human figures, as at the Kolomcy sherds
found near Novgorod in Russia (Äyräpää 1953), where the anthropomorph has
horns in its head, recalling highly similar figures in Finnish rock paintings. Images
of birds and anthropomorphs cease to be made in the following late Comb Ware,
but the association seems to persist, as feathers and eggshell fragments are sometime
used as a temper in late Comb Ware (Huurre 1998). Moreover, the shape of both
Typical and late Comb Ware vessels evokes the shape of an egg. Precisely why or
how pots and waterfowl are related is difficult to guess, but it may be noted that the
elk-and waterfowl motifs also manifest in the handles of contemporary wooden
spoons, which Immonen (2002) suggests were used in communal food-sharing rit-
uals following a hunt. Perhaps the pots decorated with water birds were likewise
used in communal feasting associated with birds, such as the present-day Siberian
rituals that celebrate the arrival of the first flocks of ducks and geese (Napolskikh
1992: 9) or the Khanty burial ritual described above.
Later manifestations of the significance of waterfowl can be found in Iron Age
jewellery, where ducks and swans (and their feet in particular) are a common theme
throughout the entire Finno-Ugric area, and in ethnographic materials such as
traditional Karelian embroidery (käspaikka), which show several motifs –such as
double-headed water-birds –that are thought to derive from a very distant past, pos-
sibly even related to the Neolithic carvings of Lake Onega (Säppi and Oino 2010).
Cranes and dwarfs
In Finno-Ugric cosmology, a paradise-like island known as the ‘Home of the Birds’
(Finn. lintukoto) lay beyond the south-western horizon, to where the Milky Way
seems to lead. This otherworldly place where migrating birds fly to is known for
instance among the Finns, Komi, Khanty and Mansi and seems to belong to the
oldest stratum of Uralic myth (Napolskikh 1992). Because heaven and earth met
here, the place was so low that a grown-up person could not stand straight. For this
reason, it was populated by small human-like creatures (Finn. lintukotolaiset), who
in some myths stole the eggs of the birds and waged a war against cranes (Berezkin
2007). The Finno-Ugric myths bear an astonishing resemblance to Ancient Greek
myths concerning the state of war between Pygmies (Gr. πυγμαῖοι) –a race of
dwarfs –and migrating cranes, a theme known as Geranomachy, which makes its
first appearance already in the Iliad (Book III:5). According to Homer, the Pygmies
FIGURE 8.4 Dwarfs fighting cranes in Greenland. A vignette from Olaus Magnus’

Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555).
faced the cranes each winter in their homeland on the southern shores of the
earth, by the shore of the World River or Oceanus (Gr. Ὠκεανός). The myth is
subsequently reported by authors such as Herodotus, Aristotle and Pliny the Elder
as an ethnographic fact, and it also features prominently in Ancient Greek and
Roman art (Dasen 1993; Ovadiah and Mucznik 2017). In the sixteenth century, it
is repeated by Olaus Magnus who places the struggle in Greenland –a place that
(from a Swedish perspective) lay at the extreme outer edge of the inhabited world
(Figure 8.4).
According to Ovadiah and Mucznik (2017: 152), it appears that Greek and
Roman authors have never offered an explanation to the somewhat bizarre myth
concerning Pygmies and cranes, and that modern authors have likewise failed to
do so. Their interpretation is that it relates ‘a real and true event, clothed in myth-
ical vestment, in the Greek and Roman worlds, in which the Pygmies hunt the
birds in order to consume their flesh’ (Ovadiah and Mucznik 2017: 165). In other
words, it would describe real African hunter-gatherer tribes hunting cranes for
food, an ethnographic reality perhaps witnessed by Greeks stationed in Egypt and
later transformed into a myth. However, as Berezkin (2007: 68) points out, because
‘the study of classical antiquities had been poorly integrated into the mainstream
of anthropological research, the Pigmies [sic] and cranes motif was considered by
many to be peculiar just for the Greeks’. The Finnish linguist Yrjö Toivonen (1937)
demonstrated already in the 1930s that the same theme can be found in Finnic,
Siberian and North American myths, and that a ‘heliocentric’ Greek origin for such
a wide-spread motif seemed unlikely. If anything, it is more likely of a northern
circumpolar origin.
Several observations can be brought about to support this notion. First, the
Pygmies are described as minuscule in size, which fits well with the notion of a
people living beyond the horizon where the world (in a flat-earth cosmology)
150 Sky
was very low. Significantly, the Greek authors generally located the Pygmies in the
Upper Nile, that is, to the south of Greece and at the extreme reaches of the known
world, while Strabo specified that since ‘Oceanus stretches along the entire southern
sea-board, and since the cranes migrate in winter to this entire sea-board, we must
admit that the Pygmies also are placed by mythology along the entire extent of that
sea-board’ (cited in Ovadiah and Mucznik 2017: 155). In other words, he perceived
them as a people located vaguely at the edge of the southern horizon, not in a
specific geographic location. This suggests that the Greek myth may likewise be
related to myths concerning the Milky Way as a pathway to a mythical land beyond
the horizon –in Greece thought to lie in the south while in the northern regions
generally located in the north-east end of the Milky Way.
The Common crane (Grus grus) is not just any bird but stands out from the crowd
already because of its anomalously long legs and beak. As Russell and McGowan
(2003) point out in their discussion on the symbolic role of cranes at Çatal Höyük,
cranes resemble humans in a number of ways. They are bipedal, grow consider-
ably tall (reaching ca. 120 cm in adults), and have a long lifespan (sometimes over
40 years) and social structure resembling that of humans. Most importantly, cranes
dance. The dancing often takes place in formation, which can be initiated by a
crane but also by a human imitating a crane. Moreover, cranes are by nature curious
beings and can form a bond with humans, as testified by Jouko Alhainen, a Finnish
birdwatcher dubbed by the press as ‘the crane-whisperer’, who has maintained an
‘orphanage’ for wounded cranes for over thirty years (Saarinen 2008).
Moreover, in Finno-Ugric myths, cranes also have a cosmological role. Cranes
were thought to hold up the heavens, possibly because they are so tall and stand
in an upright position (Lehikoinen 2009). This belief is reflected in contemporary
Finnish language, where the ridgepole supporting the roof of a timber-built house
is still known as kurkihirsi or ‘crane beam’. Since buildings, whether conical teepees
or rectangular houses, shape and replicate cosmology (see Chapter 3), the associ-
ation of cranes with the ridgepole situates them in the very centre of the universe.
The conflict with the ‘dwarfs’ at the outer extreme of the cosmos may perhaps be
seen as a conflict between the centre and periphery, life and death or order and
chaos. The theme of Geranomachy thus appears to be neither a burlesque parody
nor a case of ethnographic observance of African tribes transformed into myth, but
probably reflects the ancient cosmological notions of northern peoples adapted into
a Graeco-Roman context. It may have been later elaborated based on explorers
reports from the Upper Nile or Africa’s west coast, as suggested by Dasen (1993),
but such information hardly reached Greece in the age of Homer, when the myth
already seems to have been commonly known by the Greeks.
In spite of this mythological importance –or perhaps because of it –cranes are
rather invisible in the rich osteological and rock art material of the northern Stone
Age, even if a few individual cranes are depicted at the carvings of Kola peninsula
and Karelia (Kolpakov and Shumkin 2012). This puzzled Kristiina Mannermaa
(2008: 67), who surmised that the ‘rarity of these species in the archaeological data
may be the result of hunting restrictions or taboos’. Indeed, although swans have
commonly been hunted in Lapland, taboos appear to have existed further south
in the historical period, and particularly in eastern Finland and Karelia swans were
either revered or regarded as foul-tasting. In some folklore sources, killing a swan
was compared to killing an angel, and among the Vepsians of Lake Onega swans
were known as ‘Gods’ birds’ (jumalanlind) (Vinokurova 2005). Such taboos may
relate to the association of the swan with the Underworld, or the Land of Death,
which it could reach thanks to its long neck.
Devil’s swans
In addition to its pure white plumage, the exceptionally long neck of the swan is
perhaps its most distinctive feature. It is, incidentally, also one of several features
(such as monogamy, longevity and flying in V-shaped formations) that it shares in
common with cranes. The long neck allows swans to reach water plants and their
roots at depths not reached by other members of the Anatinae family, but among
northern peoples, it has also associated the bird with the subaquatic Underworld.
This association has been immortalized by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius
(1865–1957) in the tone poem called The Swan of Tuonela, a rather sinister avian
swimming in the river that separates the land of the living from that of the dead
(‘Tuonela’ being one of the mythological names in Finnish for the Land of Death).
This association of swans with death and as messengers between the worlds also
seems to be encountered already in classical literature: in Phaedo (84D–85B), Plato
has Socrates saying that although swans sing in early life, they ‘sing especially well
when on the point of death, because they are about to go off to the god [Apollo]
whose servants they are’ –hence the association of ‘swan song’ with death. And
because, being Apollo’s birds, they are granted with the gift of prophecy, they
do not sing from grief as they ‘know beforehand that what is in Hades’ realm
is good –and they take delight in a different way that day than they have ever
delighted before’.
The neck of the swan clearly fascinated the Neolithic inhabitants of Lake Onega,
who sometimes depicted in rock art swans with an almost ridiculously long neck.
The necks and heads of the swan figures, moreover, bear a special relation to cracks
and fissures in the bedrock. For instance, at the cape of Besov Nos (‘Devils’ Cape’),
two disembodied necks of a swan emerge from a rift, as if entering our world from
underneath, while at the Karetskyi Nos locale a swan with a neck seven times the
length of its body appears to plunge into a crack in the rock. Some images of swans
have even incorporated a crack into the image so that a natural crack forms the
neck of the swan (Lahelma 2012a).
Although the Finno- Ugric Otherworld could be reached through various
means, such as diving into a lake bottom or travelling far up north, in Finnish–
Karelian shamanistic folklore cracks in the rock commonly serve as portals into
the world of the dead (cf. Chapter 2). This is reflected, for example, in the Finnish
expression langeta loveen, ‘to fall into a crack’, which in traditional Finnish–Karelian
Kalevala-metric poetry refers to falling into a trance. Swans entering a crack or
152 Sky
FIGURE 8.5 ANeolithic carving of a swan at Lake Onega has been superimposed by

a Greek Orthodox cross probably in the late medieval period. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
emerging from one thus appear to symbolize the passage of the soul (either of a
deceased person or of a shaman) between this world and the Lower World.
Because swans were associated with the Lower World, which in a Christian
interpretation might be understood as equivalent with Hell, the images of swans
may have been viewed as pagan or even ‘evil’ by medieval Christian mission-
aries entering the region. This is indicated by the fact that, in addition to
the central figure of the Lake Onega complex (a large human figure locally
known as Bes or ‘The Devil’), one of the swan figures at Besov Nos has been
superimposed by a carved Greek Orthodox cross (Figure 8.5). The crosses have
been dated on stylistic grounds to the fourteenth or fifteenth century ad, and it
has been suggested that they were made by the monks of the nearby monastery
of Muromsk.
Solar swans?
In addition to the swans, one of the most emblematic types of motif at Lake Onega
are so-called lunar and solar symbols. Most are the shape of the crescent, circle or
semicircle, from which one or two straight lines project, sometimes forming a loop.
There is much variation (at least twenty-five different types can be identified),
and their interpretation has raised some discussion, but the suggestion made by
Ravdonikas (1936) that they are associated with the sun and the moon has today
won wide acceptance. They are not found everywhere at the carving area, but are
concentrated on specific locales, such as Peri Nos. This has prompted Zhulnikov
(2006) to suggest that those locales were devoted to observing astronomical phe-
nomena. The orientation of the ‘rays’ is likewise not random. At Peri Nos, three
groups can be identified –one with rays toward the north, the other towards the
east, and the third towards south-west –possibly signifying orientations of cosmic
significance. East, of course, is the direction of sunrise, and north that of the Finno-
Ugric Land of the Dead. South-west may have acquired significance as the dir-
ection to which the Milky Way seems to lead and from which, as noted above,
migratory water birds arrive to Lake Onega.
The sun also affects the manner in which the carvings can be observed. At
noon they are barely visible but become increasingly visible in oblique light and
are best observed at sunset, in a sense making them alive and active. As the position
of the sun shifts, new figures become visible, while others disappear. Moreover, the
granite of Lake Onega is extremely smooth, polished by countless glaciations, and
can be shiny and luminous when not covered by lichen, as is the case at the rock
art locales located immediately on the lakeshore. Since luminosity and shininess is
cross-culturally associated with supernatural power, the cliffs themselves may have
carried associations with light and sun.
One of the best-known carvings of swans at Besov Nos differs from the rest in
that a solar symbol is clearly intentionally attached to its neck (Zhulnikov 2006),
raising a question if swans were also associated with the sun. As suggested by the
composition of Bolshoy Guri (see Chapter 5), they appear to have been associated
with the Creation, where according to folklore accounts the yolks of the Cosmic
Egg formed the sun in the sky. The so-called ‘cosmic swans’ that occur throughout
the Onega carving region, with a body consisting of three concentric semicircles,
may belong to the same theme of swans and cosmogony. However, the figure of
Besov Nos may also refer to myths and associations that are lost to us. A mythical
solar deer or elk, which carries the sun between its antlers, is widely known among
the northern circumpolar peoples (Jacobson 1993) and may have been preceded by
other solar creatures. It is intriguing that, as already noted, in classical myth Apollo –
who is strongly associated with the sun –rides in a chariot drawn by swans, and in
some myths, Phaeton, the son of Helios or the divine sun –is associated with the
constellation of Cygnus. This might seem like a vague correspondence, but perhaps
worth considering since the number of parallels between northern cosmology and
Greco-Roman myth seems to be surprisingly high.
9
THE SUN, LIGHT AND FIRE
People of the Sun
At least since classical times, the sun has been closely associated with the North
and northerners, as evidenced by Greek myths concerning Hyperborea, Ultima
Thule and other northern, otherworldly places. The Greek explorer Pytheas of
Massilia gave the first first-hand account of the northern world (‘Ultima Thule’) in
the fourth century bc, describing phenomena such as the midnight sun and the sea
freezing over during the winter. Although he was widely accused of being a liar
because of such seemingly incredible claims, his account (which has not survived)
made a lasting impression on classical geography and was quoted by subsequent
authors such as Plato and Pliny the Elder. In these accounts, the North was a place
where even the most dependable of all phenomena, such as the rising and setting of
the sun, did not follow their ‘natural’ course, but were strange and different.
In the late medieval and early modern period, literary accounts of the North
written by northerners themselves began to make their way into the central and
southern European consciousness, most importantly through the work of the
Swedish bishop and historian Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), whose encyclopaedic
work Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555) (‘History of the Northern Peoples’)
was translated to most major European languages. This account of northern
marvels made a great impression on many Renaissance scholars and authors, such
as Cervantes, whose last published novel The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda: A
Northern History (1617) relates the northern exploits of the ‘Prince of Thule’ and
the Princess of Friesland. From the eighteenth century onward, a steady flow of
European scholars and aristocrats began to make their way to the specific places
in the north, such as Aavasaksa in Northern Finland and Nordkapp in northern-
most Norway, to observe and admire the strange phenomenon of the midnight sun
(Figure 9.1).
The sun, light and fire 155
FIGURE 9.1 A view of the midnight sun from the mount Aavasaksa (‘Avasaxa’),
drawn by A.F. Skjöldebrand in June 1799. Published in Giuseppe Acerbi’s Voyage
pittoresque au Cap Nord (1801–1802). Image source: Finnish Heritage Agency.
Olaus Magnus maintained that the Sámi worship the midnight sun and make
sacrifices to it, because it brings light and warmth to the darkness and ‘incon-
ceivable frosts’ they have endured during the winter (III, 2). In Sámi mythology,
the Sun (Beaivi) is indeed a central divinity, as indicated by the fact that in many
Sámi shaman drums it occupies the centre. Some myths maintain that the Sámi are
descendants of the sun-god, a notion put forcibly forward by the twentieth-century
Sámi poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää in his lauded work Beaivi, Áhcázan (‘The Sun, My
Father’) (1988). The persistence of the idea of northerners as sun-worshippers
is understandable, as even if it is to some extent a construction of ‘outsiders’, it
resonates with the experienced northern realities. The importance of the sun is
expressed in the northern festivities of the Midsummer Eve, still a vital part of folk
culture, and the special significance of the sun is also sometimes evident in the pre-
historic archaeological record, particularly in the case of Bronze Age Scandinavian
iconography.
Like the sun, fire is crucial to survival in the North, which explains the sym-
bolic and ritual dimensions of the hearth in both prehistoric and historical times.
The hearth connects the different dimensions of reality, as expressed by the asso-
ciation of the hearth with the world-tree or pillar that supports the cosmos. The
earthly fire is thus a cousin of the heavenly fire of the sun. The emergence of
solar imagery in the latter part of the Bronze Age may be linked to the increased
significance of pyrotechnology and fire-induced transformations, related to the
rise of metallurgy and the introduction of cremation burials in Scandinavia.
156 Sky
Transformation is indeed a key theme related to the sun and fire: it connects with
northern ideas of transformation, or shamanic practices and the transformations
associated with them.
Amber and Apollo
In addition to being a bleak, dark and barbarian land, the North has also been
conceived as a place of light, sun and treasures, including the peculiar and highly
valued substance that is amber (Davidson 2005: 25). Amber has fascinated people
for thousands of years and has among other things given the name to electri-
city (amber is ἤλεκτρον or ‘electron’ in Greek) because, when rubbed with wool,
it produces a strong charge of static electricity. Amber has been associated with
the sun and assigned with magical and curative powers in many different cultural
contexts (Ragazzi 2016). It features in Homer’s epics and is mentioned or discussed
by several Greek and Roman authors, all of whom testify to the allure of this pecu-
liar substance. It is also a distinctively ‘northern’ material in the European world
and has been recognized as such since ancient times –indeed, amber is perhaps
the single most long-standing material symbol of the northern reaches of Europe.
Significantly, amber, the sun and the North are combined in Graeco-Roman
mythological themes. The story of Phaethon and the sun chariot explains the myth-
ical origins of amber in Greek mythology, as given in Roman written accounts.
Phaethon persuaded Helios, his father and sun-god, to let him drive the sun cha-
riot but failed to control it and was about to burn the Earth, leading Zeus to strike
down the chariot and kill Phaethon, who fell in the river Eridanus. Struck with
sorrow, Phaethon’s sisters were transformed into trees and their tears were turned
into amber by the sun and fell in Eridanus which, according to some traditions, was
located in the Far North (Olcott 2013: 6–7). Similar associations between amber,
the sun and the North are present in the figure of Apollo. Apollo is a complex and
multi-layered figure, but there is a long tradition, originating in classical antiquity,
which regards him as a Hyperborean deity. This ‘northern’ identity of Apollo in
his role as the sun-god is reflected in his emblems which include amber and the
whooper swan (cf. Figure 8.1) –a bird with distinctively northern associations due
to its breeding range in sub-Arctic Eurasia (Ahl 1982).
The richest deposits of amber in Europe are located on the south-eastern shore
of the Baltic Sea, with a majority of amber nowadays mined in the Kaliningrad
region in Russia, in addition to which amber can be found along the Danish
coasts (Butrimas 2001). In prehistoric times it was mostly found washed ashore
on the sandy beaches of the southern coast of the Baltic sea, as pieces were torn
from the seafloor by wave action. Baltic amber has been distributed far and wide
since the Neolithic. It has famously been found in Troy, Mycenae and other eastern
Mediterranean late Bronze Age sites where amber suddenly appears around
the mid- sixteenth century bc (Hughes- Brock 1985; Kristiansen and Larsson
2005: 125), and the desire for amber continued into classical times and beyond
(e.g. Vīķis-Freibergs 1985: 324).
Archaeologists have long been interested in the ‘amber routes’ and the
mechanisms of amber exchange, which has been viewed as a proxy of various other
aspects of ancient cultures and societies. However, in addition to trickling down
South to the Mediterranean, amber made its way from the south-eastern shores
of the Baltic Sea across northern Europe already in the Neolithic, including the
circumpolar boreal regions, where it appears in the archaeological material from
around 4000 bc (Zhulnikov 2008; Núñez and Franzén 2011). The distribution of
prehistoric amber in present-day northern Fennoscandia, moreover, must be seen
as a part of much wider contacts networks which channelled Baltic amber around
European Russia as well (Beck 1985: 207; see also Nordqvist 2018).
More than thirty years ago, Markley Todd (1985: 188) observed that the East–
West relations have tended to dominate the understanding of intercultural relations
in prehistoric and ancient Europe. The study of amber could balance the picture
by focusing attention on the importance of the North–South axis, which ‘forces
scholars to ask new questions about cultural contact’ (Markley Todd 1985: 188).
Núñez and Franzén (2011) identify three possible Neolithic ‘amber routes’ to the
North: one route along the eastern Baltic coast, a second one across the Gulf of
Finland and northwards along inland waterways and a third route that reached
northern regions through Lakes Ladoga and Onega and all the way to the White
Sea following River Vyg. Some of the sites far up North are extremely rich in
amber finds. For instance, the cluster of Neolithic sites at Kierikki, in the mouth of
river Ii on the northern coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, has yielded some 200 amber
finds from sites dating from fourth and third millennia bc (Núñez and Franzén
2011: 13, 16).
Amber is a relatively common type of grave goods in Typical Comb Ware graves,
and at some sites such as Kukkarkoski in south-western Finland, amber finds are
accumulated in just a few graves, suggesting that it was associated with rank and
prestige (Ahola 2017a). Anthropomorphic amber figurines have been found in
underwater excavations in front of the rock painting of Astuvansalmi in central
Finland, evidently presented as offerings at the site (Grönhagen 1994). Amber was
thus clearly regarded as a special and valuable substance in northern Fennoscandia
already in the Neolithic, much as it was later in the Mediterranean, even if the spe-
cific meanings associated it may of course have differed.
More importantly in this context, however, Markley Todd (1985: 188) observed
that amber is a substance ‘linking the study of symbols, myths, and cult practices
with modern scientific studies’. This provides an important cue for appreciating
amber and its appeal also in the ancient world. Due to its unique material prop-
erties –and the ‘mythical capital’ it acquired through being imported from a far-
away, unknown sea in the North –most things related to amber lay between myth,
reality and imagination for the Greeks and Romans; amber was a mythical world
materialized. In addition to its capacity to produce static electricity, its proper-
ties as a substance include shininess, hardness, translucency and a general gem-like
character. The mineral-like qualities, however, were contradicted by other qualities
that distinguished amber from other gemstones: it feels warm to the touch, it is
158 Sky
surprisingly light, it emits a pine-like smell when rubbed, insects and plant remains
can sometimes be seen trapped inside it and it burns when exposed to fire.
In a pre-modern context, these properties of amber rendered it a deeply ambiva-
lent and anomalous substance, which has contributed to its many mythical and
magical associations. The fifth-century bc Athenian politician Nicias, for example,
characterized amber as ‘the “juice” or essence of the brilliant rays of the setting
sun, congealed in the sea and then cast up upon the shore’ (Kunz 1971 [1913]: 56).
For the Greek philosopher Thales, amber was ‘a stone with a soul’ because of its
(electric) ability to attract objects towards itself (Markley Todd 1985: 185), while
Demostratus maintained that it originated from the urine of lynxes. The mythical
association of amber with the tears of mourning women (in Greek myth Phaethon’s
sisters, known as the Heliades) is of particular interest, because it has parallels in
both Baltic and Scandinavian mythologies. The Norse goddess of love and fertility,
Freyja, is said to long for his absent husband (the god Óðr), and when her tears fall
to the sea they turn to amber. Similarly, in a popular Lithuanian legend concerning
Jūratė and Kastytis –the goddess of the sea (Lith. jūra, ‘sea’) and a mortal man –the
goddess is said to weep tears of amber after Kastytis, who was slain by the thunder-
god Perkūnas. Some folklore sources, moreover, seem to associate amber with sun-
myths on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea (Vīķis-Freibergs  1985).
Towards the beginning of the Common Era, such mythical explanations began
to give way in the classical world. For instance the Roman naturalist Pliny the
Elder (ad 23–79) set out in his Naturalis Historia to correct ‘the many falsehoods
that have been told about amber’ and to ‘expose the frivolities and falsehoods of
the Greeks’ concerning the substance. He writes at length about the qualities and
possible origins of amber, concluding that ‘there can be no doubt that amber is
a product of the islands of the Northern Ocean’ and that it is ‘produced from
a marrow discharged by trees belonging to the pine genus’, which is gradually
hardened and washed on the seashores (Pliny Nat. Hist. 11, 3). Yet he, too, devotes
an entire chapter to the ‘remedies derived from amber’, which according to him
include curing fevers, maladies of the ear, stomach diseases and preventing delirium.
Interestingly, many of the Neolithic finds of Baltic amber have been carved into the
shape of a double-axe (labrys), which resonates with the Minoan world (where the
labrys is a recurring symbol) and with labyrinths (cf. Chapter 5).
As shown by Pliny’s account, there was a certain awareness of the northern
origins of amber in the ancient world, even though knowledge of the actual geog-
raphies of the North was hazy at best. The Greek explorer Pytheas wrote in the
fourth century bc that a Germanic people called Gutones (sometimes identified
with Goths) collected amber at the shores of an island called Abalus in the northern
sea, where it was washed up by waves. They burned it for fuel and also sold it to
the Teutones. Pliny agreed that it was collected by the Germanic tribes, who sold
it further to Pannonia (present-day Hungary), from where it was transported by
the Veneti to the Adriatic coast and the Mediterranean world. The most detailed
account is given by Tacitus, who in ad 98 writes of a people called Aestii, who
search the deep [sea], and of all the rest [of the Germanic tribes] are the
only people who gather amber. They call it glesum, and find it amongst the
shallows and upon the very shore. But, according to the ordinary incuriosity
and ignorance of Barbarians, they have neither learnt, nor do they inquire,
what is its nature, or from what cause it is produced. In truth it lay long
neglected amongst the other gross discharges of the sea; till from our luxury,
it gained a name and value. To themselves it is of no use: they gather it rough,
they expose it in pieces coarse and unpolished, and for it receive a price with
wonder.
[Tac. Germ. 45, 4 ]
As already mentioned, in addition to being associated with the North and northern
lands, amber was widely associated with the sun. For Homer, amber was ‘shining
as the sun’ (Gimbutas 1985: 248), and amber was an emblem of Apollo the sun-
god, who was also associated with the North and with Hyperborea. The Greek
geographer Hecatateus of Miletus claimed that Hyperborea was an island located
beyond the North Pole and that its inhabitants were devoted to Apollo in his role
as the sun-god (Davidson 2005: 23–24).
The association of the North with the sun may appear peculiar, but it makes
sense from the ancient Greek point of view. With nightfall, the sun was considered
to journey beyond the Ripaean Mountains (a mythical mountain range vaguely
located in a general northern direction), and therefore, when the sun was not
shining on the Mediterranean world, it was thought to reside somewhere among
the northerners (Davidson 2005: 23–24). Although this special relationship between
the sun and northerners is grounded in Greek imaginaries, it has persisted into the
modern times and represents an amalgamation of southern imaginations of the
northern realities. Thus, while the intertwining of the sun and the North is related
to the exoticizing of the unknown mythical land, it also strikes a curious resonance
with actual northern practices and mentalities revolving around solar themes.
Worshipping the northern sun

Amber begins to feature prominently in the northern archaeological record
around the Middle Neolithic, together with other colourful and exotic materials
(Herva et al. 2014). Already Oscar Montelius (1843–1921), the ‘father’ of modern
archaeology, argued that Stone Age miniature amber axes found in Scandinavia
were ‘symbols of the sun god’ (Montelius 1910: 68), and amber discs discovered
in the Baltic countries have similarly been interpreted in terms of prehistoric
sun worship (see Ahl 1982: 395). Gimbutas (1985: 251) proposed that amber
discs associated with the Neolithic Globular Amphora culture in central Europe
were ‘undoubtedly regarded as imbued with the divine power of the God of the
Shining Sky’, and represented ‘a personification of the light of the sky and the
sun, well-known from comparative Indo-European mythology and linguistics’
(Gimbutas 1985: 248). The attribution of such discs with sun worship is not
160 Sky
FIGURE 9.2 A Bronze Age ‘sun-holder’ from Denmark (exact find location is

unknown), with a bronze frame and a disc of amber, which shows the solar
‘wheel-cross’ when illuminated from behind. Photo: Roberto Fortuna and Kira
Ursem/National Museum of Denmark.
unreasonable (a Bronze Age ‘sun-holder’ found in Denmark likewise features an

amber disc, which, when held against the light, reveals the shape of a ‘sun cross’;
see Figure 9.2) but according to present knowledge, the Globular Amphora cul-
ture probably was not Indo-European. The earliest mythological associations of
amber are thus probably lost in the fogs of prehistory. These early associations
between amber and the sun roughly coincide with the first emergence of solar
imagery in rock in rock art. The Neolithic rock carvings of Lake Onega feature a
vast number of globular and crescent-shaped symbols, interpreted by Ravdonikas
(1936) as being related to worshipping the celestial bodies, particularly the sun
and the moon.
According to Zhulnikov (2006), the ‘rays’ emanating from these symbols suggest
astronomically significant orientations, and some of the peninsulas at the Lake
Onega rock art complex may indeed have been devoted to observing celestial phe-
nomena. Because they bear a stylistic similarity to later, South Scandinavian rock
art imagery possibly related to the sun, Hallström (1960) argued that they should
FIGURE 9.3 The rock carving of Aspeberget in Tanum, Sweden, showing what appear
to be the sun and two long-haired ‘sun-worshippers’, as well as other figures such as
roe deer and a halberd. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
be seen as a possible Neolithic precedent to the Bronze Age ‘sun cult’ of southern
Scandinavia.
In the Bronze Age, solar symbolism is very conspicuously present in Scandinavian
visual culture, suggesting that the sun did have a prominent position in ancient nor-
thern societies and ideologies (Figure 9.3). The sun motif occurs both in metal-
work and rock art, and is connected with various other motifs, such as horses and
ships (see Bradley 2006). The most famous example of this complex of motifs is
the Trundholm ‘sun chariot’ found in Denmark, one face of which is plated with
gold (possibly representing the sun), while the other is unplated (representing the
moon). The same imagery is replicated in contemporary bronze razors and rock art
(Kaul 1998; Kristiansen 2010). It also brings together a number of broader cultural
phenomena that were integral to Bronze Age societies or their elites, including
the symbolic meaning of bronze, long-distance travelling, the horse and chariot as
symbols of aristocracy and the esoteric knowledge associated with travelling to far-
away places and with the manipulation of metal (e.g. Kristiansen and Larsson 2005).
The association of the sun with the chariot and the ship can be interpreted
in terms of the journey of the sun, drawn across the sky in the chariot in the day
and then disappearing into the sea where it travels in the night, as well as with the
‘mythical capital’ related to long-distance travel. Thus, the sun descends into the
Underworld, the Land of the Dead, as associated with the sea and underwater, to
reappear in ‘this world’ again in the morning (Kaul 1998; Kristiansen and Larsson
162 Sky
2005). This mythology is even found in Old Norse sources, such as the Icelandic
poem Vafþrúðnismál, which mentions the horses of the day and night, Skinfaxi and
Hrímfaxi (‘shining mane’ and ‘rime mane’), who pull the chariot of the day (‘Dagr’)
across the sky every day and the chariot of the moon (‘Nótt’) during the night
(Ellis Davidson 1964). The association of the sun with a ship is probably even older,
as the notion of a ‘sun-ship’ appears to have a northern circumpolar background
(Lahelma 2017).
The Bronze Age marked significant social and cultural changes in southern
Scandinavia, including connectedness to the vast Eurasian contact networks and
the associated flow of cultural influences, but it is not quite clear why the sun
and solar symbolism became so prominently visible specifically in the Bronze
Age. Speculatively, this might have something to do with the new role that fire
and pyrotechnology came to have in the Bronze Age, as related for instance to
metallurgy and the adoption of cremation burial. Be that as it may, the archaeo-
logical material from later periods does not show similar celebration of the sun as
in the Bronze Age. But this being said, the long-standing idea about the cultural
importance of the sun in the North does make sense on some level due to strong
contrasts which are particularly acutely experienced in northern regions: the sun
is very prominently present in the summer, shining through the night, and largely
hidden during the polar night. It is the journeying of the sun –as perhaps also
depicted on Bronze Age rock art –that renders the sun particularly meaningful
in the North.
While working on his magnum opus, Atlantica, which was supposed to demon-
strate Sweden’s place as a cradle of civilization, the Swedish seventeenth-century
scholar Olaus Rudbeck learned about an enigmatic monument, a ‘runestone’
located far in the northern wilderness of Sweden well above the Arctic Circle and
much farther north than any other known runestones in the realm (Figure 9.4).
Excited about this discovery, Rudbeck reflected that the stone was located ‘where
our eldest forefathers observed the movements of the sun and the moon’ (quoted
in Pekonen 2005: 24, our translation). He believed that sun worship had been
practiced at this particular site because it was located on the Arctic Circle, or the
latitude which marked the southern border of the true polar day where the sun
stayed above the horizon in the summer (Enbuske 2011: 101). Upon later investi-
gation, the monument that so excited Rudbeck turned out to be a natural, albeit a
peculiar and interesting rock (see Herva et al. 2018). But even though classical and
early modern ideas about the importance of the sun in the North were specula-
tive –and, of course, ultimately more about southern ideas of the North –there
are some indications that the sun did feature prominently in the northern world in
prehistoric times.
The marriage of fire and earth

In the traditional Finnish healing magic, an incantation concerning the ‘origin of
fire’ was recited in healing wounds related to fire (e.g. SKVR:VII3 1388). Knowing
FIGURE 9.4 The main face of the Vinsavaara ‘runestone’ in Swedish Lapland, located
some 200 km North of the Arctic Circle. The curious grooves on the different sides
of the stone have been interpreted as an ancient (runic) script but are actually products
of nature. Olaus Rudbeck the Elder thought that the stone marked a place where the
ancients observed the movements of the sun and moon. Photo: Vesa-Pekka Herva.
the ‘origins’ of an illness was essential to healing the ailment, and in the Kalevala
poetry the most common explanation to the origin of fire related it to the supreme
god Ukko (‘Old Man’). He was thought to strike the first light using his stone
weapon or the feathers of the Thunderbird (‘Kokko’), a mythological motif with a
circumpolar distribution. From this first fire, the tinder fell ‘through the six heavens’
into the mythical lake of Alue, made it boil and was eventually swallowed by a fish –
recalling the Germanic Bronze Age solar myth reconstructed by Flemming Kaul
(1998), where the setting sun is accompanied by a fish.
The Estonian historian Lennart Meri, and later president of the Estonian Republic,
suggested that this mythical episode relates a memory of a meteor strike that hit the
Estonian island of Saaremaa sometime in the Neolithic or Bronze Age, which resulted
in the Kaali crater (Figure 9.5) and at least eight other craters nearby (Meri 1976). The
main crater is today a small pond with a diameter of ca. 110 m and is thought have
been created by an iron meteorite weighing 20–80 tonnes that hit the island around
1500 bc (Losiak et al. 2016), although many other dates have been suggested as well.
Regardless of the exact dating of the impact, it appears to have taken place in rela-
tively recent prehistory, and the likelihood that some memory of the impact may be
164 Sky
FIGURE 9.5 The Kaali meteorite crater in the island of Saaremaa, Estonia.

Photo: Väino Poikalainen.
preserved in folklore seems conceivable. Stone walls surrounding the pond may be
prehistoric and related to cultic practices related to the meteor strike. Meri suggests
that the word Thule, used by Pytheas for the extreme North and later repeated by
countless scholars up until the sixteenth century (but which has no commonly
accepted etymology), is derived from the Baltic Finnic word ‘tuli’, which means
fire, and that the event is reflected in both the Greek myth concerning Phaethon
and his Chariots of Fire and the Finno-Ugric myth concerning the origin of fire.
The notions concerning the origin of fire appear to differ depending on the
means of livelihood. For hunter-gatherers, the first fire was shot onto the earth from
the skies by non-human agents such as Thunderbirds –a notion rooted in northern
circumpolar mythology –whereas in the cosmology of early farmers, the mythical
striking of fire was conducted by an anthropomorphic deity (Sarmela 1994: 306–
307). The Finnish archaeologist Unto Salo (1997) associates the latter with the
worship of the Indo-European thunder-god, who in literary sources occurs by
names such as the Greek Zeus, the Roman Jupiter, the Lithuanian Perkūnas and the
Scandinavian Thor. Salo suggests that the thunder-god is first manifested in finds
such as Neolithic perforated ‘battle axes’, which in Finnish folk culture were known
as ‘vaaja’ and were thought to protect households from lightning strikes. The word
‘vaaja’ is according to Salo of Indo-European origin and related to the ‘vajra’ of
Vedic texts, or the mythical thunderbolt-weapon of the god Indra.
FIGURE 9.6 A Sámi marriage ceremony featuring the use of a strike-a-light. A

vignette from Olaus Magnus’ Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555).
In the later (Iron Age) archaeological record, the presence of the thunder-
god manifests according to Salo in the form of oval strike-a-lights made of
quartzite. These objects have a wide distribution in northern Europe from the
first to the eight millennium ad, and because of their oval shape accompanied
with a vertical cut, many archaeologists have associated them with the female
sexual organ. Salo (1997) suggests that they symbolically express and repro-
duce the mythical origins of fire, the hieros gamos or ‘sacred marriage’ between
a sky-god and a Goddess of the Earth, whereupon lightning struck by the
sky-god makes the Earth fertile –an act replicated in using a strike-a-light. In
Salo’s view, fire was born in the heavens when Ukko –the sky-god of Finnic
mythology –was having intercourse with his wife (Rauni), which produced
lightning. This notion finds some support in the account of Finnish heathen
religion given by the Finnish Bishop Mikael Agricola in 1555, who associates
Ukko and Rauni with the harvest (Harviainen et al. 1990), and it also seems
to be reflected in the account of the sixteenth-century Swedish historian and
bishop Olaus Magnus (IV, 7), who visited Lapland in the course of his travels
(Figure 9.6).
Olaus noted that the Sámi forged their marriages through a fire ritual:
In the presence of friends and relatives, parents forge the marriages of their
children by striking flint and steel. For a marriage thus agreed upon is by its
omens more auspicious than under any other type of custom, and is so well-
established and widely accepted that it could as well have had its origin in
Greece or Italy. […] For as flint preserves itself as a hidden fire that derives
from its nature, which flares up when struck, so do both sexes conceal a life
that in union eventually produces a living offspring.
[Olaus Magnus 1973: 51; our translation from Finnish]
166 Sky
However, the historical sources do not really explain the distribution and arch-
aeological contexts of the oval strike-a-lights, which tend to be found outside the
regions that have traditionally been considered as permanently inhabited –that is, in
the ‘wilderness’. Their find contexts suggest that they were deliberately deposited
in particular spots of the landscape, apparently in water or wet places. This resonates
with the more general and long-standing northern European practice of making
ritual deposits in water and wet places.
Whatever the specific meaning of depositing strike-a-lights, the practice can
generally be understood as a means of incorporating fire in the land or particular
spots in the landscape. This echoes the broader northern European tradition of
depositing objects in water and wet places (e.g. Bradley 1993) and the traditions
of symbolic and magical fires pertaining to the northern world. It is worth noting
that wetlands have been subject to substantial cultural imaginations in the European
circumpolar North, where wetlands in different forms comprise a common land-
scape –associated with extraordinary light and fire phenomena –and perhaps
unexpectedly therefore also feature prominently in northern mindscapes. This is
reflected in folklore which suggests that bogs were regarded as strange and other-
worldly environments, a scene for extraordinary events, experiences and beings
(Meredith 2002).
Fire and the hearth in northern cultures

In Finnish folk poetry, fire is described as the ‘son of the sun’ (Sarmela 1994: 303),
and both fire and the sun may have been more generally associated with a life-
affirming warmth that human life in the North depends upon (Westerdahl
2002: 195). According to David Anderson, ‘if there is one idiom that is common
all across the circumpolar North, it is the centrality of the hearth in social life
and of commensality with the home fire itself ’ (Anderson 2013: 262). In a cold
climate, the hearth sustains life in a very concrete sense, but its centrality in nor-
thern cultures extends beyond straightforward ‘practical’ matters. In northern cos-
mologies, the hearth is also closely associated with the world-tree or world-pillar,
connecting the different levels of cosmos (Anderson 2013: 272). Thus, according
to Westerdahl (2002: 184), ‘The constructing of the hearth can itself be considered
as a renewal (re-creation) of the microcosm or as a repetition of creation’. He
suggests, moreover, that charcoal collected from the hearth was ritually deposited at
particular loci in the landscape, possibly to symbolically or magically to strengthen
borders of a farmstead.
Anthropologists and historians have sometimes envisioned ‘fire rituals’ among
northern peoples, but there are no indications that fire in itself would have been
‘worshipped’ in any meaningful sense, even if it has evidently played an instru-
mental role in various cosmologically important practices (Sarmela 1994: 307). Fire
was viewed as a powerful elemental force, and specialized techniques intertwining
‘practical’ and ‘ritual’ or ‘spiritual’ dimensions were required for controlling and
engaging with it in various contexts. Fire-related practices with a particular cultural

meaning involved, for instance, preparing slash-and-burn fields, the lighting of the
smith’s furnace and protecting buildings from fire (Sarmela 1994: 307). It was, for
example, inadvisable to build a house on a spot where one had previously burned
down, lest the same might happen again, and objects such as Stone Age axes and
adzes, thought hit the earth in the tips of thunderbolts, were sometimes concealed
in buildings to protect them from fire and lightning (Hukantaival 2016: 51, 102).
This pan-European association between stone axes and lightning ultimately relates
to the ancient Indo-European thunder-god, whose descendants included Indra,
Zeus and Thor –as well as the Finnish Ukko, whose weapon the folk poems is
typically a stone axe.
The special powers and properties of fire –as denoted by its supernatural
power or ‘väki’ –indicate that fire was a wilful and inspirited entity with its
own agency, thus rendering the relationship between people and fire as social
and reciprocal. That fire has been conceived as a person-like entity in northern
cultures is still today reflected in such notions as fire needing to be fed, indi-
cating that fuelling a fire was not simply a question of burning anything that
burns. Instead, fire should be fed with specific kinds substances, such as particular
types of wood or, as in the case of the Inuits, with fat –just like people eat fat
(Anderson 2013: 272). This can be taken to reflect the recognition of reciprocity
between people and fire: people give food to fire in order to maintain it, and fire
likewise supports human life by providing warmth and light. This may go some
way towards explaining why burnt animal bones are regularly found in hearths
in Fennoscandia, from sites ranging the Mesolithic until the early Iron Age when
the practice of burning bones becomes rarer. The bones could be used as fuel,
even if they do not burn very well, but a complementary reason may have been
to feed fire with remains of human food.
In addition to its usual ‘explicit’ form, fire could be encountered and engaged
with in other forms in prehistoric and historical times. Quartz and flint were
thought to contain ‘hidden’ fire, as indicated by their capability to spark and
give a birth to fire (e.g. Olaus Magnus 1973: 51). Both flint and quartz produce
sparks when hit with iron, and quartz, moreover, features piezoelectric sparks of
light within the stone when struck. This association between flint and fire –‘fire
incorporated in stone’ –was apparently recognized already in the Neolithic,
which perhaps explains why flint artefacts were sometimes purposefully exposed
to fire (Larsson 2011: 76–77). Although fire has probably always carried cul-
tural meanings, the Neolithic likely marked a significant change in people’s per-
ception and understanding of and relationship with fire, including the ways of
using it. Pottery-making brought fire and its transformative power –the ability
to turn clay into a stone-like substance (see Chapter 3) –to the fore. This
would have been further amplified by the introduction of metallurgy and cre-
mation burial, both of which carried deep cultural and cosmological meanings
and implications.
168 Sky
Fire and transformation

Appropriating the transformative nature of fire is one of the defining characteristics
of the Neolithic period. In addition to the obvious cases of pottery-making
or cremation, and the practice of burning flint mentioned above, it has been
argued that Neolithic houses were transformed at a certain stage of their cultural
life –towards the end of their active use –by deliberately burning them down.
Stevanović (1997) argues that transforming daub-built houses into a ceramic-
like substance was imbued with symbolic potential, as ceramics was central to
the symbolic world of the Neolithic. In north-eastern Europe, we find similar
evidence for burned Neolithic houses (see Zhulnikov 1999; Katiskoski 2002),
and it is possible that this was a result of intentional destruction and thus linked
to a changing cultural meaning of fire in the Neolithization of north-eastern
European boreal zone. However, other interpretations (such as endemic warfare,
see Sipilä and Lahelma 2006) have been put forward, and the remains of northern
Neolithic houses have not really been investigated from this point of view (but
see Herva et al. 2017).
The palynological record suggests that fire was increasingly employed as an
means of altering the landscape in northern Fennoscandia since the introduction
of pottery in the sixth millennium onwards, particularly through the emerging
slash-and-burn cultivation (Alenius et al. 2013, 2017). This increased fire activity
was most likely of an anthropogenic origin, and in addition to opening up the
landscape, it would have made fire more conspicuously present as part of human
landscapes and mindscapes. Fire thus took on a new role and meaning in the life
of northern people in the Neolithic, and the incipient pyrotechnology made trans-
formation (of the landscape, or of clay, the human cadaver, etc.) a central cultural
theme running through the Neolithic.
In the Bronze Age, fire became even more conspicuously incorporated in ritual
practices and was also linked to various ‘mundane’ practices (that is, ones with
less obvious ritual underpinnings), binding together different taskscapes. Metalwork
and cremation rituals comprised the most obvious ritual arena and a cosmological
focal point associated with fire, together with rock art demonstrating the centrality
of fire in the Bronze Age world (e.g. Østigård and Goldhahn 2008). A similar com-
plex of meanings and interlinks between different sociocultural domains has been
identified in the Iron Age practices related to fire. Due to their dual character of
being both regenerative and dangerous, fire and iron were also associated with such
aspects of life as procreation and fertility (Giles 2007: 409). Thus, for example,
both Thor and Ukko –the Scandinavian and Finnish gods of thunder –were
associated with fertility, and still in the sixteenth century ad, the Finnish bishop
Mikael Agricola complained that Finns celebrated May feasts in honour of Ukko
(Harviainen et al. 1990). The feasts (‘Ukon vakka’) featured heavy drinking, as a
result of which ‘many shameful acts’ followed.
The contemporary Finnish May Day or Walpurgisnacht (Finn. Vappu) is a
fair match to Agricola’s description, as –rather than being associated with the
FIGURE 9.7 A traditional Midsummer Eve celebration featuring a bonfire or ‘kokko’

in Pitäjänmäki, a suburb of Helsinki, in 2011. Photo: Antti Lahelma.
international workers movement –May Day as celebrated in Finland is a car-

nival of drinking and loose relationships. Symbolic and ritual uses of fire have
likewise continued to recent history, for example in the form of ‘purifying’ cer-
tain loci in the landscape with fire and burning bonfires at certain times of the
year (Hukantaival 2016: 144). May Day bonfires are a tradition cherished in the
western coast of Finland, whereas in the rest of the country, bonfires are mostly
lit during Midsummer Eve (Figure 9.7). The Finnish word kokko used of these
bonfires carries an interesting reference to ancient beliefs concerning fire, as kokko
is also a word used of the Thunderbird who is associated with the Origin of Fire
(cf. above).
Strange lights in the northern sky

The word ‘Arctic’ is derived from the North Star, which since classical antiquity has
been known as the star Arcturus (Gr. Ἀρκτοῦρος, or ‘Guardian of the Bear’; in astro-
nomical terms, ‘α Boötis’), the only fixed point in the northern night sky, around
which the other stars appear to revolve. Because of its position, it has been subject
to various cosmological meanings in circumpolar and Arctic cultures around the
globe, most likely since the earliest prehistory to the recent past. In addition to
the North Star and the midnight sun, the Aurora Borealis, or northern lights, have
170 Sky
always been a ‘quintessential symbol of the far north’ (Friedman 2012: 115) and
one of the best known marvels of the polar regions. For centuries, there was no
scientific explanation to the phenomenon, and to European eyes, these veils of light
in the darkness of the polar night ‘resembled nothing ever seen on earth, except
perhaps in dreams’ (Falck-Ytter et al. 1999: 9). Theories about the nature and char-
acter of the northern lights abounded, but their origin remained a mystery until the
twentieth century (Friedman 2012).
Everything about the Aurora Borealis was unclear and elusive for a long time.
Why did it take place only in the polar regions, how high up in the sky did it occur,
where did the lights and colours come from, and why did they move and chance
the way they did (Falck-Ytter 1999: 15–16)? The mystery was further underlined
by the sounds that the Aurora Borealis were reported to emit, contributing to the
sense of enchantment caused by the fires in the sky (e.g. McCorristine 2016). The
secrets of the northern lights were thus one reason why Lapland became a subject to
and scene of scientific pursuits from the eighteenth century onwards (Pihlaja 2012).
The northern skies continue to yield more mysteries, as even though northern
lights are today fairly well understood, the so-called ‘Hessdalen lights’ of central
Norway are not. These ‘UFO-like’ ghostly lights floating or dancing in the airspace
continue to defy scientific explanations. They can be
as big as cars and can float around for up to two hours. Other times they zip
down the valley before suddenly fading away. Then there are the blue and
white flashes that come and go in the blink of an eye, and daytime sightings
that look like metallic objects in the sky. It is little wonder that when they
started appearing up to 20 times a week in the early 1980s, UFOlogists hailed
the Hessdalen valley as a portal to other worlds and flocked there to celebrate.
[Williams 2014: 40 ]
Whatever the scientific explanation of the Hessdalen lights is, they contribute to
the centuries-old notion of the North as a land of light and dark, of contrasts and
ambiguity. Whether related to light seen through amber, or ‘lightning’ seen within
quartz or flint, or the will-o’-wisps hovering over the bogs, the midnight sun or
northern lights, the North has always been associated with the sun and mysterious
lights of unknown origin.
10
EPILOGUE
A world full of life

If there is a central message to this book, it might be the observation –repeated
again and again in various different contexts –that the modern (‘Cartesian’) div-
ision of the lived world into such dichotomies as material and spiritual, human
and non-human, organic and inorganic is deeply misleading if applied to the pre-
modern northern world. Rather, when we zoom closely into the pre-modern past
of northern Fennoscandia, with archaeology, history, folklore and ethnography as
our guides, we encounter a world where everything is bubbling with the potential
of life and sentience. In this world, there is no ‘either/or’: anything can be a living
thing, even if not everything is –at least not always or in every situation. Nor does
it mean plunging into a chaotic fantasy world of trolls, ghosts and talking trees. As
Bird-David (1999: 77) writes, in an animistic context
To ‘talk with a tree’ […] is to perceive what it does as one acts towards it,
being aware concurrently of changes in oneself and the tree. It is expecting
a response and responding, growing into mutual responsiveness and, further-
more, possibly into mutual responsibility.
Applying this notion of animism (or ‘new animism’, as some would have it) to
ethnographic or archaeological data is not a novel or original thing as such, as
anthropologists like Irving A. Hallowell (1960) and Tim Ingold (2000) have made
the same argument decades ago, and many archaeologists have similarly embraced
the ‘relational ontology’ of anthropological theorists and reinterpreted archaeo-
logical datasets in its light (e.g. contributions in Watts 2013). If there is any novelty
to our approach, it lies in concentrating on a single region and its archaeological
past, studying it in the long term and in fairly great detail, and from a consistently
relational viewpoint.
172 Sky
Most previous studies on the topic have been case studies on a wide spectrum
of time periods and geographic regions, providing useful data for discussion but
also resulting in a rather fragmentary view of individual, ‘special cases’ –whereas
we have attempted to reach a more holistic reading of the archaeology of a single
region, from the Mesolithic to the present day. As noted in the introduction to this
book, the European North offers a unique prospect for this kind of analysis: the
archaeological research carried out is impeccable (Scandinavia is, after all, the birth-
place of scientific archaeology; see Trigger 2006), historical records extend back for
more than a thousand years, and the folklore and ethnography of the region has
been studied and recorded in minute detail.
Many of the arguments made herein are likely to raise objections with those
who encounter our line of argument for the first time. It is an argument that, like
quantum physics, runs counter to our fundamental, ‘common sense’ understanding
of the world. Most readers of this book are likely to be academics trained in
‘Western’ modes of thinking, and Western academics are a breed who is weaned
since early childhood from animism and taught to view it as a mindless supersti-
tion –even if, as demonstrated already by the psychologist Jean Piaget (1928), a
type of ‘animism’ is a natural phase in every child’s development and experience
of the world.
Relational ontology dissolves the boundaries between organism and environ-
ment and subject and object, thus challenging basic modernist assumptions about
the workings of the world. Consequently, we thus tend not to really accept animism
or consider its full consequences in prehistoric situations. It is hard to imagine that
people in the past really thought that a stone or a river could be a person, just like
you and I, and how that might have affected everyday life. Perhaps what they were
really doing, we would like to think, is that they were engaging in some sort of a
playful make-believe, acted out faithfully but without a deep conviction that it
represented reality. And in some respects, that may be so. Relational ontology is not
a philosophical conviction but a mode of being-in-the-world based on observation
and situated in a specific relational context. It does not necessitate a deep conviction
about the ‘true nature’ of things: it can involve performance, it can be inconsistent
and yes, it can also be playful –all of which, of course, does not mean that it should
not be taken seriously. The Danish anthropologist Rane Willerslev observes that
‘taking animism seriously’ means taking seriously
what the people themselves take seriously. This is not usually done in
anthropology. Spirits such as those the Yukaghirs claim to exist out there
in the world alongside humans and animals and with whom they interact in
both waking life and in dreams are generally not accepted by anthropologists
as having any reality other than as mental representations, imposed upon
the world by indigenous minds as a means of grasping it conceptually and
appropriating it symbolically within the terms of a culturally constructed
worldview.
[Willerslev 2007: 181 ]
Epilogue 173
For archaeologists, ‘taking animism seriously’ offers new perspectives on material

culture and thus encourages a thorough reassessing of the meanings of things and
phenomena, which is something we have attempted in this book. Animism is an
inextricable element of the entire northern Fennoscandian archaeological record –
whether one examines Neolithic rock art depictions of elk or bears, the burial rites
of Iron Age farmers, or such deceptively ‘mundane’ artefacts as seventeenth-century
fragments of pottery and clay pipes (cf. Herva 2009). For humanity as a whole, as
some have argued (e.g. Harvey 2005), taking animism seriously offers a perspective
for critical self-examination: of how we relate to other animals, plants and trees,
the physical environment and –in general –our place in the world in an era of
planetary environmental crisis.
The North and the South

We had of course a pretty clear idea of the structure and main themes of the
book before we embarked on writing it, and much of it builds on the research
that the two of us have conducted over many years, but writing is always a cre-
ative process that conjures up new ideas and fresh insights. And so it happens that
some destinations to which this book led us to took us pretty much by surprise.
For example, although from reading the book it might perhaps appear that it is
our agenda to ‘demonstrate’ points of contact between the Mediterranean and the
Baltic worlds, or between the northern periphery of Europe and classical antiquity,
this was never our intention or a point that we consciously sought to pursue –it
simply happened.
Quite the contrary, one of us (Lahelma) has recently argued that the centuries-
long tendency to search for parallels to certain aspects of Scandinavian archae-
ology (specifically South Scandinavian rock art) in the Mediterranean world is to
some extent politically motivated and even racist. While such parallels and contacts
undoubtedly exist, as exemplified by the excellent work of Kristiansen and Larsson
(2005), we thought they were too pronounced. They follow a line of scholarship
that has viewed the agrarian cultures of southern Scandinavia as ‘our’ tradition, as
belonging to a grand European story, impregnated by contacts –whether direct or
indirect –with the classical civilizations of the South. Sometimes they have been
explicitly been identified as ‘Aryan’ or as bearing evidence of the superiority of the
‘Nordic race’ (Pringle 2006). In its more muted form, this discourse has maintained a
hermetic North–South dichotomy, where influences may trickle from the South to
the North, but never (or extremely rarely) the other way around. The North, in this
view, has been ‘associated with the primitive Other, usually identified –either expli-
citly or implicitly –as the Sámi’ (Lahelma 2017: 166–167). More nature than culture,
it has always been at the receiving end of ‘higher’ cultural forms or ‘civilization’.
Yet, here we are, exploring northern cosmologies but finding parallels with Apollo
and his swans, Ariadne and the labyrinth, the myth of Phaethon and the Chariot
of the Sun, the tears of Heliades and the Homeric myth concerning Pygmies and
cranes –hypothetical contacts between the North and the classical world that seem
174 Sky
unexpected, to say the least. Are we, then, subconsciously trying to vindicate the
significance of the Fennoscandian periphery by finding contact points with the
classical tradition, the unwitting disciples of Olaus Rudbeck the Elder, for whom
the northernmost fringes of Europe were the birthplace of civilization? As much as
we both respect and admire the breadth of his scholarship and the lasting legacy of
this ‘mad genius’ (cf. King 2005) of northern antiquarianism –whose prominence
in our discussion is, incidentally, another curious and unexpected turn –we would
like to think that these points of contact are not purposefully chosen but rather
illustrate the wide contact networks of the ancient North.
Early modern antiquarian studies of northernmost Europe unfolded in a colo-
nialist setting, with the North seen as a land of both material wealth and sym-
bolic capital. The latter involved, for instance, opportunities to discover material for
re-envisioning ancient times and the relationship between classical and northern
worlds, as expressed by Olaus Rudbeck the Elder’s pursuit for the evidence of the
world’s oldest writing in Lapland, associated with his grander vision of Atlantis –the
supposed cradle of civilization –located in the North. Such views built on ancient
classical imaginings of the North and have also been replicated in later times in, for
instance, the form of placing Homeric stories in the Baltic world.
Such classically and biblically influenced reworkings, however, have effectively
served to cast the northern worlds and their pasts in a ‘southern’ mould, conquering
and colonizing them through assimilation into ‘European’ cultural spheres and
narratives, instead of assessing the North in its own terms. Thus, even when
seemingly focusing on the North, antiquarian and later archaeological narratives
have actually tended to be more about the South (or the ‘European world’) than
the North. Rudbeck’s argument of the northern origins of writing, for instance,
was about Sweden’s role to the grand narrative of history with Lapland merely
functioning as a resource for repositioning Sweden within the European domain,
past and present. Distant, unknown and exoticized, the northern fringe of the
Europe served as an arena for projections and fantasies and had the potential for
wondrous and unexpected discoveries.
High mobility is one of the characteristic features of northern, circumpolar
cultures. As noted already in the early twentieth century (e.g. Gjessing 1944), this
resulted in exchange networks that already in the Stone Age spanned thousands of
kilometres –indeed quite possibly across the entire northern circumpolar world
along the east–west axis (Westerdahl 2010). If they did that, it should not come as
a huge surprise that influences may have spread also along the North–South axis,
from the classical world to the extreme North and, quite probably, also the other
way round. It would be more surprising if such contacts did not exist, even if that
is by and large what contemporary archaeological narratives (e.g. Scarre 2005) tend
to suggest by excluding the North.
In that sense, perhaps this book does continue a line of scholarship initiated
already by the sixteenth-century Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus (whose fol-
lower Rudbeck in many respects was) and the other northern antiquarians who
perceived a lacuna in central European knowledge pertaining to the North and
Epilogue 175
sought to rectify the situation through their own ‘northern exposures’ –Olaus
offering an all-encompassing, encyclopaedic review of nearly all things northern
in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (1555), and Rudbeck ‘exposing’ it (with
a Baroque flair) as the vagina gentium, or the womb of all nations, in his Atlantica
(published in four volumes between 1679–1702). Our form of ‘northern exposure’
pursued in this book has admittedly much more modest aims but can be seen to
contribute to the same aim of highlighting the role of the North in phenomena
that have affected the entire European subcontinent.
The study of the northern world, we argue, can make a significant contribution
to the understanding of continent-wide prehistoric and historical processes, such
as Neolithization and modernization, as well as current theoretical discussions in
archaeology. Northern Fennoscandia comprises an excellent arena for exploring
the nature and significance of relational ontologies and epistemologies in a long-
term perspective, especially because ‘ethnographically informed approaches’ can be
employed to trace cultural and cosmological continuities and changes over cen-
turies and millennia. Northern cultures have for long provided anthropological
examples for discussions of relational ontologies and epistemologies, but they tend
to lack the deep-time perspective provided by combining archaeology, history, eth-
nography and folklore studies. A dialogue between these different disciplines, and
the datasets employed by them, lies at the heart of the approach taken in this book.
By the same token, the book interrogates the mythical and actual northern worlds
that are intertwined in many curious (and sometimes surprising) ways.
In both written sources and local perspectives, the northern fringe of Europe is
an enchanted land of marvels and magic. We hope this book, and our encounters
with northern phenomena, will retain some of that sense of marvel –as well as
contributing to a better understanding of how the North of Europe, rather than
being isolated and cut off from the rest of the subcontinent, has always engaged in
an active cultural dialogue with regions further south.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahl, F.M. 1982. Amber, Avallon, and Apollo’s singing swan. The American Journal of Philology
103(4): 373–411.
Ahola, J. 2014. The other island: Kalevalaic epic and history. In J. Ahola, Frog, M. and
J. Lucenius (eds.). The Viking Age in Åland: insights into identity and remnants of culture.
Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, pp. 55–82.
Ahola, M. 2017a. The material culture of Finnish Stone Age hunter- gatherer burials.
Fornvännen 112(4): 201–215.
Ahola, M. 2017b. Memory, landscape & mortuary practice: understanding recurrent ritual
activity at the Jönsas Stone Age cemetery in southern Finland. Acta Archaeologica 88(1):
95–120.
Äikäs, T. 2015. From boulders to fells: sacred places in the Sámi Ritual landscape (translated by S.
Silvonen). Helsinki: Archaeological Society of Finland.
Ailio, J. 1909. Die steinzeitlichen Wohnplatzfunde in Finnland. Helsingfors: Akademischen
Buchhandlung.
Akkerman, A. 2001. Urban planning in the founding of Cartesian thought. Philosophy and
Geography 4(2): 141–167.
Alberti, B. 2012. Cut, pinch and pierce: image as practice among the early formative La
Candelaria, first millennium AD, Northwest Argentina. In I.-M. Back Danielsson, F.
Fahlander and Y. Sjöstrand (ed.). Encountering imagery: materialities, perceptions, relations.
Stockholm University. Stockholm: University of Stockholm, pp. 13–28.
Albrethsen, S.E. and Brinch Petersen, E. 1976. Excavation of a Mesolithic cemetery at
Vedbæk, Denmark. Acta Archaeologica 47: 1–8.
Alenius, T., Mökkönen, T., Holmqvist, E. and Ojala, A. 2017. Neolithic land use in the nor-
thern boreal zone: high-resolution multiproxy analyses from Lake Huhdasjärvi, south-
eastern Finland. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 26(5): 469–486.
Alenius, T., Mökkönen, T. and Lahelma, A. 2013. Early farming in the northern boreal
zone: reassessing the history of land use in southeastern Finland through high-resolution
pollen analysis. Geoarchaeology 28(1): 1–24.
Almgren, O. 1907. Nordiska stenålderskulpturer. Fornvännen 2: 113–125.
Bibliography 177
Almgren, O. 1927. Hällristningar och kultbruk: Bidrag till belysning av de nordiska

bronsåldersristningarnas innebörd. Stockholm: Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets
Akademien.
Anderson, D.G. 2013. Home, hearth and household in the circumpolar North. In D.G.
Anderson, R.P. Wishart and V.Vaté (eds.). About the hearth: Perspectives on the home, hearth
and household in the circumpolar North. New York: Berghahns, pp. 262–282.
Andersson Burnett, L. 2010. Abode of Satan: the appeal of the magical and superstitious
North in eighteenth-century Britain. Northern Studies 41: 67–77.
Anfält, T. 2002. Bilden av ett bruk: bruksbor och brukspatroner i vallonbruket Lövsta
under 1700- talet. In A. Florén and G. Ternhag (eds.). Valloner - järnets människor.
Uppsala: Gidlunds förlag, pp. 95–106.
Antanaitis, I. 1998. Interpreting the meaning of East Baltic Neolithic symbols. Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 8(1): 55–68.
Artelius, T. 1996. Långfärd och återkomst: skeppet i bronsålderns gravar. Kungsbacka:
Riksantikvarieämbetet.
Artress, L. 1995. Walking a sacred path: rediscovering the labyrinth as a spiritual practice. New York:
Penguin.
Arukask, M. 2017. The personal rituals of the Finnic peoples with forest trees. Anthropology
and Archeology of Eurasia 56(1–2): 167–185.
Asplund, H. 2005. Puikko puhki pilven? In V. Immonen and M. Haimila (eds.). Mustaa
valkoisella: ystäväkirja arkeologian lehtori Kristiina Korkeakoski- Väisäselle. Turku: Turun
yliopisto, arkeologia, pp. 19–27.
Aupers, S. 2009. ‘The force is great’: enchantment and magic in Silicon Valley. Masaryk
University Journal of Law and Technology 3(1): 153–173.
Äyräpää, A. 1953. Kampakeramiikan linnunkuvat. Suomen Museo 60: 34–44.
Bäärnhielm, G. 1976. I Norrland hava vi ett Indien: gruvdrift och kolonisation i Lappmarken under
1600-talet. Stockholm: Ordfront.
Bäckman, L. 1975. Sájva. Föreställningar om hjälp-och skyddsväsen i heliga fjäll bland samerna.
Stockholm: Almqvist & Wikséll.
Bahn, P. 2010. Prehistoric rock art: polemics and progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bailey, D. 2007. The anti-rhetorical power of representational absence: incomplete figurines
from the Balkan Neolithic. In C. Renfrew and I. Morley (eds.). Image and imagination.
Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 111–120.
Bailey, D. 2014. Touch and the cheirotic apprehension of prehistoric figurines. In P. Dent
(ed.). Sculpture and touch. London: Ashgate, pp. 17–43.
Ballard, C., Bradley, R., Nordenborg Myhre, L. and Wilson M. 2003. The ship as a symbol
in the prehistory of Scandinavia and Southeast Asia. World Archaeology 35(3): 385–403.
Bankson, M.Z. 2008: The soulwork of clay: a hands-on approach to spirituality. Woodstock: Skylight
Paths Publishing.
Bat Or, M. 2010. Clay sculpting of mother and child figures encourages mentalization. The
Arts in Psychotherapy 37: 319–327.
Baudou, E. 1968. Forntida bebyggelse i Ångermanlands kustland: arkeologiska undersökningar av
ångermanländska kuströsen. Stockholm: University of Stockholm.
Baudou, E. 1992. Boplatsen vid Nämforsen. Arkeologi i norr 3: 71–82.
Beck, C.W. 1985. Criteria for ‘amber trade’: the evidence in the eastern European Neolithic.
Journal of Baltic Studies 16 (3): 200–209.
Berezkin, Y. 2007. ‘Earth-diver’ and ‘emergence from under the earth’: cosmogonic tales
as evidence in favor of the heterogenic origins of the American Indians. Archaeology,
Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 32(1): 110–123.
178 Bibliography
Berezkin,Y. 2010. The Pleiades as openings, the Milky Way as the path of birds, and the girl
on the moon: cultural links across northern Eurasia. Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore
44: 7–34.
Bergman, I. and Edlund, L.-E. 2016. Birkarlar and Sámi –inter-cultural contacts beyond state
control: reconsidering the standing of external tradesmen (birkarlar) in medieval Sámi
societies. Acta Borealia 33(1): 52–80.
Bird-David, N., 1999. ‘Animism’ revisited: personhood, environment, and relational epistem-
ology (with comments). Current Anthropology 40, Supplement: 67–91.
Blier, S.P. 1983. Houses are human: architectural self-images of Africa’s Tamberma. Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians 42(4): 371–382.
Bock, I. 1996. Bockin perheen saaga: Väinämöisen mytologia (edited by Juha Javanainen).
Helsinki: Synchronicity Publications.
Boivin, N. 2004a. From veneration to exploitation: human engagement with the mineral
world. In N. Boivin and M. Owoc (eds.). Soils, stones and symbols: cultural perceptions of the
mineral world. London: University College of London Press, pp. 1–29.
Boivin, N. 2004b. Mind over matter? Collapsing the mind-matter dichotomy in material
culture studies. In E. Demarrais, C. Gosden and C. Renfrew (eds.). Rethinking materi-
ality: the engagement of mind with the material world. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for
Archaeological Research, pp. 63–67.
Boriç, D. 2002. The Lepenski Vir conundrum: reinterpretation of the Mesolithic and
Neolithic sequences in the Danube Gorges. Antiquity 76(294): 1026–1039.
Bradley, R. 1993. The passage of arms: an archaeological analysis of prehistoric hoards and votive
deposits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bradley, R. 2000. An archaeology of natural places. London: Routledge.
Bradley, R. 2006. Danish razors and Swedish rocks: cosmology and the Bronze Age land-
scape. Antiquity 80(308): 372–389.
Bradley, R. 2009. Image and audience: rethinking prehistoric art. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bradley, R. and Widholm, D. 2007. Bronze Age cosmology in the south-west Baltic: a
framework for research. In D. Widholm (ed.). Stone ships: the sea and the heavenly journey.
Lund: Lund University Press, pp. 13–48.
Breilin, O., Kotilainen, A., Nenonen, K. and Räsänen, M. 2005. The unique moraine morph-
ology, stratotypes and ongoing geological processes at the Kvarken Archipelago on the
land uplift area in the western coast of Finland. Geological Survey of Finland Special Paper
40: 97–111.
Brinch Petersen, E. and Meiklejohn, C. 2003. Three cremations and a funeral: aspects of
burial practice in Mesolithic Vedbæk. In H. Kindgren, L. Larsson and D. Loeffler (eds.).
Mesolithic on the move. Oxford: Left Coast Press, pp. 485–493.
Brink, S. 2001. Mythologizing landscape: place and space of cult and myth. In M. Stausberg
(ed.). Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Religionsgeschichte. Berlin: De Gryter, pp. 76–112.
Broadbent, N. 2010. Lapps and labyrinths: Saami prehistory, colonization and cultural resilience.
Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press.
Butrimas, A. (ed.). 2001. Baltic amber. Baltic amber in natural sciences, archaeology and applied arts.
Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts Press.
Cameron, E. 2008. Indigenous spectrality and the politics of postcolonial ghost stories.
Cultural Geographies 15(3): 383–393.
Capelle, T. 1986. Schiffsetzungen. Praehistorische Zeitschrift 61: 1–63
Carpelan, C. 1977. Älg-och björnhuvudföremål från Europas nordliga delar. Finskt Museum
85: 5–67.
Bibliography 179
Carpelan, C. 1999. Käännekohtia Suomen esihistoriassa aikavälillä 5100-1000 eKr. In P.

Fågelberg (ed.). Pohjan poluilla: suomalaisten juuret nykytutkimuksen mukaan. Helsinki:
Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, pp. 249–280.
Carsten, J. and S. Hugh- Jones (eds.). 1995. About the house: Levi- Strauss and beyond.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Castrén, M., 1954 [1802]. Luontoa ja taloutta kuvaava kertomus Kemin pitäjästä vuodelta 1802.
s.n.: Kemi.
Chauvet, J.-M., Brunel Deschamps, E. and Hillaire, C. 1996. Dawn of art: The Chauvet Cave.
P.G. Bahn (Foreword), J. Clottes (Epilogue). New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Chippindale, C. and Smith, B. and Taçon, P.S. 2000. Visions of Dynamic Power: Archaic
Rockpaintings, Altered States of Consciousness and ‘Clever Men’ in Western Arnhem
Land (NT), Australia. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10 (1): 63–101.
Clark, A. 1998. Being there: putting brain, body and world together again. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Clark, A. 2004. Clark’s Law. <https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11133> (Accessed
28.9.2018)
Clark,A. 2010. Supersizing the mind: embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Clark, S.R. 2009. Material matters: representation and materiality of the Harappan body.
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16(3): 231–261.
Cleve, N. 1955. Kemin Haminasaaren markkinapaikka. Jatuli 5: 3–17.
Cloke, P. and Jones, O. 2002. Tree cultures: the place of trees and trees in their place. Oxford: Berg.
Clottes, J. and Lewis-Williams, D. 1998. The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the
Painted Caves. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
Coles, J. 2005. Shadows of a northern past: rock carvings in Bohuslän and Østfold. Oxford:
Oxbow Books.
Conneller, C. 2010. An archaeology of materials: substantial transformations in early prehistoric
Europe. London: Routledge.
Costopoulos, A., Vaneeckhout, S., Okkonen, J., Hulse, E., Paberzyte, I. and C. Wren 2012.
Social Complexity in the Mid-Holocene Northeastern Bothnian Gulf. European Journal
of Archaeology 15(1): 41–60.
Cunliffe, B. 2017. On the ocean: the Mediterranean and the Atlantic from prehistory to AD 1500.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Curran, B.A. 2007. The Egyptian Renaissance: The afterlife of Ancient Egypt in early modern Italy.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Curran B.A., Grafton, A., Long, P. and Weiss, B. 2009. Obelisk: a history. Cambridge, MA: The
Burndy Library.
Dasen,V. 1993. Dwarfs in Ancient Egypt and Greece. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, P. 2005. Theidea of North. London: Reaktion Books.
Davies, P. and Robb, J.G. 2004. Scratches in the earth: the underworld as a yheme in British
prehistory, with particular reference to the Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age. Landscape
Research 29(2), 141–151.
Devlet, E. and Devlet, M. 2005. Mify v kamne: Mir naskalnogo iskusstvo Rossii. Aleteia:
Moscow.
Diffrient, D.S. 2006. For the love of film: cinephilia in Cicely and the cross-media inter-
textuality of Northern Exposure. Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of
Television Studies 1(2): 81–95.
Dillinger, J. 2011. Magical treasure hunting in Europe and North America: a history. Palgrave:
Basingtoke.
180 Bibliography
Dorson, R. 2008. Bloodstoppers and bearwalkers: folk traditions of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Edensor,T. 2005. The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in exces-
sive space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23: 829–849.
Edgren, T. 1992. Den förhistoriska tiden. In M. Norrback (ed.). Finlands historia 1, 11–270.
Helsingfors: Schildts.
Edlund, A.-C. 1989. Sjökatt och svarttjäder: studier över säljägares noaord för säl inom det bottniska
området och Östersjöområdet. Umeå: Center for Arctic Cultural Research.
Eichberg, H. 2009. Wandering, winding, wondering: moving in the labyrinth. Ido – Ruch
dla Kultury 9: 210–225.
Eilola, J. 2003. Rajapinnoilla: sallitun ja kielletyn määritteleminen 1600- luvun jälkipuoliskon
noituus ja taikuustapauksissa. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Elgström, O. and Manker, E. 1984. Björnfesten: en bildberettälse. Umeå: Norrbottens museum.
Ellis Davidson, H. 1964. Gods and myths of Northern Europe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Ellis Davidson, H. 2013. The road to Hel: A study of the conception of the dead in Old Norse lit-
erature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Enbuske, M. 2011. Tornionlaakson Käymäjärven riimukivi –tieteenhistorian fantasiaa.
In J. Ikäheimo, R. Nurmi and R. Satokangas (eds.). Harmaata näkyvissä: Kirsti Paavolan
juhlakirja. Oulu: Kirsti Paavolan juhlakirjatoimikunta, pp. 95–106.
Epes, H.E. 2008. Going native in Cicely, Alaska: American archetypes and hybridized identity
on Northern Exposure. In T. Fahy (ed.), Considering David Chase: Essays on The Rockford
Files, Northern Exposure and the Sopranos. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 95–106.
Erä-Esko, A. 1958. Die Elchskopfskultur vom Lehtojärvi in Rovaniemi. Suomen Museo
65: 8–18.
Eriksson, G. 2002. Rudbeck 1630–1702: Liv, lärdom, dröm i barockens sverige. Stockholm: Atlantis.
Europaeus-Äyräpää,A. 1930. Die relative Chronologie der steinzeitliche Keramik in Finnland
I & II. Acta Archaeologica 1: 165–190, 205–220.
Evans, J. 2003. Environmental archaeology and the social order. London: Routledge.
Evans, C. and Rydén, G. 2007. Baltic iron in the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century.
Leiden: Brill.
Falck-Ytter, H., Alexander, R. and Lovgren, T. 1999. Aurora: the northern lights in mythology,
history and science. Hudson, NY: Bell Pond Books.
Fellman, J. 1980 [1906]. Poimintoja muistiinpanoista Lapissa. Helsinki: Werner Söderström.
Fernandez, K. and J. Lastovicka. 2011. Making magic: fetishes in contemporary consumption.
Journal of Consumer Research 38(2): 278–299.
Fors, H. 2015. The limits of matter: chemistry, mining and enlightenment. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Forsberg, L. 1999. The Bronze Age site at Mårtenfäboda in Nysätra and the settlement con-
text of the cairns on the coast of North Sweden. In M. Huurre (ed.). Dig it all: papers
dedicated to Ari Siiriäinen. Helsinki: Finnish Antiquarian Society, pp. 251–285.
Foster, F. 1997. Fear of three dimensionality: clay and plasticine as experimental bodies. In
K. Killick and J. Schaverien (eds.) Art, psychotherapy and psychosis. London: Routledge,
pp.  52–72.
Franzén, P. 2009. Kevyttä ja kaunista –Yli-Iin meripihkalöydöt. In J. Ikäheimo and S.
Lipponen (eds.). Ei kiveäkään kääntämättä: juhlakirja Pentti Koivuselle. Tornio: Oulun
Yliopisto, pp. 151–159.
Frazer, J. 1993 [1922(1890)]. The golden bough: a study in magic and religion. Ware: Wordsworth.
Fredriksen P.D. 2011. When knowledges meet: engagements with clay and soil in southern
Africa. Journal of Social Archaeology 11(3): 283–310.
Bibliography 181
Friedman, R.M. 2012. Introduction: the Aurora in history. Acta Borealia 29(2): 115–118.

Fuller, D.Q., Willcox, G. and Allaby, R.G. 2011. Cultivation and domestication had multiple
origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the
Near East. World Archaeology 43(4): 628–652.
Ganander, C. 1984 [1789]. Mythologia Fennica. (Facsimile edition). Helsinki: Duodecim.
Gansum, T. and Oestigaard, T. 2004. The ritual stratigraphy of monuments that matter.
European Journal of Archaeology 7(1): 61–79.
Gell. A. 1995. The language of the forest: landscape and phonological iconism in Umeda.
In E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds.). The anthropology of landscape: perspectives on place and
space. Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 232–258.
Gell, A. 1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford: Clarendon.
German, K. 2009. Early hunter-gatherer ceramics in Karelia. In P. Jordan and M. Zvelebil
(eds.). Ceramics before farming: the dispersal of pottery among prehistoric Eurasian hunter-
gatherers. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 255–280.
Gerritsen, F. 2008. Domestic times: houses and temporalities in late prehistoric Europe. In A.
Jones (ed.). Prehistoric Europe: theory and practice. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 143–161.
Gheorghiu, D. 2008. The emergence of pottery. In A. Jones (ed.). Prehistoric Europe: theory and
practice. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 164–192.
Giles, M. 2007. Making metal and forging relations: ironworking in the British Iron Age.
Oxford Journal of Archaeology 26(4): 395–413.
Gillis, J. 2003. Taking history offshore: Atlantic islands in European minds, 1400–1800. In
R. Edmond and V. Smith (eds.). Islands in history and representation. London: Routledge,
pp.  19–31.
Gilman, P. 1987. Architecture as artefact: pit structures and pueblos in the American
Southwest. American Antiquity 52(3): 538–564.
Gimbutas, M. 1985. East Baltic amber in the fourth and third millennia B.C. Journal of Baltic
Studies 16(3): 231–256.
Gjerde, J.M. 2006. The location of rock pictures is an interpretive element. In R. Barndon,
S.M. Innselset, K.K. Kristoffersen and T.K. Lødøen (eds.). Samfunn, symboler og identitet –
Festskrift til Gro Mandt på 70-årsdagen. Bergen: University of Bergen, pp. 197–209.
Gjerde, J.M. 2010. Rock art and landscapes: studies of Stone Age Rock art from northern Fennoscandia.
PhD dissertation. Tromsø: Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology,
University of Tromsø.
Gjessing, G. 1944. Circumpolar Stone Age. Acta Arctica II: 19–70.
Glucklich, A. 1997. The end of magic. New York: Oxford University Press.
Godwin, J. 2002. The pagan dream of the Renaissance. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes.
Goldhahn, J. 2002. Roaring rocks: an audio-visual perspective on hunter-gatherer engravings
in northern Sweden and Scandinavia. Norwegian Archaeological Review 35(1): 29–61.
Goldhahn, J. 2008. From monuments in landscape to landscapes in monuments: monuments,
death and landscape in Early Bronze Age Scandinavia. In A. Jones, (ed.). Prehistoric
Europe: theory and practice. New York: Blackwell, pp. 56–85.
Goldhahn, J. 2010. Emplacement and the hau of rock art. In J. Goldhahn, I. Fuglestvedt and
A. Jones (eds.). Changing pictures: rock art traditions and visions in the northernmost Europe.
Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 106–126.
Goldhahn, J. 2013. Bredarör på Kivik –en arkeologisk odyssé. Kalmar: Artes Liberales AB.
Goldhahn, J. 2016. Sagaholm: north European Bronze Age rock art and burial ritual.
Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Goodison, L. 2010. Holy trees and other ecological surprises. Manchester: Just Press.
Goodrick-Clarke, N. 2008. The Western esoteric traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
182 Bibliography
Gosden, C. 1994. Social being and time. Oxford: Blackwell.

Gothus, Olaus Magnus 1973 [1555], Pohjoisten kansojen historia: Suomea koskevat kuvaukset
(transl. K. Hirvonen, comm. K. Vilkuna). Helsinki: Otava.
Götlind, A. 2005. Gruvnäringen. In J. Christensson (ed.). Signums svenska kulturhistoria,
Renässansen. Lund: Bokförlaget Signum, pp. 261–299.
Greenwood, S. 2009. The anthropology of magic. Oxford: Berg.
Grøn, O. and Skaarup, J. 1991. Møllegabet II: a submerged Mesolithic site and a boat burial
from Ærø. Journal of Danish Archaeology 10: 38–50.
Grönhagen, J. 1994. Ristiinan Astuvansalmi, muinainen kulttipaikkako? Suomen Museo
101: 5–18.
Guenat, S. 1994. Puulajien perusolemuksista kansanperinteessä. Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja
73: 120–133.
Gurina, N. 1956. Oleneostrovskij mogilnik. Materialy i issledovanija po archeologiji SSSR 47.
Moskva-Leningrad: Nauka.
Haaland, R. 2004. Technology, transformation and symbolism: ethnographic perspectives on
European iron working. Norwegian Archaeological Review 37(1): 1–19
Haavio, M. 1935. Kalevalan selityskokeita. Virittäjä 1935: 25–32.
Haavio, M. 1942. Suomalaiset kodinhaltiat. Helsinki: Werner Söderström.
Haavio, M. 1950. Sielulintu: eräiden motiivien selvittelyä. Kalevalaseuran vuosikirja 30:13–45.
Haavio, M. 1952. Väinämöinen: eternal sage. Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia.
Haavio, M. 1967. Suomalainen mytologia. Porvoo and Helsinki: WSOY.
Haavio, M. 1992. Esseitä kansanrunoudesta. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Haggrén, G., Halinen, P., Lavento, M., Raninen, S. and Wessman, A. 2015. Muinaisuutemme
jäljet. Suomen esi-ja varhaishistoria kivikaudelta keskiajalle. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.
Häkkinen, K. 1996. Suomalaisten esihistoria kielitieteen valossa. Helsinki: Suomalaisen
Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Halén, H. and Tukkinen, T. 1984. Elämän ja kuoleman kello: Sigurd Wettenhovi-Aspan elämä ja
teot. Helsinki: Otava.
Hallgren, F. 2012. A permeable border –long-distance contacts between hunters and farmers
in the early Neolithic of Scandinavia. In C. Damm and J. Saarikivi (eds.). Networks, inter-
action and emerging identities in Fennoscandia and beyond. Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen
seura, pp. 139–154.
Hallowell, A.I. 1926. Bear ceremonialism in the northern hemisphere. American Anthropologist
28(1): 1–175.
Hallowell, A.I. 1960. Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view. In S. Diamond (ed.). Culture
in history: essays in honor of Paul Radin. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hallström, G. 1960. Monumental art of northern Sweden from the Stone Age. Stockholm: Almqvist
& Wiksell.
Hand, W.D. 1942. California miners’ folklore: below ground. California Folklore Quarterly
1(2): 127–153.
Hanna, S.P. 1996. It is Roslyn or is it Cicely? Representation and the ambiguity of place.
Urban Geography 17(7): 633–649.
Harjumaa, P. 2008. Aaveriekkoja: lappilaisia mystisiä tarinoita ja kummituksia (4th edition).
Rovaniemi: Lapland University Press.
Harrison, R. 2013. Heritage: critical approaches. Abingdon: Routledge.
Hartz S, Kostyleva E, Piezonka H, Terberger T, Tsydenova N, Zhilin MG. 2012. Hunter-
gatherer pottery and charred residue dating: new results on early ceramics in the north
Eurasian forest zone. Radiocarbon 54 (3–4):1033–1048.
Harvey, G. 2005. Animism: respecting the living world. London: Hurst.
Bibliography 183
Harviainen,T., S. Heininen and A. Huhtala 1990. Opi nyt vanha ja nuori. Mikael Agricola tänään.
Helsinki: Otava.
Hastorf, C.A. 1998. The cultural life of early domestic plant use. Antiquity 72(278): 773–782.
Heckscher, E.F. 1954. An economic history of Sweden. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University  Press.
Heikkurinen, T. 1980. Itäkarjalaiset tasa-ja kourutaltat. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopiston
arkeologian laitos.
Helms, M.W. 1988. Ulysses' sail: an ethnographic odyssey of power, knowledge, and geographical
distance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Helskog, K. 1987. Selective depictions: a study of 3700 years of rock carvings and their
relationship to the Saami drums. In I. Hodder (ed.). Archaeology as long term history.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 17–30.
Helskog, K. 1999. The shore connection: cognitive landscape and communication with rock
carvings in northernmost Europe. Norwegian Archaeological Review 32(2): 73–94.
Helskog, K. 2004. Landscapes in rock-art: rock carving and ritual in the old European North.
In C. Chippindale and G. Nash (eds.). The figured landscapes of rock-art: looking at pictures in
place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 265–288.
Helskog, K. 2012. Bears and meanings among hunter- fisher-
gatherers in northern
Fennoscandia 9000–2500 BC. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 22(2): 209–236.
Helskog, K. 2014. Communicating with the World of Beings: The World Heritage Rock Art Sites in
Alta, Arctic Norway. Oxford and Philadelphia: Oxbow Books.
Herva, V.-P. 2009. Living (with) things: relational ontology and material culture in early
modern northern Finland. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19(3): 388–397.
Herva, V.-P. 2010a. Maps and magic in Renaissance Europe. Journal of Material Culture
15(3): 323–343.
Herva,V.-P. 2010b. Buildings as persons: relationality and the life of buildings in a northern
periphery of early modern Sweden. Antiquity 84(324): 440–452.
Herva, V.-P. and Ikäheimo, J. 2002. Defusing dualism: mind, materiality and prehistoric art.
Norwegian Archaeological Review 35(2): 95–108.
Herva, V.-P., Ikäheimo, J. Enbuske, M. and Okkonen, J. 2018. Alternative pasts and colo-
nial engagements in the North: the materiality and meanings of the Pajala ‘runestone’
(Vinsavaara stone), northern Sweden. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28(4): 613–628.
Herva,V.-P. and Lahelma, A. 2017. Esihistoria on tässä. Helsinki: Museovirasto.
Herva,V.-P., Mökkönen, T. and Nordqvist, K. 2017. A northern Neolithic? Clay work, culti-
vation and cultural transformations in the boreal zone of north-eastern Europe, c. 5300–
3000 BC. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 36(1), 25–41.
Herva, V.-P. and Nordin, J.M. 2013. Classicism and knowing the world in early modern
Sweden. In C. Watts (ed.). Relational archaeologies: people, animals, things. Abingdon and
New York: Routledge, pp. 209–227.
Herva, V.-P. and Nordin, J.M. 2015. Unearthing Atlantis and performing the past: ancient
things, alternative histories and the present past in the Baroque world. Journal of Social
Archaeology 15(1): 116–135.
Herva,V.-P., Nordqvist, K., Lahelma, A. and Ikäheimo, J. 2014. Cultivation of perception and
the emergence of the Neolithic world. Norwegian Archaeological Review 47(2): 141–160.
Herva,V.-P. and Salmi, A.-K. 2010. Engaging with sea and seals: environmental and human-
animal relations on the northern coast of the early modern Gulf of Bothnia. Norwegian
Archaeological Review 43(2): 115–127.
Herva, V.-P. and Ylimaunu, T. 2009. Folk beliefs, ritual deposits, and engagement with the
environment in early modern northern Finland. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
28(2): 234–243.
184 Bibliography
Herva,V.-P., Nurmi, R. and Symonds, J. 2012. Engaging with money in a northern periphery
of early modern Europe. Journal of Social Archaeology 12(3): 287–309.
Herva,V.-P. and Ylimaunu, T. 2014. Coastal cosmologies: long-term perspectives on the per-
ception and understanding of dynamic coastal landscapes in the northern Baltic Sea
region. Time and Mind 7(2): 183–202.
Heyerdahl, T. and Lillieström, P. 2001. Jakten på Odin: på sporet av vår fortid. Oslo: J.M.
Stenersens forlag.
Hoggard, B. 2004. The archaeology of counter-witchcraft and popular magic. In O. Davies
and W. de Blécourt (eds.). Beyond the witch trials: witchcraft and magic in enlightenment Europe.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 167–186.
Hole, C. 1967. Superstitions and beliefs of the sea. Folklore 78(3): 184–189.
Holloway, J. and Kneale, J. 2008. Locating haunting: a ghost- hunter’s guide. Cultural
Geographies 15(3): 297–312.
Holm, I. 2002. A cultural landscape beyond the infield/outfield categories: an example from
eastern Norway. Norwegian Archaeological Review 35(2): 67–80.
Holm, I. 2005. The forest Finns of Norway and Sweden and their use and conception of
the landscape. In I. Holm, S. Inselset and I. Öye (eds.), ‘Utmark’: The outfield as industry
and ideology in the Iron Age and Middle Ages. Bergen: University of Bergen, pp. 171–179.
Holmblad, P. 2010. Coastal communities on the move house and polity interaction in southern
Ostrobothnia 1500 BC – AD 1. Umeå: University of Umeå.
Hörnberg, G., Josefsson,T. and Liedgren, L. 2014. Revealing the cultivation history of north-
ernmost Sweden: Evidence from pollen records. The Holocene 24(3): 318–326.
Houlbrook, C. 2013. Ritual, recycling and recontextualization: putting the concealed shoe
into context. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 23(1): 99–112.
Houlbrook, C. 2017. The other shoe: fragmentation in the post-medieval home. Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 27(2): 261–274.
Hughes-Brock, H. 1985. Amber and the Mycenaeans. Journal of Baltic Studies 16(3): 257–267.
Hukantaival, S. 2016. For a witch cannot cross such a threshold! Building concealment traditions in
Finland c. 1200–1950. Turku: Suomen keskiajan arkeologian seura.
Huurre, M. 1998. Kivikauden Suomi. Helsinki: Otava.
Hyötyniemi,Y. 1978. Omaa rahaa Tornionlaaksossa: Könkään ruukin poletit ja setelit 1658–
1686. Faravid 2: 184–210.
Ilomäki, H. 2014. Loitsun mahti. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura.
Immonen, V. 2002. Functional ladles or ceremonial cutlery? A cultural biography of prehis-
toric wooden spoons from Finland. Acta Borealia 19(1): 27–48.
Ingold, T. 1993. The temporality of the Landscape. World Archaeology 25(2): 152–174.
Ingold, T. 1999. Reply to Bird-David 1999. Current Anthropology 40(S1): 81–82.
Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment: essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill.
London: Routledge.
Ingold, T. 2006. Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought. Ethnos 71(1): 9–20.
Ingold, T. 2007. Lines: a brief history. London: Routledge.
Ingold,T. 2011. Being Alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge.
Ingold, T. 2013. Making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. London: Routledge.
Ingold, T. and Kurttila, T. 2000. Perceiving the environment in Finnish Lapland. Body and
Society 6(3–4): 183–196.
Itkonen, T.I. 1946. Heidnische Religion und späterer Aberglaube bei den finnischen Lappen.
Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen  seura.
Itkonen, T.I. 1962. Kuivi, ein heiliger Ort der Lappen. In Commentationes Fenno-Ugricae in
Honorem Paavo Ravila. Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen seura, pp. 127–138.
Bibliography 185
Jaanits L., Laul, S., Lõugas V. and Tõnisson E., 1982. Eesti esiajalugu. Tallinn: Eesti NSV
Teaduste Akadeemia Ajaloo Instituut.
Jacobson, E. 1993. The deer-goddess of ancient Siberia: a study in the ecology of belief. Leiden: Brill.
Janik L. 2002. Wandering weed: the journey of buckwheat (Fagopyrum sp.) as an indicator
of human movement in Eurasia. In K. Boyle, C. Renfrew and M. Levine (eds.). Ancient
Interactions: East and West in Eurasia. Cambridge: McDonald Institute of Archaeology, pp.
299–308.
Janik, L., Roughley, C. and Szczesna, K. 2007. Skiing on the rocks: the experiential art of
fisher-gatherer-hunters in prehistoric northern Russia. Cambridge Archaeological Journal
17(3): 297–310.
Jauhiainen, M. 1999. Suomalaiset uskomustarinat: tyypit ja motiivit. Helsinki: Finnish Literature
Society.
Jennbert. K. 2003. Animal graves: dog, horse and bear. Current Swedish Archaeology
11: 139–152.
Johanson, K. 2009. The changing meaning of ‘thunderbolts’. Folklore 42: 129–174.
Jones, O. 2011. Materiality and identity –forests, trees and senses of belonging. In E. Ritter
and D. Dauksta (eds.). New Perspectives on People and Forests. New York: Springer, pp.
159–177.
Jones, O. and Cloke, P. 2002. Tree cultures: the place of trees and trees in their place. Oxford: Berg.
Jordan, P. and Zvelebil, M. 2009 (eds.). Ceramics before farming: the dispersal of pottery among pre-
historic Eurasian hunter-gatherers. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Julku, K. 1986. Kvenland – Kainuunmaa. Oulu: Pohjoinen.
Kankaanpää, J. 2002. The house pits at Kauvonkangas, Tervola. In H. Ranta (ed.). Huts and
Houses: Stone Age and Early Metal Age Buildings in Finland. Helsinki: National Board of
Antiquities, pp. 65–77.
Karlsson, T., 2009. Götisk kabbala och runisk alkemi: Johannes Bureus och den götiska esoterismen.
PhD Thesis, University of Stockholm, Stockholm.
Kashina, E. 2009. Ceramic anthropomorphic sculptures of the East European forest zone. In
P. Jordan and M. Zvelebil (eds.), Ceramics before farming: the dispersal of pottery among prehis-
toric Eurasian hunter-gatherers. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 281–297.
Kashina, E. and Zhulnikov, E. 2011. Rods with elk heads: symbols in ritual context. Estonian
Journal of Archaeology 15(1): 18–31.
Katiskoski, K. 2002. The semisubterranean dwelling at the Kärmelahti site in Puumala, Savo
province, Eastern Finland. In Ranta, H. (ed.). Huts and houses: Stone Age and Early Metal
Age buildings in Finland. Helsinki: Finnish National Board of Antiquities, pp. 171–200.
Kaul, F. 1998. Ships on bronzes: a study in Bronze Age religion and iconography. Copenhagen:
National Museum of Denmark.
Kaul, F. 2004. Bronzealderens religion: Studier af den nordiske bronzealders ikonografi. København:
Det kongelige nordiske oldskriftsselskab.
Kern, H. 2000. Through the labyrinth: designs and meanings over 5000 years. Munich: Prestel.
Kesäläinen, K. and Kejonen, A. 2017. Suomen luonnon pyhät paikat. Helsinki: Salakirjat.
Kesäläinen, K., Kejonen, A., Kielosto, S. and Salonen, V.- P. 2015. Suomen luolat.
Helsinki: Salakirjat.
Keskisarja, T. 2006. “Secoituxesta järjettömäin luondocappalden canssa”: perversiot, oikeuselämä ja
kansankulttuuri 1700-luvun Suomessa. PhD dissertation, University of Helsinki, Helsinki.
Kettu, K. and Seppälä, M. 2016. In the land of the Finndians. Helsinki: WSOY.
King, D. 2005. Finding Atlantis: A true story of genius, madness, and an extraordinary quest for a lost
world. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Kivikäs, P. 2003. Ruotsin pyyntikulttuurin kalliokuvat suomalaisin silmin. Jyväskylä: Kopijyvä.
186 Bibliography
Kivikoski, E. 1967. Ancient Peoples and Places: Finland. London: Thames & Hudson.
Klinge, M. 1983. Muinaisuutemme merivallat: kuvitettu historiallinen luonnos. Helsinki: Otava.
Knappett. C. and Malafouris, L. (eds.). 2008. Material agency: towards a non-anthropocentric
approach. New York: Springer.
Koivunen, P. 2002. Kierikkisaari Island in Yli-Ii –a Stone Age Pile Settlement? In H. Ranta,
H. (ed.) Huts and Houses. Stone Age and Early Metal Age Buildings in Finland, pp. 123–
128. Helsinki: National Board of Antiquities.
Kolpakov, E.M. and Shumkin,V.Ya. 2012. Petroglify Kanozera. St Petersburg: Iskusstvo Rossii.
Korhonen, S. 1990. Kultaisen pukin etsijöistä tehtiin rikosilmoitus –totuuden kaivajat
rouhivat Kajaanin linnan pihalle kuopan. Iltalehti 12.10.1990.
Korhonen, T. 2009. Rakennuspaikan valinta ja valtaus sekä kodin turvaaminen. In H.-M.
Pellinen (ed.). Maasta, kivestä ja hengestä: Markus Hiekkanen Festschrift. Turku: University
of Turku, pp. 262–271.
Korpela, J. 2011. In deep, distant forests. In M. Lamberg, M. Hakanen, J. Haikari (eds.). Physical
and cultural space in pre-industrial Europe: methodological approaches to spatiality. Lund: Nordic
Academic Press, pp. 95–123.
Kovalainen, R. and Seppo, S. 2006. Tree people (English translation by Roderick Fletcher).
Helsinki: Miellotar.
Kraft, J. 1985. The goddess in the labyrinth. Åbo: Åbo Akademi.
Kriiska A. 2009. The beginning of farming in the Eastern Baltic. In P.M. Dolukhanov,
G.R. Sarson and A. Shukorov (eds.), The East European Plain on the eve of agriculture.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 159–179.
Kriiska, A., Lõugas, L., Lõhmus, M., Mannermaa, K. and Johanson, K. 2007. New AMS dates
from Estonian Stone Age burial sites. Estonian Journal of Archaeology 11(2): 83–121.
Kristiansen, K. 2010. Rock art and religion: the sun journey in Indo-European myth-
ology and Bronze Age rock art. In Å. Fredell, K. Kristiansen and F. Criado Boado (eds.).
Representations and communications: creating an archaeological matrix of late prehistoric rock art.
Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 93–115.
Kristiansen, K. and Larsson, T.B. 2005. The rise of Bronze Age society: travels, transmissions and
transformations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kulikova, A. S. 2014. Izobrazheniya lodok severnoi Evrazii. Vestnik Kemerovskogo
Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta 58(2): 58–69.
Kunz, G.F. 1971 [1913]. The curious lore of precious stones. New York: Dover.
Kuperjanov, A. 2002. Names in Estonian folk astronomy: from ‘Bird’s Way’ to ‘Milky Way.
Folklore 22: 49–61.
Kuusela, J.-M. 2013. Political economy and Iron Age societies in the eastern coast of the Bothnian Bay
ca. 1500 BC – AD 1300. Oulu: University of Oulu.
Kuusela, J.-M. 2018. Food and tension: feasting as means to alleviate social tension in the
fourteenth–fifteenth century trading places of the Bothnian Bay region. World Archaeology
50(2): 323–326.
Kuusela, J.-M., Nurmi, R. and Hakamäki,V. 2016. Co-existence and colonisation: re-assessing
the settlement history of the pre-Christian Bothnian Bay coast. Norwegian Archaeological
Review 49(2): 177–203.
Kuusela, J.-M., Nurmi, R. and Hakamäki, V. 2018. Unhierarchical and hierarchical core-
periphery relations: North Fennoscandian trade network from the Middle Ages to the
post-sixteenth century. American Anthropologist 120(4): 765–780.
Kuusi, M. 1963. Suomen kirjallisuus I: kirjoittamaton kirjallisuus. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Kuusi, M., Bosley, K. and Branch, M. (eds. and transl.) 1977. Finnish folk poetry: epic.
Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Bibliography 187
Kuzmin Ya.V. 2015: The origins of pottery in East Asia: updated analysis (the 2015 state-of-
the-art). Documenta Praehistorica XLII,  1–11.
Laaksonen, P. and Timonen, S. 1997. Sodomia ja suomalainen kansankulttuuri: kymmenen
lähtökohtaa. ELEKTROLORISTI 1/ 1997 [http://www.elore.fi/arkisto/1_97/lati197
.html]. Joensuu: Suomen Kansantietouden Tutkijain Seura ry.
Lahelma, A. 2005. Between the worlds: rock art, landscape and shamanism in Subneolithic
Finland. Norwegian Archaeological Review 38(1): 29–47.
Lahelma,A. 2007.‘On the back of a blue elk’: recent ethnohistorical sources and ‘ambiguous’ Stone
Age rock art at Pyhänpää, Central Finland. Norwegian Archaeological Review 40(2): 113–137.
Lahelma, A. 2008. A touch of red: archaeological and ethnographic approaches to interpreting Finnish
Rock paintings. Helsinki: The Finnish Antiquarian Society.
Lahelma, A. 2010. Hearing and touching rock art: Finnish rock paintings and the non-visual.
In J. Goldhahn, I. Fuglestvedt and A. Jones (eds.). Changing pictures: rock art traditions and
visions in northernmost Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 48–59.
Lahelma, A. 2012a. Strange swans and odd ducks: interpreting the ambiguous waterfowl
imagery of Lake Onega. In A. Cochrane and A. Jones (eds.). Visualising the Neolithic: abstrac-
tion, figuration, performance, representation. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 15–33.
Lahelma, A. 2012b. Politics, ethnography and prehistory: in search of an ‘informed’ approach
to Finnish and Karelian rock art. In B. Smith, D. Morris and K. Helskog (eds.). Working
with rock art: recording, presenting and understanding rock art using indigenous knowledge.
Johannesburg: Wits University Press, pp. 113–134.
Lahelma, A. 2017. The circumpolar context of the ‘sun ship’ motif in South Scandinavian
rockart. In U. Bertilsson, J. Ling and P. Skoglund (eds.). Where North meets South –methods
and theory in interpreting rock art traditions. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 144–171.
Lähteenmäki, M. 2006. Terra Ultima: Matka Lapin historiaan. Helsinki: Otava.
Lappalainen, M. 2007. Maailman painavin raha. Helsinki: WSOY.
Larsson, L. 1988. Ett fångstsamhälle för 7000 år sedan. Boplatser och gravar i Skateholm.
Kristianstad: Signum.
Larsson, L. 1990. Dogs in fraction –symbols in action. In P.M.Vermeersch and P.Van Peer (eds.).
Contributions to the Mesolithic in Europe. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 153–160.
Larsson, L. 2011. Water and fire as transformation elements in ritual deposits of the
Scandinavian Neolithic. Documenta Praehistorica 38: 69–82.
Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Launonen, K. and Partanen S.J. 2002. A guide to the gold fields of Lapland. Sodankylä: Gold
Prospector Museum of Tankavaara.
Lavento, M. 2000. Textile ceramics in Finland and on the Karelian Isthmus. Helsinki: Finnish
Antiquarian Society.
Leem, K. 1767. Beskrivelse over Finnmarkens Lapper, deres Tungemaal, Levemaade og forrige
afgudsdyrkelse. København.
Lehikoinen, H. 2009. Ole siviä sikanen: suomalaiset eläinuskomukset. Helsinki: Teos.
Leinonen, M. 2000. Laulujoutsen, Suomen kansallislintu. Helsinki: WSOY.
Leppänen, S. 2016. “Sä oot oman ittes herra siellä”: etnografinen tutkimus nykypäivän kullankaivajista
Suomen Lapissa. MA thesis, University of Helsinki, Helsinki.
Levi-Strauss, C. 1962. Totemism. London: Merlin Press.
Lewis-Williams, J.D. and Dowson, T. 1988. The signs of all rimes: entoptic phenomena in
Upper Palaeolithic art. Current Anthropology 29(2): 201–245.
Lewis-Williams, J.D. 2000. The mind in the cave: consciousness and the origins of art. London:
Thames & Hudson.
188 Bibliography
Lewis-Williams, D. and Pearce, D. 2005. Inside the Neolithic mind: consciousness, cosmos and the
realm of the gods. London: Thames & Hudson.
Liliequist, J. 1992. Brott, synd och straff. Tidelagsbrottet i Sverige under 1600-och 1700-talet.
Umeå: Umeå universitet.
Lindow, J. 1982. Swedish legends of buried treasure. The Journal of American Folklore 95(377):
257–279.
Lindqvist, C. 1994. Fångstfolkets bilder: en studie av de nordfennoskandiska kustanknutna
jägarhällristningarna. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet.
Ling, J. 2014. Elevated rock art: towards a maritime understanding of rock art in northern Bohuslän,
Sweden. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Lødøen, T. 2012. Prehistoric explorations in rock: investigations beneath and beyond
engraved surfaces. In B. Smith, D. Morris and K. Helskog (eds.). Working with rock
art: presenting and understanding rock art using indigenous knowledge. Johannesburg: Wits
University Press, pp. 99–110.
Lødøen, T. 2015. Treatment of corpses, consumption of the soul and production of rock
art: approaching Late Mesolithic mortuary practices reflected in the rock art of Western
Norway. Fennoscandia Archaeologica 32: 79–99.
Losiak, A.,Wild, E.M., Geppert,W.D., Huber, M.S., Jõeleht, A., Kriiska, A., Kulkov, A., Paavel,
K., Pirkovic, I., Plado, J., Steier, P.,Välja, R., Wilk, J., Wisniowski, T. and Zanetti, M. 2016.
Dating a small impact crater: An age of Kaali crater (Estonia) based on charcoal emplaced
within proximal ejecta. Meteoritics and Planetary Science 51(4): 681–695.
Lucas, G. 2005. The archaeology of time. London: Routledge.
Luke, D. 2010. Rock art or Rorschach: is there more to entoptics than meets the eye? Time
and Mind 3(1): 9–28.
Magnus, Olaus 1998 [1555]. Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (edited by P. Foote).
London: Hakluyt Society.
Malinen, B. 2015. Pyhät puut Kansanrunousarkiston aineistossa 1909–1939. Unpublished MA
thesis. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä.
Mandelstam Balzer, M. 1996. Sacred genders in Siberia: shamans, bear festivals and androgyny.
In S.P. Remet (ed.), Gender Reversals and Gender Cultures: Anthropological and Historical
Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 164–182.
Mandt, G. and Lødøen, T. 2012. Vingen: et naturens kolossalmuseum for helleristninger.
Trondheim: Akademika.
Manker, E. 1957. Lapparnas heliga ställen. Stockholm: Nordiska Museet.
Mannermaa, K. 2003. Birds in Finnish prehistory. Fennoscandia Archaeologica 20: 3–39
Mannermaa, K. 2006. Bird remains in the human burials at Zvejnieki, Latvia: introduction
to bird finds and a proposal for interpretation. In L. Larsson and I. Zagorska (eds.), Back to
the origin: new research in the Mesolithic-Neolithic Zvejnieki cemetery and environment, Northern
Latvia. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, pp. 289–299.
Mannermaa, K. 2008. Birds and burials at Ajvide (Gotland, Sweden) and Zvejnieki (Latvia)
about 8000-3900 BP. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 27(2): 201–225.
Mannermaa, K. 2013. Powerful birds. The Eurasian jay (Garrulus glandarius) and the osprey
(Pandion haliaetus) in hunter-gatherer burials at Zvejnieki, northern Latvia and Yuzhniy
Oleniy Ostrov, northwestern Russia. Anthropozoologia 48(2):190–205.
Mannermaa, K. and Lõugas, L. 2005. Birds in the subsistence and cultures on four major
Baltic Sea Islands in the Neolithic (Hiiumaa, Saaremaa, Gotland and Åland). In G. Grupe
and J. Peters (eds.). Feathers, grit and symbolism: birds and humans in the ancient old and new
worlds. Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf, pp. 179–198.
Mariconda, S. 2007. The haunted house. In S.T. Joshi (ed.). Icons of horror and the supernatural:
an encyclopaedia of our worst nightmares,Vol. 1. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 267–305.
Bibliography 189
Markley Todd, J. 1985. Introduction. Journal of Baltic Studies 16(3): 185–190.

McCorristine, S. 2016. “Involuntarily we listen”: hearing the aurora borealis in nineteenth-
century Arctic exploration and science. Canadian Journal of History 48(1): 29–61.
McCullough, D.W. 2005. The unending mystery: a journey through labyrinths and mazes.
New York: Anchor Books.
Menefee, S.P. 1985. Circling as an entrance to the otherworld. Folklore 96(1): 3–20.
Meredith, D. 2002. Hazards in the bog –real and imagined. The Geographical Review
92(3): 319–332.
Meri, L. 1976. Hõbevalge: reisikiri tuulest ja muinasluulest. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat.
Merrifield, R. 1987. The archaeology of ritual and magic. London: Batsford.
Miettinen, T. 2000. Kymenlaakson kalliomaalaukset. Kotka: Painokotka.
Mihelich, J. and Gatzke, J. 2007. Spiritual quest and popular culture: reflexive spirituality in
the text of Northern Exposure. Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 15(1), pp. 4.
Mikkelsen, E. 1986. Religion and ecology: motifs and location of hunters’ rock carvings in
eastern Norway. In G. Steinsland (ed.). Words and objects: towards a dialogue between archae-
ology and the history of religion. Oslo: Norwegian University Press, pp. 127–141.
Møhl, U. 1978. Aggersund-bopladsen zoologiskt belyst: svanejagt som årsag til bosaettelse?
Kuml 1978: 57–75.
Mökkönen, T. 2010. Kivikautinen maanviljely Suomessa. Suomen Museo 2009: 5–38.
Mökkönen, T. 2011. Studies on Stone Age housepits in Fennoscandia (4000–2000 cal BC): changes
in ground plan, site location and degree of sedentism. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.
Mökkönen, T. 2013. Stone setting filled with red ochre from the Keelaharju site, northern-
most Baltic Sea region: a Stone Age grave in the context of European burial traditions.
Fennoscandia Archaeologica 30: 13–36.
Mökkönen, T. 2014. Archaeological radiocarbon dates as a population proxy: skeptical view.
Mökkönen, T. and Nordqvist, K. 2014. Vuoksen synty ja kulttuurikehitys. Muinaistutkija 4/
2014: 47–56.
Mökkönen, T., Nordqvist, K. and Herva,V.-P. 2017. Beneath the surface of the world: high-
quality quartzes, crystal cavities, and Neolithization in circumpolar Europe. Arctic
Anthropology 54(2): 94–110.
Mökkönen, T. and Nordqvist, K. 2018. Kierikki Ware and the contemporary Neolithic
asbestos-and organic-tempered potteries in north-east Europe. Fennoscandia Archaeologica
34: 83–107.
Montelius, O. 1910. The sun-god’s axe and Thor’s hammer. Folklore 21(1): 60–78.
Mrozowski, S. 1999. Colonization and the commodification of nature. International Journal of
Historical Archaeology 3(3): 153–166.
Muhonen,T. 2008. Something old, something new: excursions into Finnish sacrificial cairns.
Temenos 44(2): 293–346.
Muhonen, T. 2010. Kiviröykkiöt parannusperinteen näkökulmasta. In S. Knuuttila, U.
Piela and L. Tarkka (eds.). Kalevalamittaisen runon tulkintoja. Helsinki: Suomalaisen
Kirjallisuuden Seura, pp. 200–223.
Muhonen. T. 2013. A hard matter: stones in Finnish-Karelian folk belief. In A. Kannike and
P. Laviolette (eds.). Things in culture, culture in things. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, pp.
114–138.
Mulk, I.-M. and Bayliss-Smith, T., 2006. Rock art and Sami sacred geography in Badjelánnda,
Laponia, Sweden: sailing boats, anthropomorphs and reindeer. Umeå: University of Umeå.
Myllyniemi, S. 2013. Korpimuseo wildwood tales: on the trail of the magical traditions of Upper
Kainuu. Hyrynsalmi: The Municipality of Hyrynsalmi. Available online: http://www
.tarinakartasto.fi/fi
190 Bibliography
Nagel, A. and Wood, C.S. 2005. Toward a new model of renaissance anachronism. The Art
Bulletin 87(3): 403–415.
Nagel, A. and Wood, C.S. 2010. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books.
Napolskikh, V. 1992. Proto-Uralic world picture: a reconstruction. In M. Hoppál and J.
Pentikäinen (eds.). Northern religions and shamanism. Budapest: Akadémiai kiadó, pp. 3–20.
Naum, M. 2016. Between utopia and dystopia: colonial ambivalence and early modern per-
ception of Sápmi. Itinerario 40(3): 489–521.
Naum, M. 2017. The pursuit of metals and the ideology of improvement in early modern
Sápmi, Sweden. Journal of Social History 51(4): 784–807.
Naum, M. 2019. Enchantment of the underground: touring mines in early modern Sweden.
Journal of Tourism History 11(1): 1–21.
Neville, K. 2009. Gothicism and early modern historical ethnography. Journal of the History
of Ideas 70(2): 213–234.
Nilsson Stutz, L. 2013. The persistent presence of the dead: recent excavations at the hunter-
gatherer cemetery at Zvejnieki (Latvia). Antiquity 87 (338): 1016–1029.
Niskanen, M. 2007. Niilo Oravainen –“Lapin kuningas”. Tornionlaakson vuosikirja
2007: 128–132.
Noble, G. 2017. Woodland in the Neolithic of Northern Europe: the forest as ancestor. Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Nordin, J.M. 2013. The centre of the world: the material construction of Eurocentric dom-
ination and hybridity in a Scandinavian seventeenth-century context. Journal of Material
Culture 18(2): 189–209.
Nordin, J.M. 2015. Metals of metabolism: the construction of industrial space and the com-
modification of early modern Sápmi. In M.P. Leone and J.E. Knauf (eds.). Historical
archaeologies of capitalism (revised edition). New York: Springer, pp. 249–272.
Nordin, J.M. and Ojala, C.-G. 2017. Copper worlds: a historical archaeology of Abraham
and Jakob Momma-Reenstierna and their industrial enterprise in the Torne River Valley,
c. 1650–1680. Acta Borealia 34(2): 103–133.
Nordqvist, K. 2018. The Stone Age of north-Eastern Europe 5500–1800 calBC: bridging the gap
between the East and the West. Oulu: University of Oulu.
Nordqvist, K. and Herva, V.-P. 2013. Copper use, cultural change and Neolithization in
north-eastern Europe (c. 5500–1800 BC). European Journal of Archaeology 16(3): 401–432.
Nordqvist, K., Herva, V.-P. and Sandell, S. 2019. Water and cosmology in the Stone Age of
north-western Russia. Archaeology, Ethnology and Anthropology of Eurasia 47(1): 23–32.
Norsted, T. 2013. The cave paintings of Norway. Adoranten 2013: 5–24.
Núñez, M. 1990. On Subneolithic pottery and its adoption in late Mesolithic Finland.
Núñez, N. and Franzén, P. 2011. Implications of Baltic amber finds in northern Finland
4000–2000 BC. Archaeologia Lituana 12: 10–24.
Núñez, M. and Okkonen, J. 1999. Environmental background for the rise and fall of villages
and megastructures in North Ostrobothnia 4000–2000 cal. BC. In M. Huurre (ed.). Dig
it all: papers dedicated to Ari Siiriäinen. Helsinki: Archaeological Society of Finland, pp.
105–115.
Núñez, M. and Okkonen, J. 2005. Humanizing of north Ostrobothnian landscape during the
4th and 3rd millennia BC. Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science 15: 25–38.
Nurmi, R. 2011. Development of the urban mind: an object biographical approach, the case study of
the town of Tornio, northern Finland. Oulu: University of Oulu.
Nyland, A. 2017. Quarrying as a socio-political strategy at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition
in southern Norway. In T. Pereira, X. Terradas and N. Bicho (eds.). The exploitation of raw
Bibliography 191
materials in prehistory: sourcing, processing and distribution. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge

Scholars Publishing, pp. 30–45.
Østigård, T. and Goldhahn, J. 2008. Smith and death: cremations in furnaces in Bronze
and Iron Age Scandinavia. In C. Prescott, K. Chilidis and J. Lund (eds.). Facets of archae-
ology: essays in honour of Lotte Hedeager on her 60th birthday. Oslo: Oslo University, pp.
215–241
Oinas, F. 1985. Studies in Finnic folklore: homage to the Kalevala. Helsinki: Finnish Literature
Society.
Oinonen, M., Pesonen, P., Alenius, T., Heyd, V., Holmqvist-Saukkonen, E., Kivimäki, S.,
Nygrén, T., Sundell, T. and Onkamo, P. 2014. Event reconstruction through Bayesian
chronology: massive mid-Holocene lake-burst triggered large-scale ecological and cul-
tural change. The Holocene 24(11): 1419–1427.
Okkonen, J. 2003. Jättiläisen hautoja ja hirveitä kiviröykkiöitä: Pohjanmaan muinaisten
kivirakennelmien arkeologiaa. Oulu: University of Oulu.
Okkonen, J. 2007. Archaeological investigations at the Sámi sacrificial site of Ukonsaari in
Lake Inari. Fennoscandia archaeologica XXIV: 29–38.
Okladnikov, A.P. and Martynov, A.I. 1972. Sokrovishcha tomskikh pisanits: Naskalnye risunki
epokhi neolita i bronzy. Moskva: Izadel’testvo Iskusstvo.
Okladnikov, A.P. and Mazin, A.I. 1976. Pisanitsy reki Olekmy i Verkhnego Priamuria.
Nauka: Novosibirsk.
Olcott, M.D. 2013. Electron: Greek etymology and Baltic mythology. San Jose State University
Faculty Publications 2013: 1–17.
Olivier, L. 2011. The dark abyss of time: archaeology and memory. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.
Olsen, B. 1991. Material metaphors and historical practice: a structural analysis of stone
labyrinths in coastal Finnmark. Fennoscandia Archaeologica 8: 51–58.
Olsen, B. 2010. In defense of things: archaeology and the ontology of objects. Lanham,
MD: AltaMira Press.
Ovadiah, A. and Mucznik. S. 2017. Myth and reality in the battle between the pygmies and
the cranes in the Greek and Roman worlds. Gerión 35(1): 151–166.
Overton, N.J. and Hamilakis, Y. 2013. A manifesto for a social zooarchaeology: swans and
other beings in the Mesolithic. Archaeological Dialogues 20(2): 111–136.
Pälsi, S. 1920. Ein Steinzeitlicher Moorfund. Suomen Muinaismuistoyhdistyksen Aikakauskirja
28(2): 1–19.
Partanen, S.J. 1999. Sankareita, veijareita ja huijareita: Lapin kullankaivajien tarina. Helsinki: Edita.
Påsse, T. and Andersson, L. 2005. Shore-level displacement in Fennoscandia calculated from
empirical data. GFF 127(4): 253–268.
Pekkanen, T. 1983. The Hellusii and the Oxiones of Tac. Germ. 46,4. Arctos 17: 49–60.
Pekonen, O. 2005. Käymäjärven merkillinen kivi. Tieteessä tapahtuu 1/2005: 24–27.
Pentikäinen, J. 1995. Saamelaiset: pohjoisen kansan mytologia. Hämeenlinna: Karisto.
Pentikäinen, J. 2005. Karhun kannoilla –metsänpitäjä ja mies. Helsinki: Etnika.
Perlman, P. 1989. Acting the she-bear for Artemis. Arethusa 22(2): 111–133.
Pesonen, P. 1996. Rääkkylän joutsenet ja muita kampakeramiikan linnunkuvia. Kentältä
poimittua 3: 5–14.
Pesonen, P. and Leskinen, S. 2009. Pottery of the Stone Age hunter-gatherers in Finland. In P.
Jordan and M. Zvelebil (eds.). Ceramics before farming: the dispersal of pottery among prehistoric
Eurasian hunter-gatherers. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, pp. 299–318.
Piaget, J. 1928. The child’s conception of the world. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Pietiläinen, P. 1999. GIS-analyysi keskiaikaisen Etelä-Karjan jatulintarhoista. Muinaistutkija
4/1999: 2–17.
192 Bibliography
Pihlaja, P.M. 2012. Northern laboratories of nature and the quest for scientific honour in
early modern Sweden. Acta Borelia 29(2): 119–136.
Poikalainen, V. 2004. Synopsis of the Lake Onega rock art. In M. Otte, L. Oosterbeek, D.
Seglie and L. Remacle (eds.). Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic art. Oxford: Archaeopress,
pp. 135–150.
Poikalainen, V. 2006. The diffusion of swan and whale motifs in Karelian rock art. In A.
Gustafsson and H. Karlsson (eds.). Glyfer och arkeologiska rum: en vänbok till Jarl Nordbladh.
Göteborg: Goteborgs universitet, pp. 699–717.
Poska, A. and Saarse, L. 2006. New evidence of possible crop introduction to North Eastern
Europe during the Stone Age: cerealia pollen finds in connection with the Akali Neolithic
settlement, East Estonia. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 15: 169–179.
Poutiainen, H. and Lahelma, A. 2004. Uusia kalliomaalauksia Päijät-Hämeestä. Suomen Museo
110: 59–80.
Principe, M. (ed.). 2007. Chymists and chymistry: studies in the history of alchemy and early modern
chemistry. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications.
Pringle, H. 2006. The master plan: Himmler’s scholars and the holocaust. London: Fourth Estate.
Pulkkinen, R. 2014. Suomalainen kansanusko: samaaneista saunatonttuihin. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.
Puustjärvi, E. 2013. Hautausmaan symboliikka maisemasuunnittelun perustana: tapaustutkimus
Lahden Levon hautausmaalla. Unpublished MA thesis. Helsinki: University of Helsinki.
Ragazzi, E. 2016. Amber, a stone of sun for ancient medicines. Acta medico-historica Rigensia
10: 208–234.
Rainbird, P. 2007. The archaeology of islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rainio, R., Lahelma, A., Äikäs,T., Lassfolk, K. and Okkonen, J. 2018. Acoustic measurements
and digital image processing suggest a link between sound rituals and sacred sites in nor-
thern Finland. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 25(2): 453–474.
Rainio, R. and Mannermaa, K. 2014. Bird calls from a Middle Neolithic burial at Ajvide,
Gotland? Interpreting tubular bird bone artefacts by means of use-wear and sound ana-
lysis, and ethnographic analogy. In J. Ikäheimo, A.-K. Salmi and T. Äikäs (eds.). Sounds like
theory: XII nordic theoretical archaeology group meeting in Oulu. Helsinki: The Archaeological
Society of Finland, pp. 85–100.
Randsborg, R. 2008. Kings’ Jelling: Gorm & Thyra’s palace, Harald’s monument & grave –
Svend’s cathedral. Acta Archaeologica 79:1–28.
Ranta, H. (ed.). 2002. Huts and houses: Stone Age and Early Metal period buildings in Finland.
Helsinki: National Board of Antiquities.
Rapoport, A. 1969 House form and culture. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Ravdonikas, V. 1936. Naskalnye izobrazheniya Onezhskogo ozera i Belogo morya. Moskva:
Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk.
Reynolds, F. 2009. Regenerating substances: quartz as an animistic agent. Time and Mind
2(2): 153–166.
Riikonen, J. 2005. Iron Age aprons from southwest Finland: and other cloths and
pendants worn on the waist. In S. Mäntylä (ed.). Rituals and relations: studies on society
and material culture of the Baltic Finns. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and
Letters, pp. 31–72.
Rival, L. (ed.). 1998. The social life of trees: anthropological perspectives on tree symbolism. Oxford:
Berg.
Roggen, V. (ed.) 2014. Thor Heyerdahl’s search for Odin: ancient links between Azerbaijan and
Scandinavia? Oslo: Novus.
Roling, B. 2017. Introduction. In B. Roling, B. Schirg and S.H. Bauhaus (eds.). Apotheosis
of the North: The Swedish appropriation of classical antiquity around the Baltic Sea and beyond
(1650 to 1800). Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 1–16.
Bibliography 193
Rönnby, J. 2007. Maritime durées: long-term structures in a coastal landscape. Journal of

Maritime Archaeology 2: 65–82.
Rozwadowski, A. 2017. Travelling through the rock to the otherworld: the shamanic
‘grammar of mind’ within the rock art of Siberia. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27(3):
413–432.
Rundqvist, M. 1994. Skärvstenshögar med gravgömmor i östligaste Mälarområdet. Fornvännen
89: 83–89.
Ruohonen, J. 2005. Saariin ja metsiin haudatut: historiallisen ajan hautapaikkoja
Kangasniemellä. In M. Haimila and V. Immonen (eds.). Mustaa valkoisella: ystäväkirja
arkeologian lehtori Kristiina Korkeakoski-Väisäselle. Turku: Turun yliopisto, pp. 256–269.
Ruohonen,J.2010.Kuolleiden saaret.Historiallisen ajan keskisuomalaisten saarihautausmaiden
luonne ja käyttö hautapaikkoina. J@rgonia 8(17): 1–25.
Russell, N. and McGowan, K.J. 2003. Dance of the cranes: crane symbolism at Çatalhöyük
and beyond. Antiquity 77(297): 445–455.
Russell, W.M.S and Russell, C. 1991. English turf mazes, troy, and the labyrinth. Folklore
102(1): 77–88.
Rydving, H. 2010. The ‘bear ceremonial’ and bear rituals among the Khanty and the Sami.
Temenos 46(1): 31–52.
Saarinen, R. 2008. Kurkikuiskaaja. Helsingin Sanomat 19.10.2008.
Saipio, J. 2015. Bronze Age cairns in the Finnish Lake district: cultural contacts, creative
translations and local traditions. In P. Suchowska-Ducke, S. Scott Reiter and H.Vandkilde
(eds.). Forging identities: the mobility of culture in Bronze Age Europe. Oxford: Archaeopress,
pp. 123–131.
Salo, U. 1997. Ukko ukkosen jumala: muinaissuomalaisten ukkosenjumala ja hänen
suomalaisten ukkosenjumala indoeurooppalainen sukunsa. In K. Julku (ed.).
Itämerensuomi: eurooppalainen maa. Jyväskylä: Atena, pp. 121–233.
Säppi, L. and Oino, L. (eds.). 2010. Käspaikka – muistiliina. Helsinki: Maahenki.
Sarmela, M. 1991. Karhu ihmisen ympäristössä. In P. Laaksonen and S.-L. Mettomäki (eds.).
Kolme on kovaa Sanaa – kirjoituksia kansanperinteestä. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society,
pp. 209–250.
Sarmela, M. 1994. Suomen kansankulttuurin kartasto, 2: Suomen perinneatlas. Helsinki: Finnish
Literature Society.
Scarre, C. 2005 (ed.). The human past: world prehistory and the development of human societies.
London: Thames & Hudson.
Schanche, A. 2000. Graver i ur og berg: samisk gravskikk og religion fra forhistorisk til nyere tid.
Karasjok: Davvi Girji OS.
Schefferus, J. 1956 [1673]. Lappland. Uppsala: Gebers.
Schoenberger, E. 2011. Why is gold valuable? Nature, social power and the value of things.
Cultural Geographies 18(1): 3–24.
Seger, T. 1982. On the structure and emergence of Bronze Age society in coastal Finland: a
system approach. Suomen Museo 1981: 31–44.
Seitsonen, O., Nordqvist, K., Gerasimov, D.V. and Lisitsyn, S.N. 2012. “The good, the bad, the
weird”: Stone Age and Early Metal Period radiocarbon dates and chronology from the
Karelian Isthmus, North-West Russia. Geochronometria 39(2): 101–121.
Seitsonen, O., Nordqvist, K. and Gerasimov, D.V. 2016. Stone Age and Early Metal period
Archaeology and Settlement Patterns in Lake Pyhäjärvi Microregion, Karelian Isthmus,
Russia. In P. Uino and K. Nordqvist (eds.). New sites, new methods: Proceedings of the Finnish-
Russian archaeological symposium, Helsinki, 19–21 November 2014, pp. 116–142.
Sholt, M. and Gavron,T. 2006. Therapeutic qualities of clay-work in art therapy and psycho-
therapy: a review. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 23(2): 66–72.
194 Bibliography
Shumkin, V. 2000. The rock art, labyrinths, seids and beliefs of Eastern Lapland’s ancient
population. In A. Kare (ed.). Myanndash – rock art in the ancient Arctic. Rovaniemi: Arctic
Centre Foundation, 202–287.
Siikala, A.-L. 1978. Rite technique of the Siberian shaman. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science
and Letters.
Siikala, A.-L., 1992. Suomalainen šamanismi: mielikuvien historiaa. Helsinki: Finnish Literature
Society.
Siikala, A.-L. 2013. Itämerensuomalaisten mytologia. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.
Siiriäinen, A. 1967. Yli-Iin Kierikki: asbestikeraaminen asuinpaikka Pohjois-Pohjanmaalla.
Suomen Museo 74: 5–37.
Simmel, G. 1992 [1900]. The philosophy of money. London: Routledge.
Simola, H. 2001. Kallioon piirretyt kuvat: retki Äänisen kalliopiirrosten maailmaan.
Muinaistutkija 4/2001: 33–41.
Sipilä, J. and Lahelma, A. 2006. War as a paradigmatic phenomenon: endemic violence and
the Finnish Subneolithic. Journal of Conflict Archaeology 2: 189–209.
Skoglund, P. 2008. Stone ships: continuity and change in Scandinavian prehistory. World
Sognnes, K. 1982. Prehistoric cave paintings in Norway. Acta Archaeologica 53: 101–118.
Spangen, M. 2009. Silver hoards in Sámi areas. In P. Halinen, M. Lavento and M. Suhonen
(eds.). Recent perspectives on Sami archaeology in Fennoscandia and North- West Russia.
Helsinki: Finnish Antiquarian Society, pp. 94–106.
Spangen, M. 2016. Circling concepts: a critical archaeological analysis of the notion of stone circles
as sami offering sites. Stockholm: Stockholm University.
Stevanovic, M. 1997. The age of clay: the social dynamics of house destruction. Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology 16(4): 334–395.
Stolzenberg, D. 2013. Egyptian Oedipus: Athanasius Kircher and the secrets of antiquity. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Symonds, J., Ylimaunu, T., Salmi, A.- K., Nurmi, R., Kallio- Seppä, T., Kuokkanen, T.,
Kuorilehto, M. and Tranberg, A. 2015. Time, seasonality, and trade: Swedish/Finnish-
Sámi interactions in early modern Lapland. Historical Archaeology 49(3): 74–78.
Swann, J. 1996. Shoes concealed in buildings. Costume 30(1): 56–69.
Swann, J. 2005. Interpreting concealed shoes and associated finds. In I. Ericsson and R.
Atzbach (eds.). Depotfunde aus Gebäuden in Zentraleuropa –Concealed Finds from Buildings
in Central Europe. Berlin: Scrîpvaz-Verlag, pp. 115–119.
Taavitsainen, J.-P. 1978. Hällmålningarna –en ny synvinkel på Finlands förhistoria. Suomen
antropologi –Antropologi i Finland 4: 179–195.
Taavitsainen, J.-P. 1992. Cemeteries or refuse heaps? Suomen Museo 1991: 5–15.
Taavitsainen, J.-P. 2003. Lapp cairns as a source on Metal Period settlement in the inland
regions of Finland. Acta Borealia 20: 21–48.
Tarasov, A. and Gogolev, M. 2018. ICP-MS analysis of metatuff from the Middle Neolithic/
Eneolithic ‘green slate’ workshops in the Lake Onega area. Fennoscandia Archaeologica
34: 32–45.
Tarkka, L. 1994. Metsolan merkki: metsän olento ja kuva vienalaisrunostossa. In P. Laaksonen
and S.-L. Mettomäki (eds.). Metsä ja metsänviljaa. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden
seura, pp. 56–102.
Theuws, F. 2004. Exchange, religion, identity and central places in the early Middle Ages.
Archaeological Dialogues 10(2): 121–138.
Tilley, C. 1991. Material culture and text: the art of ambiguity. Oxford: Berg.
Tilley, C. 2008. Body and image: explorations in landscape phenomenology. Walnut Creek,
CA: Left Coast Press.
Bibliography 195
Timmons, A. and Macdonald, E. 2008: ‘Alchemy and magic’: the experience of using
clay for people with chronic illness and disability. British Journal of Occupational Therapy
71(3): 86–94.
Toivonen, Y.H. 1937. Pygmäen und Zugvögel: Alte kosmologische Vorstellungen. Finnisch-
Ugrische Forschungen 24 (1–3): 87–126.
Tolley, C. 1994. The shamanic séance in the Historia Norvegiae. Shaman: Journal of the
International Society for Shamanistic Research 2(2): 135–156.
Torvinen, M. 1979. Liedon Kukkarkosken kivikautinen kalmisto. Suomen Museo 1978: 37–80.
Trigger, B. 2006. A history of archaeological thought (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Troels-Smith, J. 1946. Stammebaade fra Aamosen. Fra Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark 1946:
15–23.
Tuovinen, T. 2002. The burial cairns and the landscape in the archipelago of Åboland, SW Finland,
in the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. Oulu: University of Oulu.
Turnbull, C. 1961. The forest people: a study of the pygmies of the Congo. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Turner, J.S. 2000. The extended organism: the physiology of animal-built structures. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press
Ukkonen, P. and Mannermaa, K. 2017. Jääkauden jälkeläiset: Suomen nisäkkäiden ja lintujen
historia. Helsinki: Museovirasto.
Utkin, A. 1989. Waterfowl representations on ceramics from Saktysh I and VIII. Fennoscandia
Archaeologica 6: 99–100.
Valkeapää, N.-A. 1988. Beaivi, áhčážan. Kautokeino: DAT.
van der Veen, M. 2014. The materiality of plants: plant– people entanglements. World
Vaneeckhout, S. 2008. Sedentism on the Finnish northwest coast: shoreline reduction and
reduced mobility. Fennoscandia Archaeologica 25: 61–72.
Vaneeckhout, S. 2010. House societies among coastal hunter-gatherers: case study of Stone
Age Ostrobothnia, Finland. Norwegian Archaeological Review 43(1): 12–25.
Varner, G.R. 2004. Menhirs, Dolmen, and circles of stone: the folklore and magic of sacred stone.
New York: Algora Publishing.
Vastokas, J.M. 2004. The Peterborough petroglyphs: Native or Norse? In C. Diaz-Granados
and J.R. Duncan (eds.). The rock art of eastern North America: capturing images and insight.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, pp. 277–289.
Vastokas, J.M. and Vastokas, R.K. 1973. Sacred art of the Algonkians. Peterborough: Mansard Press.
Vīķis-Freibergs,V. 1985. Amber in Latvian folk songs and folk beliefs. Journal of Baltic Studies
16(3): 320–40.
Viljamaa,T. 2017. “Hiidenkankaat”: muinaissuomalaisten kulttipaikat Algot Scarinin ja H. G.
Porthanin kirjoituksissa. AURAICA: Scripta a Societate Porthan edita 8: 49–58.
Vilkuna, J. 1992. Suomalaiset vainajien karsikot ja ristipuut: kansatieteellinen tapatutkimus.
Helsinki: Suomen muinaismuistoyhdistys.
Vilkuna, K.H.J. 1997. Menneisyyden ihmisen todellinen unimaailma: unet ja persoonallisuus
historiassa. In H. Roiko-Jokela (ed.). Huhut, unet, sodomiitit, moraalinvartijat, elämänkerrat,
puhuttelusanat ja ammattinimikkeet. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, pp. 9–54.
Vinci, F. 2017. The Baltic origins of Homers epic tales: The Iliad, the Odyssey and the migration of
myth. Rochester: Inner Traditions.
Vinokurova, I. 2005. Vepsäläisten mytologis-uskonnollisista käsityksistä. In L. Saressalo (ed.).
Vepsä –maa, kansa, kulttuuri. Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, pp. 136–151.
Vitenkova, I.F. 2002. Pamyatniki pozdnego neolita na territorii Karelii. Petrozavodsk: Karelyi
nauchnyi tsentr.
196 Bibliography
Viveiros de Castro, E. 1998. Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. Journal of the
Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3): 469–488.
Vuorela, I., Saarnisto, M., Lempiäinen, T. and Taavitsainen, J.-P. 2001. Stone Age to recent
land-use history at Pegrema, northern Lake Onega, Russian Karelia. Vegetation History and
Archaeobotany 10(3): 121–138.
Wallerström, T. 1995. Norrbotten, Sverige och medeltiden: problem kring makt och bosättning i en
europeisk periferi. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.
Watts, C. (ed.). 2013. Relational archaeologies: humans, animals, things. London: Routledge.
Wengrow, D. 1998: ‘The changing face of clay’: continuity and change in the transition from
village to urban life in the Near East. Antiquity 72(278): 783–795.
Wennerlind, C. 2003. Credit-money as the philosopher’s stone: alchemy and the money
problem in seventeenth- century England. History of Political Economy 35 (Annual
Supplement): 234–261.
Wessman, A. 2009. Levänluhta: a place of punishment, sacrifice or just a common cemetery.
Wessman, A. 2010. Death, Destruction and Commemoration: Tracing ritual activities in Finnish Late
Iron Age cemeteries (AD 550–1150). Helsinki: Finnish Antiquarian Society.
Westerdahl, C. 1995. Stone maze symbols and navigation: a hypothesis on the origin of coastal
stone mazes in the north. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 24(4): 267–277.
Westerdahl, C. 2002. The heart of hearths: some reflections on the significance of hearths in
nature, culture and in human memory. Current Swedish Archaeology 10: 179–198.
Westerdahl, C. 2005. Seal on land, elk at sea: notes on and applications of the ritual landscape
at the seaboard. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 34(1): 2–23.
Westerdahl, C. (ed.). 2010. A circumpolar reappraisal: the legacy of Gutorm Gjessing (1906–1979).
Oxford: Archaeopress.
Westerdahl, C. 2014. Spiritscapes of the north: traces of the fear of the drowned in mari-
time landscapes? In H. Alexandersson, A. Andreeff and A. Büntz (eds.). Med hjärta och
hjärna: en vänbok till professor Elisabeth Arwill-Nordbladh. Göteborg: Goteborgs universitet,
pp. 483–503.
Westerhoff, J.C. 2001. A world of signs: Baroque pansemioticism, the polyhistor and the
early modern Wunderkammer. Journal of the History of Ideas 62(4): 633–650.
Wettenhovi-Aspa, S. 1935 Fenno-ägyptischer Kulturursprung der alten Welt: Kommentare zu den
vorhistorischen Völkerwanderungen. Leipzig/Helsinki: Genius Verlag.
Wilcox, R.V. 1993. ‘In your dreams, Fleischman’: Dr. Flesh and the dream of the spirit in
‘Northern Exposure’. Studies in Popular Culture 15(2): 1–13.
Willerslev, R. 2007. Soul hunters: hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Williams, C. 2014. Light fantastic. New Scientist (May 2014): 40–43.
Wilson, E. and Stammler, F. 2016. Beyond extractivism and alternative cosmologies: Arctic
communities and extractive industries in uncertain times. The Extractive Industries and
Society 3(1): 1–8.
Witsen, N. 1692. Noord en Oost Tartarye. Amsterdam.
Wood, C.S. 2008. Forgery, replica, fiction: temporalities of German Renaissance art. Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ylimaunu, J. 2000. Itämeren hylkeenpyyntikulttuurit ja ihminen-hylje -suhde. Helsinki: Finnish
Literature Society.
Ylimaunu, T. 2007. Aittakylästä kaupungiksi: arkeologinen tutkimus Tornion kaupungistumisesta
18. vuosisadan loppuun mennessä. Rovamiemi: Pohjois-Suomen historiallinen yhdistys.
Bibliography 197
Zawadzka, D. 2015. Cultivating relations in the landscape: an analysis of rock art in the Temagami
region of northeastern Ontario. An unpublished PhD Thesis, Université du Québec à
Montréal, Canada.
Zelizer, V.A. 1989. The social meaning of money: ‘special monies’. The American Journal of
Sociology 95(2): 342–377.
Zhulnikov, A.M. 1999. Eneolit Karelii. Petrozavodsk: Rossiyskaya akademiya nauk.
Zhulnikov, A.M. 2006. Petroflify Karelii: obraz mira i miry obrazov. Petrozavodsk: Skandinaviya.
Zhulnikov, A.M. 2008. Exchange of amber in Northern Europe in the III millennium BC as
a factor of social interactions. Estonian Journal of Archaeology 12(1): 3–15.
Znamenski, A. 2003. Shamanism in Siberia: Russian records of indigenous spirituality. Boston:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Zvelebil, M. 1997. Hunter-gatherer ritual landscapes: spatial organisation, social structure
and ideology among hunter-gatherers of northern Europe and western Siberia. Analecta
Praehistorica Leidensia 29: 33–50.
Zvelebil, M. 2003. Enculturation of Mesolithic landscapes. In L. Larsson, H. Kindgren, K.
Knutsson, D. Loeffler, and Å. Åkerlund (eds.) Mesolithic on the move. Oxford: Oxbow
Books, pp. 65–73.
Zvelebil, M. and Jordan, P. 1999. Hunter fisher gatherer ritual landscapes: questions of time,
space and representation. In J. Goldhahn (ed.). Rock art as social representation. Oxford:
Archaeopress, pp. 101–127.
INDEX
Note: Page references in italics indicate figures.
amber 156–160, 160 shamanic travel in shape of animals

animals: animal ceremonialism 72–73, 111–113, 112, 143–144, 144; shamanic
80, 83; bears 80–84, 82, 84; burial of travel in shape of a fish (Sámi) 111–113,
dogs 72; depictions of sexual encounters 112; swans and 151–152
between humans and 73–75, 145; artefacts 14; concealed household artefacts
elk-headed boats 108–110, 109; 58–62, 61; of red and Onega green
elk-headed staffs 75–80, 78; human/ slate 32
animal interchangeability and 70–72, Arctic resources 25–26
71–72; seals and sealing 88; shamanic Atlantis 90–91, 91
travel in shape of animals 111–113, Aurora Borealis (northern lights) 169–170
112, 143–144, 144; shamanic travel in
shape of a fish (Sámi) 111–113, 112; Baltic Sea: birds and eggs as food and 142;
water-birds in Finno-Ugric mythology burial on islands and coastal landscapes
96, 97, 142–143, 145–148; see also of 102–104; cairns and 99, 99–102;
migratory birds connection between the Mediterranean
animistic–shamanistic worldview of and 89–90, 91, 92; impact of changing
North 10–11, 15; book structure of coastal landscapes and 93–96;
land, sky and water themes (traditional marketplaces and fairs and 135–37; stone
three-tiered northern shamanistic mazes and labyrinths and 104, 104–107;
understanding of world) and 20; see also sea and coastal landscapes
concealed household artefacts and bears 80–84, 82, 84
household spirits and 58–62, 61; birkarls, trader kingdom of 133–135
depictions of sexual encounter between boats and waterways: burial and gravesites
humans and animals and 73–75, 145; and 120–122, 122; discovery of elk-head
elk-headed staffs and 75–80, 78; human/ artefact in Lehtojärvi, Lapland 108;
animal interchangeability and 70–72, elk-headed boats 108–110, 109;
71–72; islands and 102–103; land, water shamanic travel in shape of a fish (Sámi)
and sky themes and 20–21; midnight 111–113, 112; underwater land of the
sun worship by Sámi peoples 155; rock dead folklore 111, 112; see also rivers and
formations and 27–28; seals and sealing river mouths; sea and coastal landscapes
and 88; shamanic trances 113–114; Bock, Ior 44
Index 199
Bolshoy Guri, B. 96, 153 water-birds in Finno-Ugric mythology

Bonge, Hermann Daniel 11–12 96, 97, 142–143, 145–153; see also
burial 167; of bears 83; boats and 120–122, Kalevala poetry
122; of dogs 72; engagement with fire 155; fire practices and cultural beliefs
underworld and spirits and 53–54; graves 167–170, 169; folklore and mythology
and gravesites spatial orientation in on origins of fire 163–166; Sámi
Fennoscandia 141; on islands and coastal marriages and fire rituals 165, 165
landscapes 102–104; swans and 144–145; fishing 110
see also graves and gravesites folklore and mythology: association of
the sun with the chariot and the ship
cairns, on northern coastal landscapes 161–162; Atlantis in Sweden 90–91, 91;
99, 99–102 burial and digging into ground and
clay figurines 54–57, 56 53–54; cranes and dwarves and pygmies
climate change, arctic resources and 25 in folklore 148–150, 149; depictions
Comb Ware pottery phenomenon 17, 32, of sexual encounters between humans
49, 49–53 and animals and 73–75; Finnish folklore
crater 90, 163–164, 164 surrounding houses and dwellings 58;
forests and 64–70; hearth and 166; islands
de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros 70–71 and 103; midnight sun mythology and
Denmark 16; hunting and use of swan worship (Sámi peoples) 155; in mining
feathers/bones and  144; relationship industry 38–45, 39, 45; origins of fire in
with the sea in 88; swans at burial site of 163–166; rivers and river mouths and
Vedbæk Bøgebakken burial site in 144 123–127, 130–133, 131; rock formations,
dwarves and pygmies 148–150, 149 stones and minerals 32–35, 34; swans
as symbol of North in Greek myth
elk-headed boats 108–110, 109 142, 142; underwater land of the dead
elk-headed staffs 75–80, 78 111, 112; väki (‘mana-like’ spiritual
power) of earth and soils in Finnish
fairs 136–137 56, 57–58; water-birds in Finno-Ugric
Fennoscandia (geographic region) 3–5, mythology 96, 97, 142–143, 145–148,
15–16, 131; brief outline of geological 145–153; see also spirituality and magic in
and historical past of 17–20; crystal Northern world
cavities of eastern 30–32, 31; fire forests: economic importance of 64; folklore
practices in 168–169, 169; graves and of 64–70; hunting and activities in 63;
gravesites spatial orientation in 141; Northern perceptions of and attitudes to
Hermann Daniel Bonge and 11–12; 63–65; see also animals
irrationality and utopian dimension to in
early period of mining industry 35–36; Gell, Alfred 11, 14
map of 4; marketplaces and fairs and geographic terminology 16
135–137; pit-houses of 48, 48–50; race ghosts and hauntings: concealed artefacts
for access to resources of 25; rock art and household spirits and 58–62, 61;
explosion in 26; water and water travel in non-linear time and 14–15
20–21, 88, 110 graves and gravesites: boats and 120–122,
Finland: bankruptcy of Talvivaara mine 122; orientation of in Fennoscandia 141;
in northern 40; economic import see also burial
of forests in 64; Finnish folklore Greek myths: sun’s association with North
surrounding houses and dwellings 58; and northerners in 92, 153, 156–159;
fire practices in 162–163, 168–169, see also folklore and mythology
169; geographic terminology and
definition of 16; giant’s churches hearth 155, 166; see also fire; sun
(mega-structures)  in  50; language of 16; Hedenäs-Kainuunkylä complex 135–136
relationship with maritime worlds in 88; Historia Norvegiae 111, 114
väki (‘mana-like’ spiritual power) of houses and dwellings in Northern world:
earth and soils in folklore of 57–58; on banks of river Tornio 135–136; clay
200 Index
figurines and 54–57, 56; on coast symbolism of 141, 143; swans as symbol

and shorelines 97–99; Comb Ware of North in Greek myth 142, 142;
pottery phenomenon and 49, 49–50; water-birds in Finno-Ugric mythology
concealed artefacts and household 96, 97, 142–143, 145–148, 145–153
spirits and 58–62, 61; cultural and mineral resources 25–26, 32, 64, 156–160,
environmental transformations via 160; see also rock formations, stones and
pottery and semi-subterranean houses minerals
(4000 BC) 49, 49–53; deliberate burning mining industry: bankruptcy of Talvivaara
of Neolithic 168; environmental mine in northern Finland 40;
perception, cosmological concepts irrationality and utopian dimension
and modes of engaging with the to in early period of 35–36; Lapland
world and 46–48, 135–136; Finnish gold rush 41–43; magic and folklore in
folklore surrounding 58; pit-houses of 38–45, 39, 45; modernizing and ordering
Fennoscandia and 48, 48–50 influence of 37–38
hunting 63, 70; animal ceremonialism mythology see folklore and mythology;
and 72–73; of birds and eggs 142; by Greek myths
boat 110; of seals 88; of swans 144
Nordic, as geographic term 16
Ingold, Tim 10, 95, 171 North 5; Arctic resources and historical
race to the North 25–26; connections
Kalevala poetry 19–20, 42, 103; geographies with Northern Exposure (TV show) and
of eastern Fennoscandia in 33, 44; Great 10–13; defining geographic boundaries
Oak and trees in 67, 70, 82; origin of of 15–17; Fennoscandia (geographic
fire in 163; river crossing to reach Land region) and 3–4, 4; irrationality and
of the Dead (Tuonela) and 111; rock utopian dimension to in early period
art and 27; see also Finland; folklore and of mining industry 35–36; Northern
mythology Exposure TV show and 1–3, 2, 5; sun’s
association with in Greek myth 153;
Lapland: discovery of elk-head artefact in see also animistic–shamanistic worldview
Lehtojärvi, Lapland 108; irrationality and of North; Fennoscandia (geographic
utopian dimension to in early period of region); houses and dwellings in
mining industry 35–36; Lapland gold Northern world; spirituality and magic
rushes and gold rush folklore 40–43, 41; in Northern world
mysterious runestone of Swedish Lapland Northern Exposure (TV show) 1–2, 2,
162, 163 3, 5–6; connections between people
Leem, Knud 113–115 and Northern environment and 10–13;
Linnaeus, Carl 35 spirituality and magic in Northern world
Lönnrot, Elias 132; see also Kalevala and 7–10, 12–13; theme of alternative
poetry pasts and utopias projected on the
North in 14
Magnus, Olaus 154–155, 165 northern lights (Aurora Borealis) 169–170
Malaparte, Curzio 7 Norway 16, 18; bear burials in 83; mazes
Mariconda, Steven 58 in 106; as part of Fennoscandia 3, 4;
marketplaces and trade 135–136, 136 quarries in 28, 29; relationship with the
mazes and labyrinths 104, 104–107 sea in 88, 109; rock formations and cave
Mediterranean: connection between the paintings in 26–27, 27, 75, 81, 115
Baltic Sea and 89–90, 91, 92
Meri, Lennart 163–164 Olaus Rudbeck the Elder (1603–1702)
migratory birds: avian art at Lake Onega in 12, 90–91, 91, 125–126, 162, 163,
Russian Karelia 96–97, 97–98, 144–145, 174–175
151–152, 152, 153; cranes and dwarves
and pygmies in folklore 148–150, 149; perspectivism 9, 74
human-bird relationship and interactions pottery: bird motifs in 148; clay
and 144–145; shamanic travel in shape figurines and 54–55, 56; cultural and
of 143–144, 144; as soul birds and guides environmental transformations via
to the otherworld 145–148; spiritual 49, 49–53
Index 201
quarries and quarrying 28–29, see also Baltic Sea; boats and waterways;
29, 30 rivers and river mouths
seals and sealing 88
relational thinking 3, 5–6; connections Sibelius, Jean 151
between people and the environment sleeping, folklore on 58
and 10–11; perspectivism and 9; Solovetsky monastery (Russia) 7, 7
relational Renaissance–Baroque view spirits see ghosts and hauntings
of and 11 spirituality and magic in Northern
rivers and river mouths 124; real and world: burial and digging into ground
mythical 123–127; river mouths and 53–54; clay figurines and 54–55, 56;
as liminal spaces and central places concealed artefacts and household
127–130, 135–137, 137; semi-mythical spirits and 58–62, 61; fire practices and
northern realms vs. historical realities 166–167; healing magic for wounds from
of 123–127, 130–133, 131, 135; see also fire in Finland 162–163; human/animal
boats and waterways; sea and coastal interchangeability and 70–72, 71–72;
landscapes migratory birds and 141, 143, 146, 147;
rock formations, stones and minerals in mining industry 38–40, 39; Northern
25–26; artefacts of red and Onega green Exposure (TV show) and 7–10, 12–13;
slate 32; avian art at Lake Onega in seals and sealing and 88; stone mazes
Russian Karelia 96–97, 97–98, 144–145, and labyrinths on coastlines and 104,
151–152, 152, 153; cairns on northern 106–107; väki (‘mana-like’ spiritual
coastal landscapes and 99, 99–102; crystal power) of earth and soils 56, 57–58;
cavities of eastern Fennoscandia 30–32, see also Finland; folklore and mythology
31; depictions of sexual encounter stone mazes and labyrinths 104, 104–107
between humans and animals 73–75; sun 163; amber and 159–160; association
folklore and 32–35, 34; giant’s churches with the chariot and the ship of
(mega-structures)  50; irrationality and 161–162; association with North
utopian dimension to in early period and northerners in Greek myth 153,
of mining industry 35–36; mysterious 156–159; midnight sun 154, 155;
runestone of Swedish Lapland 162, 163; midnight sun mythology and worship
quarrying and 28–29, 29, 30; quartz and (Sámi people) 155; solar symbols on rock
flint as containing fire and 167; rock art carvings 152–153, 160–161, 161
explosion 26–28, 27, 50; solar symbols on swans see migratory birds
rock carvings 152–153, 161, 161; stone Sweden: Atlantis and 90–91, 91; bear
mazes and labyrinths on Baltic coast 104, burials in 83; economic import of
104–107; see also mineral resources forests in 64; irrationality and utopian
dimension to in early period of mining
Salo, Unto 164–165 industry 35–36; modernizing and
Sámi: in Fennoscandia 4; hunting and ordering influence of mining industry
use of swan feathers/bones and 144; in 37–38; mysterious runestone of
midnight sun worship by 155; sacred Swedish Lapland 162, 163; relationship
site of Ukonsaari in Finnish Lapland 33; with maritime worlds in 88
Sámi marriages and fire rituals 165, 165;
shamanic travel in shape of a fish (Sámi) time and temporality 13; artefacts and 14;
111–113, 112 ghosts and hauntings and 14–15
Scandinavia, geographic terminology and Typical Comb Ware (TCW, Scandinavia)
definition of 16; see also Fennoscandia 17, 30–32, 49, 49–50, 58, 143; see also
(geographic region) clay figurines; pottery
sea and coastal landscapes 20–21, 87–88;
burial and 102–104; cairns and 99, väki (‘mana-like’ spiritual power), of earth
99–102; houses and dwellings near and soils 57–58; of fire 167
97–99; impact of changing coastal
landscapes and 92–96; marketplaces and water 20–21; see also boats and waterways;
fairs and 135–137; sea and water-birds rivers and river mouths; sea and coastal
in Finno-Ugric mythology 96, 97; stone landscapes
mazes and labyrinths on 104, 104–107; Willerslev, Rane 71, 74

Northern Webpdf

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Northern Webpdf

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Northern Webpdf

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What are some of the main topics discussed in the book?

What are some of the main topics discussed in the book?

How does the book examine the mythical and actual northern worlds?

How does the book examine the mythical and actual northern worlds?

NORTHERN ARCHAEOLOGY

Vesa-​Pekka Herva is a professor of archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland.

Antti Lahelma is a senior lecturer in archaeology at the University of Helsinki,

Vesa-​Pekka Herva and Antti Lahelma

3 Houses, land and soil 46

4 Forests and hunting 63

5 Coastal landscapes and the sea 87

6 Boats and waterways 108

7 River mouths and central places 123

Mythical kingdoms in later prehistory 130

8 Birds and cosmology 141

9 The sun, light and fire 154

Northern Exposure, the award-​winning American TV series created by Joshua Brand

The North and the world

FIGURE 1.2 Fennoscandia encompasses the modern states of Norway, Denmark,

in addition to shared geology and geography, is climatically, ecologically and to

Northern cultures have provided anthropological examples for discussions of

Relationality, spirituality and the richness of reality

Spirituality and magic in the northern world

Relationality and the northern world

In a northern Fennoscandian context, the same principle is demonstrated, for

Time, temporality and the longue durée

in relational terms. Although a linear and historicist understanding of time was

A brief outline of the Fennoscandian past

in archaeological or historical research –​the original poems must be used instead

The structure of the book

different regions and cultures of northern Europe. Furthermore, bodies of fresh

opportunities it promised to offer. Mineral resources became of a special focus of

The world inside the rock

FIGURE 2.1 Undulating bedrock at the rock carvings of Alta, northern Norway.

Underworld through ‘openings’ formed by cracks in the bedrock (Lahelma 2010).

as much as 400 m3 of stone has been extracted at each of them (Nyland 2017).

Crystal cavities and other marvels of the Underworld

FIGURE 2.3 The entrance to a quarried crystal chamber in Hitonharju, south-​eastern

Cavities and recent folklore in the North

significant among northern cultures also in later times, as demonstrated by histor-

FIGURE 2.4 A ‘Devil’s kettle’ (Finn. hiidenkirnu) at Sukulanrakka near Rovaniemi,

in which it illustrates how real topographies were tied to mythical descriptions of

Early modern northern mining as dreamwork

When I reached this mountain, I seemed to be entering on a new world; and

Disciplining and ordering of the North

FIGURE 2.5 A human and a mountain troll working in a mine. A vignette from

The enduring allure of minerals and the Underworld

One of the most curious recent manifestations of the enduring allure of

FIGURE 2.7 A view of the ‘Temple of Lemminkäinen’ near Helsinki in 2018. The

Dwellings, people and the cosmos in the North

The introduction of the house

FIGURE 3.1 A reconstruction of a large Neolithic pit-​house at the Kierikki Stone

Russia to north-​eastern continental Europe and northern Scandinavia (Vitenkova

Pottery, semi-​subterranean houses and cultural transformation

seen as a marginal backwater in the narratives of the Neolithization of Eurasia. The

Early pottery, cultivation and place making

Houses and the changing relationship with the underworld

Clay work as a means of restructuring human–​environment

FIGURE 3.3 Neolithic clay figurines of an elk (a), an anthropomorph (?) (b) and an

A house provides a sense of containment, of enclosure, warmth, protection

Vesa-Pekka Herva is a professor of archaeology at the University of Oulu, Finland.

Vesa-Pekka Herva and Antti Lahelma

Northern Exposure, the award-winning American TV series created by Joshua Brand

The North and the world

Spirituality and magic in the northern world

Relationality and the northern world

Time, temporality and the longue durée

A brief outline of the Fennoscandian past

in archaeological or historical research –the original poems must be used instead

The structure of the book

The world inside the rock

as much as 400 m3 of stone has been extracted at each of them (Nyland 2017).

FIGURE 2.3 The entrance to a quarried crystal chamber in Hitonharju, south-eastern

Cavities and recent folklore in the North

Disciplining and ordering of the North

Dwellings, people and the cosmos in the North

The introduction of the house

FIGURE 3.1 A reconstruction of a large Neolithic pit-house at the Kierikki Stone

Russia to north-eastern continental Europe and northern Scandinavia (Vitenkova

Pottery, semi-subterranean houses and cultural transformation

Early pottery, cultivation and place making

Clay work as a means of restructuring human–environment

as footsteps, knocking and music –or a vague sense of presence. Both seem to be

South in the Nordic world. Southern parts of Scandinavia –especially Denmark

Humans and animals in the North

Elk-headed staffs –symbols of Stone Age clans?

a capercaillie is lifting an elk-headed staff in a highly suggestive scene (Kolpakov

The Bear –the ‘Golden King of the Forest’

FIGURE 4.4 The ‘bear-pine’ (Finn. karhupetäjä) of Häkkilä at Saarijärvi, central

Living with the sea

Amazons in Scandinavia (Chapter 7), that Olaus Rudbeck the Elder (1630–1702)

FIGURE 5.2 A scenepossibly depicting the ancient Finno-Ugric creation myth at the

In other words, the millennia-long tradition of constructing and signifying cairns

A significant aspect of cairns is their long-term presence in northern landscapes

non-human spiritual power on the border of the different dimensions of reality,

Coastal mazes in the North

modern times, from the pre-classical Mediterranean world to medieval ecclesiastical

The mystery object from a Lapland bog

Elk-headed boats are a characteristic feature of northern European rock art,

FIGURE 6.1 A reconstruction of a skin-boat with an elk or deer effigy in the prow

and Kanozero –probably skin-boats resembling Inuit umiaks –could be punctured

Blue elks and flying boats

Solar boats in razors and rock art

Boats for the dead

The real and mythical rivers

River mouths as liminal spaces and central places

FIGURE 8.1 Apollo depicted as riding on a swan on a Greek red-figured krater (c.

Birds as guides and soul-birds

Worshipping the northern sun

FIGURE 9.2 A Bronze Age ‘sun-holder’ from Denmark (exact find location is

unreasonable (a Bronze Age ‘sun-holder’ found in Denmark likewise features an

The marriage of fire and earth

FIGURE 9.6 A Sámi marriage ceremony featuring the use of a strike-a-light. A

engaging with it in various contexts. Fire-related practices with a particular cultural

international workers movement –May Day as celebrated in Finland is a car-

Strange lights in the northern sky

A world full of life