Ethnicity, migration and materiality. Forest Finn archaeology

Abstract

During the early 17th century, Finns migrated within the Swedish kingdom from interior Finland to virgin spruce forest areas in Sweden. There they settled in finnmarker, areas with Finnish-speaking households conducting large-scale swidden cultivation, huuhta in Finnish. Eventually they were called Forest Finns. Their farms were centered around a rökstuga, a living-house with a stone-oven without a chimney.Four Forest Finn farms have been excavated. The article discusses how the Finnish households were integrated in the local and regional market economy, thus acquiring the same kind of things also used by their Swedish neighbours, including status and prestige objects, e.g. display ceramics and window glass panes. At the same time, they continued to live in their traditional rökstugor, which owing to different space, light and warmth compared to a Swedish cottage with an open fireplace, conditioned other relations between the individuals of the households. The process of change, Swedification, of the Forest Finns was not unilinear.Ethnicity is the social process of meeting between two or more groups of people forming ‘us-and-them’-relations. The early-modern Forest Finns is an example of complex change as concerns materiality involved in ethnicity, in this case triggered by the meeting of ‘the others’ as a result of migration.