Subarctic Archaeology Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This thesis considers the role of monuments in the social construction of landscape over a six-thousand-year period in northern Finland.
Using Cultural Virus Theory and a Resilience Theory (RT) framework, this study argues that large, lasting, and widespread artifacts such as monuments form systems with their own Adaptive Cycles, and that these artifacts change much more slowly than most systems that shape human behaviour. As a result, they become an important part of the selective environment over the long term.
From 6500 BP to 1500 BP the hunter-gatherers of northern Finland constructed stone monuments along the coast of the Bay of Bothnia. These monuments are associated with the productive paleo-estuaries from which the populations derived most of their resources. Because the coastline was moving westwards rapidly, due to isostatic rebound following the end of the last glaciation, new coastal monuments were periodically constructed as the older ones lost their association with the shoreline.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were used to reconstruct six ancient shorelines for northwestern coastal Finland, creating five strips of land each corresponding to an area that emerged over a one-thousand-year period. The coastline was also divided into Northern, Middle, and Southern study regions. Using these two parameters, fifteen study areas were created. GIS was then used to show that the monuments in most of the study areas are distributed non-randomly with respect to two important features of the coastal landscape: major waterways and the edges of watershed basins. Mapping the spatial data also showed that monuments are associated with particular paleo-estuaries and that that association persists over time, with each construction renewing a well-defined ancestral landscape.
The work of previous archaeologists on the hunter-gatherers of the ancient Finnish coast has shown that, while the early occupants were culturally relatively homogenous, different parts of the coastline diverged over time. This is confirmed by the present study; however, persistent commonalities in the situation of monuments relative to resources are also observed. It is demonstrated that certain patterns of monumental location are repeated asynchronically across different regions of the coast as patterns of sedentism and social differentiation shift. As groups become more sedentary, monuments are constructed a few kilometers away from major waterways, bracketing the resources closely associated with the paleo-estuaries. As populations grow and social differentiation increases, more monuments are constructed, and the area they cover expands to include entire watersheds and other kinds of capital resources. All three study regions experience a fairly rapid collapse, though not at the same time, and in all three regions a similar pattern can be observed: post-sedentary hunter-gatherer groups build fewer monuments, but those that they do construct continue to mark parts of the coastline that were important in the previous millennia. This suggests that the human understanding of monuments, particularly regarding their placement in the landscape, is remarkably consistent across time and space, providing evidence of a shared history and ongoing interaction along the coast even as the study regions are drawn into different networks, subsistence strategies, and forms of social organization.