Northern Archaeology and Cosmology

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.

Herva and Lahelma take us on a magical tour through the north; along the way, we meet rock crystals, forest bears, clay figurines, sunken boats and migratory birds among a host of other beings. This is no textbook on the prehistory of Fennoscandia, rather an account of how specific relational ontologies in the far north of Europe are manifest in the material world during the 11,000 years of human settlement in the area. Drawing on archaeology, folklore, history and ethnography the authors let us see this history through a perspective that ‘takes animism seriously’, approaching this world through three cosmological realms of land, sea and sky. It is a highly original approach and one that deals with a region that is paradoxically both marginal and yet central to our understandings of the European past and present. If we have never been modern, this is emphatically true of the far north as this book makes clear, where the divisions between rationality and spirituality, humans and nature have never made sense. Not 11,000 years ago and not now.Gavin Lucas, University of Iceland, IcelandThis is a deeply original work from two noted experts on the complex spiritualities of the North, bringing their long experience of Finnish anthropology to a wider audience and in a broader geographical context. With its innovative focus on land, sea and sky, issues of environmental interaction take centre stage, but always set against the relational Northern thought-worlds of humans and animals. Here we meet blue elks and spirit fish, the Devil’s swans, and the marriage of fire and earth, alongside a host of others in what the authors rightly call ‘a world full of life’. The extensive subject matter is always rigorously controlled, the case studies sensitive and well chosen, and all combined in a thrilling combination of landscape, metaphysics, communication and subsistence that presents a genuinely new perspective on the ecology of the Northern peoples. This is must for anyone interested in Northern anthropologies, circumpolar belief and shamanism, and arctic archaeologies.Neil Price, Uppsala University, Sweden

• Chapter 1: Introduction: Northern Exposure; PART I: LAND; Chapter 2: Stone-worlds; Chapter 3: Houses, Land and Soil; Chapter 4: Forests and Hunting; PART II: SEA; Chapter 5: Coastal landscapes and the sea; Chapter 6: Boats and waterways; Chapter 7: River mouths and central places; PART III: SKY; Chapter 8: Birds and cosmology; Chapter 9: The sun, light and fire; Chapter 10: Epilogue