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
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
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"This book is packed full of
detail presented in a readable way, whilst simultaneously
highlighting the various areas of research that require further
study. It is not only crucial reading for those interested in
Fennoscandia, but also important for archaeologists, ethnographers
and folklorists of Europe and the Arctic, across all chronological
periods."Tina Paphitis, Time & Mind: The Journal of Archaeology,
Consciousness and Culture
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