Risto Nurmi

Borderlands as spaces: Creating third spaces and fractured landscapes in medieval Northern Finland:

Cultural anthropologists and historians have successfully adopted a borderlands perspective to investigate interaction, power, and identity between emerging or expanding state societies. This article develops an archaeological approach to such interstitial landscapes. It conceptualizes borderlands as spaces where people engage the material world under very specific geopolitical circumstances and create very specific materialities and subjectivities in the process. Political, social, and ideological dynamics between state societies produce two kinds of cultural spaces: hybrid “third spaces” and “fractured landscapes.” Although seemingly contradictory, these often emerge side by side in the same physical space. We illustrate this process by exploring the expansion of the Catholic Church and the Swedish kingdom to the Northern Ostrobothnian coast in northern Finland during the Middle Ages (ca. 1300–1600). During this era, church buildings and cemeteries became sites where locals, ecclesial officials, and state agents negotiated their relations through complex material and spatial practices.

Co-existence and Colonisation: Re-assessing the Settlement History of the Pre-Christian Bothnian Bay Coast

This article re-interprets the historical colonisation of the Bothnian Bay coastlands between approximately the 13th and 15th centuries AD. It is argued that this colonisation was a complex process because the archaeological evidence in the coastal area demonstrates a strong continuity of local customs far into the historical period, indicating a strong influence of local societies. With local cemeteries and other archaeological sites showing a strong local identity throughout the period while at the same time showing signs of consistent contacts and interaction with other regions, this article argues that the colonisation process was one of cooperation and negotiation and not conquest or the dislodgement of local communities by the colonists.

Time, Seasonality, and Trade: Swedish/Finnish-Sámi Interactions in Early Modern Lapland

Recent theoretical debates have identified time as a key area for research by historical archaeologists. In this paper we present evidence from Tornio, in northern Finland, and suggest that the early-17th-century colonists who founded this town developed a multidimensional conception of time that varied according to context and allowed deeply held folk beliefs to coexist alongside Lutheran doctrines and also facilitated seasonal trade with the indigenous Sami people in the upper reaches of Lapland.

Street mirrors, surveillance, and urban communities in early modern Finland

This article discusses street mirrors or ‘gossip mirrors’, in terms of urban social relations and surveillance. Street mirrors were introduced to coastal towns in Sweden and Finland in the 18th and early 19th centuries and may still be found in well-preserved towns with historic wooden centres. The authors argue that the introduction of monitoring and spying devices, such as street mirrors, occurred in the 18th century due to increased urban populations and feelings of insecurity caused by greater regional and transnational mobility. Mirrors, in this sense, were one material mechanism in the process of modernization and the development of individuality.

Engaging with money in a northern periphery of early modern Europe

While contextual and interpretive approaches to money have recently emerged in archaeology, coins have attracted little serious attention in the post-medieval archaeology of the western world. The relative neglect of coins as archaeological finds probably derives from an (implicit) assumption that the function and meaning of coins is readily apparent. A close study of coin finds, however, combined with various sources of contextual data, can provide new views on how people understood and engaged with coinage even in the comparatively recent past, as this article seeks to illustrate by considering money and coin finds from a northern periphery of early modern Sweden. Economic factors are important for appreciating the significance of coinage and the patterning of the studied coin finds, but this article proposes that non-monetary uses of coins were more important to the local understanding of money than has previously been recognized.