As suggested by the title, this short, wide-ranging book frames the human past in northern Fennoscandia in relational terms from the earliest hunter-gatherers through the early modern period. Vesa-Pekka Herva and Antti Lahelma seek to dissolve subject-object and material-spiritual dichotomies in offering new perspectives on material culture, representational imagery, and landscape (p. 171). The book is organized thematically using a tripartite model of the world (p. 20), with sections dealing with “land” (stone, ores, soil, and trees), “water” (islands, mazes, bogs, rivers, and watercraft), and “sky” (birds, sun, fire, and northern lights). The materialism underlying this organizational structure is intuitively satisfying, although some readers may be frustrated by the brief, anecdotal treatment of individual topics.
Geographically, the book deals with northern Norway and Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia—areas dominated by boreal forest and tundra and geologically distinct from southern Sweden and Denmark. The authors make use of ethnographic analogy (p. 4) to interpret “deep prehistory,” referencing historical documents, Finno-Ugric folklore, the Kalevala, and ethnographic research among the Sámi. The approach is thematic, rather than chronological or culture-historical, exploring the Fennoscandian past through a relational lens—that is, “how the northern animistic and shamanistic ways of being . . . have been generated and reproduced over millennia” (p. 15). Although archaeological engagement with relationality pervades every aspect of this book, Herva and Lahelma handle such complex issues as spirituality, perspectivism, and epistemology with a clear, light authorial touch.
“Stone-Worlds,” one of the three chapters on “land,” deals with the explosion of rock art in the region between 5500 and 5000 BC. The authors highlight the use of surface fissures and concavities to enhance the imagery, noting the importance of caves as entrances to other worlds. They link these complex associations among rock and otherworldly beings to quarrying, suggesting that acquiring lithic raw material was a potentially dangerous metaphysical endeavor (p. 28). They also highlight the apparent contradiction between mining as a process of economic modernization and its association with other-than-human entities, hauntings, and hidden treasure.
Pithouse construction, cultivation, pottery making, and burial are linked as place-making activities in Chapter 3. Engagement with the soil signals new semisedentary lifeways and perhaps an increased concern with an underworld. Working with clay therefore takes on cosmological significance: the construction of figurines is interpreted as a means of “working out” relationships with other humans, soils, and the land (pp. 56–57). In sum, this chapter conveys a sense of the world as dynamic and “inspirited,” full of places and things operating in unseen networks, like the objects concealed in building foundations (pp. 59–60).
In a chapter devoted to boreal forests and hunting, Herva and Lahelma advocate for a northern archaeology that better addresses the consequences of living with and within forested landscapes (p. 63). They highlight traditional dichotomies between forested Finland and farming regions of Scania and Denmark, and they note how these characterizations have played out in nationalist rhetoric. They also argue for “closer attention to the materiality and behaviour of trees” (p. 67) in relations with northern inhabitants. Far more than symbolic resources, trees could be sentient agents, their lives analogous to the lives of human households. Much of the chapter on forests is devoted to animals, including elk (North American moose) and bears, both of which feature prominently in representational art.
Chapter 5, about the sea, is informed by shifting shorelines and glacial rebound—dynamic landscapes where humans and the places they occupy are in a constant state of becoming. Chapters on birds (Chapter 8) and the sun, light, and fire (Chapter 9) discuss parallels between northern cosmology and Greco-Roman myth. The authors suggest that these “points of contact” with the Mediterranean show how far northern networks extended (pp. 173–174). Although this may be true, the book is strongest and most persuasive when examples and interpretations are grounded in the Fennoscandian landscape rather than drawn from southern sources.
Nevertheless, many of the observations in this book shed light on analogous perceptions and practices elsewhere. For example, the human relations with trees described in Chapter 4 bear striking similarities to Tlingit reciprocity with spruce in Southeast Alaska, and the treatment of wood as inspirited is a practice shared by peoples of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta on the eastern edge of the Bering Sea. Overall, Herva and Lahelma succeed in conveying their sense that the Fennoscandian past was as dynamic and fluid as it was ontologically distinct from twenty-first-century Euro-American constructions of the world. Their readable book vividly conveys the experience of a relational lifeway in which individual trees may be known as persons, seams of ore hold danger and mystery, and cairns are loci of ancestral memory and spiritual power.
Although the book does have photographs showing sites and artifacts, many of the topics discussed would have benefited from additional illustration. It also lacks maps showing site locations, challenging readers unfamiliar with Fennoscandia.
Scholars studying rock art and landscape in any world region will find Northern Archaeology and Cosmology's relational perspective and examples of interest. This book would be an excellent addition to advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on Arctic or northern European archaeology. The e-book is currently open access, so instructors may easily integrate the thematic chapters into their courses.
