Introduction

For well over ten thousand years, the Baltic Sea region has been a lively contact zone for diverse languages and cultures. Following the Last Glacial Maxim, the first human beings arrived on the eastern and western shores of the Baltic Sea from different parts of Europe (Carpelan and Parpola 2001: 78). From that time onwards, peoples of different cultures have met and influenced each others’ language and poetics, technologies and material cultures, social organisation and subsistence strategies, mythology and religion, and so forth (see e.g. Salo 2000; Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001; Bertell 2003; Ahola and Frog 2014). The patterns of influence range from borrowings and hybridisation to amplifying contrast and othering – influences that reflect histories of power relations, competing valorisations, cultural ideologies, and social dynamics between the groups concerned. This history of contacts also unites the region: the cultures identified with Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic subfamilies of Indo-European and Sámi and Finnic subfamilies of the Uralic languages (also called Finno-Ugric) have evolved features that link them to one another while setting them apart from other Indo-European and Uralic groups. The filtering in of significant outside influences, for example from the Roman Empire (see e.g. DuBois 1999; Fischer 2005), as well as impacts from otherwise extinct cultures and languages, such as speakers of so-called Palaeo-European languages that were neither Indo-European nor Uralic, have also fed into this process across the millennia. The Circum-Baltic arena thus presents a rich laboratory within which the dynamics of historical processes can be explored, producing knowledge about specific events, cultures, and identities, but simultaneously providing a historical space in which researchers can test and develop methods and theories with wider applicability.