Hunting pits are common archaeological features in northern landscapes, mainly researched from a morphological perspective, as dateable material is scarce. This has resulted in a limited and generalized understanding of hunting pits. While human land use in non-agrarian settings is often subtle, it can still be understood in terms of distribution and management by using relational approaches that address spatial organization and the nature of land use. This study, based on extensive field surveys and GIS analyses and guided by the concept of landscape domestication, has identified the characteristics of approximately 1500 previously unrecorded hunting pits in the Arctic region of Sweden. It examines how hunting pit systems, their selective spatial distribution, and strategic arrangement can be seen as expressions of landscape domestication. The author concludes that, through profound knowledge and deliberate resource management, communities invested in the landscape, generating dense spatial and temporal manifestations in the form of hunting pits. These systems reflect an elaborate hunting technique involving the whole landscape.

The European far north is an improbable location for a large prehistoric hunter-gatherer cemetery. Tainiaro, 80km south of the Arctic Circle, was first excavated four decades ago but the unpublished findings and their potential significance have evaded wider recognition. Despite the absence of skeletal evidence, dozens of fifth-millennium BC pits have been tentatively interpreted as burials. Here, the authors present the first analytical and comparative overview of the site. Many of the pits are consistent in form with those used for inhumation at contemporaneous sites suggesting that Tainiaro is one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries in northern Europe and raising questions about the cultural and subsistence practices of prehistoric societies in the subarctic.

Rare organic artefacts, including wooden figurines and fishnet fragments from the Stone Age (c. 6000–2000 BC) were found in 2020 and 2021 during excavations of a wetland site in Finland. The first results from analysing the artefacts, crafting methods and raw materials provide novel insights into artisanship, material know-how and visual culture of northern hunter-fisher-gatherers.

The role of ferrous metallurgy in ancient communities of the Circumpolar North is poorly understood due, in part, to the widespread assumption that iron technology was a late introduction, passively received by local populations. Analyses of two recently excavated sites in northernmost Sweden, however, show that iron technology already formed an integral part of the hunter-gatherer subsistence economy in Northern Fennoscandia during the Iron Age (c. 200–50 BC). Such developed knowledge of steel production and complex smithing techniques finds parallels in contemporaneous continental Europe and Western Eurasia. The evidence presented raises broader questions concerning the presence of intricate metallurgical processes in societies considered less complex or highly mobile.

Figurines made of wood, bone, amber, clay and lithics are occasionally discovered in prehistoric contexts in Fennoscandia, but the discovery, in 2020, of a unique wooden snake figurine during the excavations of a Neolithic wetland site in Finland broadens our understanding of the worldview of northern peoples 4400 years ago.

Synchronized demographic and behavioral patterns among distinct populations is a well-known, natural phenomenon. Intriguingly, similar patterns of synchrony occur among prehistoric human populations. However, the drivers of synchronous human ecodynamics are not well understood. Addressing this issue, we review the role of environmental variability in causing human demographic and adaptive responses. As a case study, we explore human ecodynamics of coastal hunter-gatherers in Holocene northern Europe, comparing population, economic, and environmental dynamics in two separate areas (northern Norway and western Finland). Population trends are reconstructed using temporal frequency distributions of radiocarbon-dated and shoreline-dated archaeological sites. These are correlated to regional environmental proxies and proxies for maritime resource use. The results demonstrate remarkably synchronous patterns across population trajectories, marine resource exploitation, settlement pattern, and technological responses. Crucially, the population dynamics strongly correspond to significant environmental changes. We evaluate competing hypotheses and suggest that the synchrony stems from similar responses to shared environmental variability. We take this to be a prehistoric human example of the “Moran effect,” positing similar responses of geographically distinct populations to shared environmental drivers. The results imply that intensified economies and social interaction networks have limited impact on long-term hunter-gatherer population trajectories beyond what is already proscribed by environmental drivers.

Archaeological evidence for ritual animal offerings is key to understanding the formation and evolution of indigenous Sámi identity in Northern Fennoscandia from the Iron Age to the seventeenth century AD. An examination of such evidence can illuminate how major changes, such as the shift from hunting to reindeer pastoralism, colonialism by emerging state powers and Christianisation, were mediated by the Sámi at the local level. To explore the chronology of, and local variations in, Sámi animal-offering tradition, we provide a synthesis of archaeozoological data and radiocarbon dates from 17 offering sites across Norway, Sweden and Finland. Analysis reveals new patterns in the history of Sámi religious ritual and the expression of Sámi identity.

The diminutive species Micarea capitata is described from north-western Sweden. It has been found at two localities in boreal forests where it grew on the bryophyte Hylocomium splendens. Micarea capitata is distinguished by small (0·10–0·35 mm diam.) black apothecia, (0–)1-septate ascospores and a mottled, darkly pigmented hypothecium.

Between 1271 and 1246 Ma, dolerite dykes and sills of the Central Scandinavian Dolerite Group intruded into the Fennoscandian Shield during three distinct magmatic pulses. They are distributed around five large magmatic complexes extending from Sweden to western Finland and record large-scale intracratonic tensional stress. Coeval plutonism is observed in the westernmost terrane of the Sveconorwegian orogen in southern Norway, but differs in the sense of a bimodal character and uncertain Fennoscandian ancestry of the host terrane. We report a U–Pb baddeleyite age of 1269 ± 12 Ma for a gabbronoritic member of an E-trending set of dykes, called the Moslätt Dolerites, near Lake Vättern in southern Sweden, much farther to the south than any previously known Central Scandinavian Dolerite Group rock. A similar age of approximately 1275 Ma is obtained for a meta-dolerite sheet in the Børgefjell basement window in the Scandinavian Caledonides in Mid-Norway. The initial epsilon-Hf values for these two dykes are +3.9 and +10.1, respectively, and correspond to the range of values for other occurrences of the Central Scandinavian Dolerite Group (+4.7 to +10.3). They add to the evidence that the Central Scandinavian Dolerite Group is characterized by more positive epsilon values (depleted source) than other mafic Proterozoic suites in Fennoscandia. These results extend the distribution of c. 1270–1245 Ma mafic magmatism in Fennoscandia, particularly when accounting for significant Caledonian shortening. The Central Scandinavian Dolerite Group and coeval bimodal magmatism in S Norway may represent distal magmatic events related to a Mesoproterozoic subduction along the western margin of Fennoscandia rather than hotspot (mantle plume) activity as previously suggested.

Twelve 40Ar–39Ar biotite and four hornblende age determinations have been carried out to constrain the cooling history of the Proterozoic bedrock near Oskarshamn, SE Sweden, an area identified as a possible site for long-term nuclear waste storage. The bedrock hosts c. 1.80 Ga granites and diorites of the Transscandinavian Igneous Belt and two 1.45–1.44 Ga granite intrusions, the Götemar and Uthammar plutons. Biotite was selected from three surface samples, representing both the older rocks and the younger granites, and from three cored boreholes at nine different depth levels. Hornblende was extracted from samples at the top and bottom of one borehole and at two sub-surface levels of another borehole. Three age groups were distinguished: ≥1.62 Ga, 1.51–1.47 Ga and 1.43–1.42 Ga. In the first group, two hornblende analyses yielded ages of 1799±4 Ma and 1773±13 Ma, which indicate initial fast cooling after emplacement of 1.80 Ga rocks of the Transscandinavian Igneous Belt. Two biotite ages of 1618±7 Ma and 1621±3 Ma are interpreted to date final cooling, through 300 °C, after the youngest suite (1.68–1.67 Ga) of the Transscandinavian Igneous Belt in south-central Sweden. Seven biotite ages, in the range 1.51–1.47 Ga, are enigmatic to interpret but largely coincide in age with the end of widespread rapakivi magmatism in Fennoscandia and the initiation of the Danopolonian event. The 1.43–1.42 Ga biotite and hornblende ages reflect cooling after thermal heating from the 1.45–1.44 Ga Götemar and Uthammar plutons. Later events thermally affected the bedrock in the Oskarshamn area as indicated by a poorly defined biotite age of 928±6 Ma and other disturbed 40Ar–39Ar ages of samples bordering a complex deformation zone.

The parasite diversity of Norwegian lemmings Lemmus lemmus was studied in northern Fennoscandia during a moderate population peak in 1997–98. Our aim was to study the parasites of lemmings in their normal mountainous habitats in anticipation of the next great lemming migration in northern Fennoscandia into the coniferous taiga. The blood parasites (Hepatozoon, Trypanosoma and Bartonella) found, Frenkelia sp., which invades the brain tissue of the host, and the pulmonary fungus Chrysosporium (Emmonsia) sp., have been detected previously in the Norwegian lemming, but an unknown fungus, and oocysts of Eimeria spp. have not been reported from L. lemmus before. The Norwegian lemming was found to have an exceptionally species-poor helminth fauna. Only one species of cestode (Andrya sp.) occurring in lemmings at the adult stage was found, and the cestodes of carnivores that commonly parasitize voles at the larval stage were totally absent. The distribution and abundance of vectors, and sympatric definitive hosts of parasites are predicted to have a major role in determining the parasites that lemmings will encounter during their mass movements in new habitats. However, it is predicted that parasitism by adult and larval helminths is not markedly affected by the habitat change associated with the mass migration.