Networks, Interaction and Emerging Identities in Fennoscandia and Beyond

This volume is a collection of articles based on papers that were presented at the conference Networks, Interaction and Emerging Identities in Fennoscandia and Beyond, 13‒16 October 2009. The articles span a wide range of themes from vast networks of culture to the distribution of individual archaeological types and linguistic features. Many of the papers are based on material that derives from several different fields of study, such as linguistic and archaeology, archaeology and ethnohistory, history and anthropology, etc. While the time-scale, disciplinary character as well as the geographical scope of the articles are very diverse, they are united by three aspects, namely insistence on the fluctuating character of the prehistoric populations as opposed to nominal groups and straightforwardly identifiable ethnic and linguistic entities; the focus on the hunter-fisher-gatherer populations rather than agriculturalists and sedentary communities that have been the subject of most research on networking and interaction; and finally the northern dimension.