Timo Ylimaunu

What's on the Map?: re-assessing the first urban map of Torneå and early map-making in Sweden

Maps can arguably provide a wealth of information about various aspects of historical landscapes and societies. While it is clear that not all information on historical maps is reliable, some basic assumptions about the nature of maps tend to go unquestioned. There is thus a need to scrutinize scholarly assumptions about historical maps and map-making, especially in early modern contexts, in order to correct certain modernist biases and gain new perspectives on early cartography. This paper first offers a new interpretation of the earliest known urban map of Torneå (Tornio), considers some implications of the reinterpretation, and proceeds to discuss the nature of early Swedish cartography and problems of interpreting cartographic material on a more general level.

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.

MEMORY OF BARRACKS: World War II German ‘Little Berlins’ and post-war urbanization in Northern Finnish towns

Some 220,000 German soldiers were stationed and fought in northern Finland during World War II. These troops required huge amounts of supplies that were provided by supply encampments in several locations, including the towns of Oulu and Tornio. In this paper the authors consider how the memory of these German-built sites has shaped post-war urban heritage. They review and challenge the authorized history of the post-war urbanization of the northern towns.

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.

Computed tomography of mummified human remains in old Finnish churches, a case study: the mummified remains of a 17th-century vicar revisited

Summary: Mummified human remains have been preserved in the cool, well-ventilated crypts of old Finnish churches, which were popular burial sites among the elite of the early modern period. Here, the authors present the results of a computed tomography study of the remains of an early 17th-century vicar of Keminmaa. They examined the preservation of his remains and made several pathological findings; the causes of the latter possibly had a severe impact on his health. He was a large man who achieved relative longevity for his time, although he suffered from conditions related to obesity. There were also potential indications of tuberculosis. Inflammatory changes, for example, had afflicted his spine.

Coastal Cosmologies: Long-Term Perspectives on the Perception and Understanding of Dynamic Coastal Landscapes in the Northern Baltic Sea Region

This paper addresses long-term perceptions and meanings of coastal landscapes, particularly of coastal islands, in the northern Baltic Sea region from the Neolithic to the early modern period. Instead of identifying specific meanings attributed to particular landscape elements, the aim here is to explore similarities and continuities in the ways of relating with coastal landscapes across centuries and millennia, with an emphasis on how meanings of coastal landscapes and broader cosmological concepts would have been linked to environmental changes stemming from post-glacial land uplift and associated processes. While some socio-cultural impacts of land uplift have been addressed especially in the context of Stone Age archaeology, the broader and longer-term implications of living in dynamic coastal to environmental perception and cosmological concepts remain to be appreciated. A series of interlinked cases from the Neolithic to the early modern period will be employed to discuss those wider issues.