P Herva
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 12824 |
|---|---|
| NOME | P Herva |
| PRENOMES | P |
| SOBRENOME | Herva |
| ASSINATURA | HERVA P |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Oulu |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5925-4406 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 68 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 200 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 68 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Dealing with Fear
Walking with, Walking Past/s
This article interrogates the contested landscapes of Gilbbesjávri, Sápmi, integrating participatory research with an innovative walking methodology. Using an improvised walk around Lake Čáhkáljávri as both a research tool and critical framework, the study explores the interplay of land use, heritage, and identity in northern Fennoscandia. It examines how state-led conservation policies, tourism development, and shifting border dynamics intersect…
Abducted by a Terrestrial Alien
This account explores how circumstances verging on the other‐worldly alter human perception and consciousness in a fieldwork situation. The case study involves an archaeological field survey team stranded for a time on a remote Lapland mountain. By applying the method of weirding, drawing inspiration from the narrative force of weird fiction, we examine how the team interacted with their decrepit shelter—a cabin teeming with fungal life amidst th…
Archaeology of Finland’s Only “Permanent Glacier”
The first cryosphere archaeological survey in Finland underlines the exponential melt rates seen around the Earth. Our research shows that the formerly perennial Ritničohkka snowfield in Sápmi has completely vanished over the past two decades. Recent melting has uncovered notable assemblages of animal osseous material, which based on radiocarbon dating were deposited in the area over two millennia. Besides bones, the survey recovered traces of hu…
Monstrous Heritage
Below the Surface
This article examines how the sea and water were incorporated in the palatial environments of Minoan Crete, with a focus on Knossos and Zakros where some distinctive material and symbolic maritime and water elements were present, especially in the Neopalatial period (ca. 1750–1490 Before Current Era). We consider a set of specific water elements at Knossos and Zakros and their wider architectural context as an experienced environment in relation …
Lives of bronze gods and wooden puppets
Living statues and artificial humans have a long cultural history. They are awe-inspiring because they are entangled with existentialist questions about reality, especially as regards the uncertainty of being. This article explores how humanoid material culture in its different forms was involved in the interaction between myriad human and non-human entities in seventeenth-century Sweden and in the broader context of the emerging global world. We…
Smokestack Nostalgia or Hypermodern Spirituality
Urban exploration is the hobby of those who want to reach the fringes of society and the abandoned and rusting traces of the past. Photography in these forgotten places is as much part of the experience in urban exploration as the actual entering of abandoned buildings. We focus especially on abandoned industrial buildings and how they are represented online. This article attempts to understand the meanings and emotions behind urban exploration a…
Folk Magic and the Haunting of the Second World War in Finnish Lapland
This article engages with certain peculiar finds and features that we have documented at former German WWII military camps in Finnish Lapland, with a particular emphasis on an excavated assemblage that has affinities to traditional ritual (sacrificial) practices. The relevant finds and features date from the post-war period, but they are meaningfully associated with WWII sites. We consider the possible connections of these finds and features to f…
Weird quantities
Modern mining operates on enormous scales and quantities that go beyond everyday comprehension, which in turn has existential and metaphysical implications, and this article is an experiment in characterising ‘existentially disturbing’ aspects of extraction landscapes. We attempt to characterise and make sense of the Hannukainen mining landscape with regard to its deeply contradictory and dissonant - effectively monstrous - nature as an experienc…
Insides, outsides and the labyrinth
This article employs the labyrinth as an analytical and interpretive tool for thinking about Minoan architectural and especially palatial space with a particular focus on Knossos. Whether or not Minoan ruins inspired later Greek mythical narratives, Knossos can be examined as a kind of a labyrinth towards developing new perspectives on Knossos as an experienced environment and how it was entangled with broader cultural and cosmological ideas. A l…
Resource Extraction and Arctic Communities
For decades, a post-Cold War narrative heralded a 'new Arctic', with melting ice and snow and accessible resources that would build sustainable communities. Today, large parts of the Arctic are still trapped in the path dependencies of past resource extraction. At the same time, the impetus for green transitions and a 'new industrialism' spell opportunities to shift the development model and build new futures for Arctic residents and Indigenous p…
Indians” in Lapland
This article examines mechanisms of marginalization in the monocultural setting of Finland in the early 1990s through the case of the multinational Iriadamant “lifestyle Indians”. The Iriadamant imitated Native Americans in appearance, and the “tribe” settled in Finnish Lapland to experiment with a non-consumerist ecological and spiritual way of living off-grid. We examine how this community was perceived in Finland and assess how Finnish percept…
They are also victims of the war ́
This article engages with the contemporary perceptions and representations of the Finnish cooperation with Nazis during World War II. The Finnish-German relations were complicated during the war, as Finland was first an ally of Germany but later turned against the German troops in the country. Focusing primarily on the uses of photographs, personal memoirs and oral histories in museum exhibitions and related contexts, we examine how the complex F…
Minoan Lapland
For many years, I believed that fieldwork is primarily about systematic data collection. Only gradually did I begin to understand that fieldwork has several other, equally meaningful dimensions to it. This essay reflects on archaeological and anthropological fieldwork as inspiration and as a kind of a meditative (or a broadly spiritual) practice that, a little like ‘altered states of consciousness’, affords discovering and becoming aware of inter…
Minding the field
This introduction to this special issue considers various approaches to understanding ‘the field’ as an object of archaeological and anthropological research, and researchers’ own engagements with it. We draw out some theoretical and methodological approaches to the field as a way of interrogating the cognitive and physical engagements of the researcher with it, not only as a place and process of data gathering and knowledge production, but one o…
Encountering/thinking mosquitos
The essay maps and reflects on some dimensions of human-mosquito interaction in the context of the Arctic and inspired by fieldwork in Finnish Lapland. Rather than developing any particular argument, we seek to document this thinking mosquito as a collection of glimpses, fragments and musings. This impressionistic approach was inspired by conversations among the authors and with environmental humanities scholarship about the roles non-humans play…
Minding Arctic Fields
Military supply, everyday demand, and reindeer
During the Second World War, in 1941–1944, Nazi German troops held the frontal responsibility of the Arctic front in Finnish Lapland. In this paper, we present the first zooarchaeological study of the wartime faunal remains from German military camps in Lapland. This illustrates the supply situation of both the German soldiers and their multinational prisoners. The official military supply was substantially supplemented with local food sources, n…
Scandinavia/Northern Europe
Dark Heritage
Stone-worlds
Stone and rock are prominent elements of northern landscapes and bear distinct marks left by glacial and postglacial processes. The various ‘peculiar’ and attention-grabbing features of northern rockscapes have engaged with and signified in various ways through the ages. The notion that particular rocks and cliffs are sacred is a persistent feature in northernmost Europe, ranging from prehistoric rock art to the historically known sacred sites of…
Boats and waterways
Bodies of water – sea, rivers, lakes – have always been integral to mobilities and communication in the northern boreal world. The constant presence of water, and living in close proximity to water, have also infused northern water-worlds with complex cultural and cosmological meanings. Water-worlds have been associated especially with death and the dead – a central concern in northern cultures also more generally – although the perceptions and a…
Stone-worlds
Forests and hunting
Woodlands comprise one of the dominant landscape types in the circumpolar North and forests occupy a central position in the life-worlds and symbolic worlds of northern culture, even if different groups in the Nordic world have related differently to forests. In addition to being an important material resource (of timber, game, fur, etc.), the various constituents of forest landscapes – animals in particular – have been subject to a wide range of…
I have better stuff at home
Almost all archaeologists encounter collectors of different kinds of artefacts at some point in their career, whether it is the private collectors of financially valuable antiquities or 'amateur archaeologists' who have amassed personal collections of local finds. In our research into the material legacy of the German presence in northern Finland during World War II, we have encountered both artefact hunters (primarily but not exclusively metal d…
Beyond Consumption
Northern Archaeology and Cosmology
In its analysis of the archaeologies and histories of the northern fringe of Europe, this book provides a focus on animistic-shamanistic cosmologies and the associated human-environment relations from the Neolithic to modern times. The North has fascinated Europeans throughout history, as an enchanted world of natural and supernatural marvels: a land of light and dark, of northern lights and the midnight sun, of witches and magic and of riches ra…
Cultivation of Perception and the Emergence of the Neolithic World
This article develops the idea that the emergence of the Neolithic world was closely linked to discovering and becoming aware of new aspects and dimensions of reality. Practices such as pottery making and cultivation promoted attentiveness to new aspects of things and the environment, which in turn generated a new kind of lived world that was, in a sense, richer, larger and deeper than before. It is proposed that new forms of material culture and…
Copper Use, Cultural Change and Neolithization in North-Eastern Europe ( c . 5500–1800 BC)
In the context of northern Europe, copper use started early in eastern Fennoscandia (Finland and the Republic of Karelia, Russia), sometime after 4000 BC. This article explores this Stone Age copper use in eastern Fennoscandia in relation to broader cultural developments in the region between the adoption of pottery ( c . 5500 BC) and the end of the Stone Age ( c . 1800 BC). Stone Age copper use in north-eastern Europe has conventionally been und…
Flower lovers, after all? Rethinking religion and human-environment relations in Minoan Crete
That the ‘natural’ world was imbued with symbolic and religious meaning in Minoan Crete has been suggested since the early days of Minoan archaeology. Notwithstanding, it often remains unclear how certain constituents of the physical environment acquired specific meanings, and what such meanings imply for the actual dynamics of human-environment relations. This paper considers the relationship between (what is today construed as) religion and hum…
Nazi memorabilia, dark heritage and treasure hunting as “alternative” tourism
Sites connected to the Second World War (WWII) are increasingly recognized as worthy of archaeological investigation. Researchers are also becoming aware that that the collectors market in objects connected to WWII, particularly those connected to Germany, is encouraging the stripping of conflict landscapes in the search for “collectors items.” Finnish Lapland is sometimes regarded as peripheral compared to more centrally located regions of Europ…
Haunting Heritage in an Enchanted Land
This article addresses the functions and meanings of Second World War German material heritage in northern Finland from a haunting perspective and in terms of magical thinking. While archaeologists and heritage professionals have primarily been interested in the historical information that Second World War sites and military material culture may contain, this article explores how encounters and engagements with Second World War materialities in t…
Daughters of magic
Animistic and other alternative ontologies have recently been discussed in archaeology and material culture studies, but these discussions, while not entirely unfamiliar to historical archaeology, have so far had a limited impact on our understanding of the post-medieval Western world. This paper uses Western esoteric thought and folk beliefs to engage with the idea of the relational constitution of reality. It is argued that forms of ‘magical th…
Living (with) Things
This article discusses relational ontology and its significance for interpreting archaeological material from post-medieval contexts. The general theory of the relational constitution of the world is first introduced and some of its implications discussed in relation to the ‘meaning’ of artefact biographies. Second, by drawing from folk beliefs, the article considers how people in early modern Finland recognized the relational constitution of the…
A military camp in the middle of nowhere
This article discusses military mobilities and encampment, and associated themes such as dislocation and displacement of people, through the case of a Second World War German military camp in Finnish Lapland. The article describes the camp and its archaeological research and discusses various aspects of the camp and camp life in its particular subarctic ‘wilderness’ setting, framing the discussion within the themes of mobilities and dislocations,…
Buildings as persons
The author shows how houses in the northern Baltic were constructed using two realities: the reality of timber and the equally potent reality of spirits supporting and controlling the fate of structures. Excavations in seventeenth-century Tornio (now in modern-day Finland) showed that houses were furnished with special offerings when founded and refurbished, while evidence from living folklore suggested that the houses themselves were originally …
Early Copper Use in Neolithic North-Eastern Europe
Copper finds from Neolithic contexts in eastern Fennoscandia represent the earliest phase of metal use in northern Europe. Currently some 30 sites, which have produced approximately 180 copper finds, are known. The finds consist mainly of nuggets and indeterminate lumps of copper, but a number of personal adornments and small tools are also present. The centre of copper use is located on the northern and western coasts of Lake Onega, where native…
What's on the Map
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 …
The Life of Buildings
This paper discusses the interpretation of the objects deliberately hidden and sealed up in the structure of Minoan buildings. These building deposits are usually interpreted in terms of religion and ritual but this conventional view may actually be based on fallacious assumptions about the nature of human‐environment relations in Bronze Age Crete. The present paper outlines an alternative ecological approach, which allows a degree of sociality b…
British Ceramics on the Northern European Periphery
Lapland’s Roadway”
This article examines photographs illustrating the German war effort in Finnish Lapland during the Second World War. We will analyze the German photographic representation of Lapland from the perspective of how the Germans portrayed and experienced this northern land, with a focus on Fahrbahn Lappland (Lapland’s Roadway), a coffee-table book by the German photojournalist Mabre (Max Martin Brehm). It affords interesting insights into German percep…
Unearthing Atlantis and performing the past
This article discusses fabrications and alternative histories, and their relationship with antiquarian and early archaeological practice, in the Baroque world through the case of an alabaster urn reportedly found in the garden of a Swedish royal castle in 1685. The urn, decorated with a strange inscription, is used to address broader issues of how the past was conceived in the Baroque world, and how the relationship between the past and present w…
Marvels of the system. Art, perception and engagement with the environment in Minoan Crete
This paper discusses the relationship between art, perception and human engagement with the environment in Minoan Crete through the depiction of landscapes and the 'natural world' in art. It is argued that the conventional approaches to Minoan 'nature scenes', based on the representation and expression theories of art, are overshadowed by modernist assumptions about art and human-environment relations. The paper then proceeds to discuss the worki…
Maps and magic in Renaissance Europe
Contextual and interpretive approaches have broadened perspectives on historical cartography since the 1980s, but maps still continue to be understood as a means of encoding and communicating spatial information and ideas. These established approaches to maps, however, are embedded in modernist assumptions and may misrepresent the function and meaning of maps, especially in contexts such as Renaissance Europe. This article considers the meaning o…
Engaging with Sea and Seals
The nature of environmental and human-animal relations in past societies has been subject to much discussion in archaeology and other disciplines, but the significance of environmental beliefs may not have been fully appreciated in post-medieval European contexts. This paper argues that a reassessment of how people engaged with animals and the natural environment is nonetheless needed especially in such contexts as the northern Gulf of Bothnia in…
Myths on local use of natural resources and social equity of land use governance
Previous literature on social equity has focused on procedure, distribution and recognition related to land use governance. We propose novel approach to examine social equity by following ideational turn with an aim to explore globally used and locally persistent myths that (mis)inform governance in practice and effect on the three dimensions of social equity for reindeer herding in northern Finland. We take synthetizing approach and elaborate an…
A northern Neolithic? Clay work, cultivation and cultural transformations in the boreal zone of north‐eastern Europe, c .5300–3000 bc
The adoption of pottery in eastern Fennoscandia in the later sixth millennium BC has traditionally been understood in straightforward technological and practical terms, and as a development that did not mark other significant changes in local culture or ways of life. Recent research in the region, combined with new ideas about Neolithization in Eurasia more generally, nonetheless suggests that the adoption of pottery was associated with more fund…
Beneath the Surface of the World
Quartz was an important and widely used lithic material in the prehistory of circumpolar Eurasia. While ethnographic and other data indicate that quartz has been invested with special qualities and meanings in various cultures around the world, archaeological studies in circumpolar Europe have tended to discuss quartz use in exclusively practical and technological terms. This article takes a “nontechnological” approach to quartz finds from the bo…
Applying a synthetic approach to the resilience of Finnish reindeer herding as a changing livelihood
Sarkki, S., T. Komu, H. I. Heikkinen, N. Acosta García, É. Lépy, and V.-P. Herva. 2016. Applying a synthetic approach to the resilience of Finnish reindeer herding as a changing livelihood. Ecology and Society 21(4):14.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08819-210414
Defusing Dualism
How do archaeologists assign meanings to prehistoric art objects? Ancient art is often understood in terms of communication and expression, whereas other than purely visual meanings of art are seldom promulgated. Art is often associated with survival, religion and identity - the 'big issues' of social life - but some art objects may have been specimens of everyday material culture. In this article it is shown that the rejection of the dualistic m…
Should the Marginal be Classified
The Life of Buildings
This paper discusses the interpretation of the objects deliberately hidden and sealed up in the structure of Minoan buildings. These building deposits are usually interpreted in terms of religion and ritual but this conventional view may actually be based on fallacious assumptions about the nature of human‐environment relations in Bronze Age Crete. The present paper outlines an alternative ecological approach, which allows a degree of sociality b…
Flower lovers, after all? Rethinking religion and human-environment relations in Minoan Crete
That the ‘natural’ world was imbued with symbolic and religious meaning in Minoan Crete has been suggested since the early days of Minoan archaeology. Notwithstanding, it often remains unclear how certain constituents of the physical environment acquired specific meanings, and what such meanings imply for the actual dynamics of human-environment relations. This paper considers the relationship between (what is today construed as) religion and hum…
Marvels of the system. Art, perception and engagement with the environment in Minoan Crete
This paper discusses the relationship between art, perception and human engagement with the environment in Minoan Crete through the depiction of landscapes and the 'natural world' in art. It is argued that the conventional approaches to Minoan 'nature scenes', based on the representation and expression theories of art, are overshadowed by modernist assumptions about art and human-environment relations. The paper then proceeds to discuss the worki…
Folk beliefs, special deposits, and engagement with the environment in early modern northern Finland
Beyond Consumption
Living (with) Things
This article discusses relational ontology and its significance for interpreting archaeological material from post-medieval contexts. The general theory of the relational constitution of the world is first introduced and some of its implications discussed in relation to the ‘meaning’ of artefact biographies. Second, by drawing from folk beliefs, the article considers how people in early modern Finland recognized the relational constitution of the…
What's on the Map
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 …
Maps and magic in Renaissance Europe
Contextual and interpretive approaches have broadened perspectives on historical cartography since the 1980s, but maps still continue to be understood as a means of encoding and communicating spatial information and ideas. These established approaches to maps, however, are embedded in modernist assumptions and may misrepresent the function and meaning of maps, especially in contexts such as Renaissance Europe. This article considers the meaning o…
Engaging with Sea and Seals
The nature of environmental and human-animal relations in past societies has been subject to much discussion in archaeology and other disciplines, but the significance of environmental beliefs may not have been fully appreciated in post-medieval European contexts. This paper argues that a reassessment of how people engaged with animals and the natural environment is nonetheless needed especially in such contexts as the northern Gulf of Bothnia in…
Daughters of magic
Animistic and other alternative ontologies have recently been discussed in archaeology and material culture studies, but these discussions, while not entirely unfamiliar to historical archaeology, have so far had a limited impact on our understanding of the post-medieval Western world. This paper uses Western esoteric thought and folk beliefs to engage with the idea of the relational constitution of reality. It is argued that forms of ‘magical th…
Buildings as persons
The author shows how houses in the northern Baltic were constructed using two realities: the reality of timber and the equally potent reality of spirits supporting and controlling the fate of structures. Excavations in seventeenth-century Tornio (now in modern-day Finland) showed that houses were furnished with special offerings when founded and refurbished, while evidence from living folklore suggested that the houses themselves were originally …
Forgotten in the Wilderness
Spirituality and the Material World in Post-Medieval Europe
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 prov…
Early Copper Use in Neolithic North-Eastern Europe
Copper finds from Neolithic contexts in eastern Fennoscandia represent the earliest phase of metal use in northern Europe. Currently some 30 sites, which have produced approximately 180 copper finds, are known. The finds consist mainly of nuggets and indeterminate lumps of copper, but a number of personal adornments and small tools are also present. The centre of copper use is located on the northern and western coasts of Lake Onega, where native…
Copper Use, Cultural Change and Neolithization in North-Eastern Europe ( c . 5500–1800 BC)
In the context of northern Europe, copper use started early in eastern Fennoscandia (Finland and the Republic of Karelia, Russia), sometime after 4000 BC. This article explores this Stone Age copper use in eastern Fennoscandia in relation to broader cultural developments in the region between the adoption of pottery ( c . 5500 BC) and the end of the Stone Age ( c . 1800 BC). Stone Age copper use in north-eastern Europe has conventionally been und…
British Ceramics on the Northern European Periphery
Coastal Cosmologies
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 o…
Cultivation of Perception and the Emergence of the Neolithic World
This article develops the idea that the emergence of the Neolithic world was closely linked to discovering and becoming aware of new aspects and dimensions of reality. Practices such as pottery making and cultivation promoted attentiveness to new aspects of things and the environment, which in turn generated a new kind of lived world that was, in a sense, richer, larger and deeper than before. It is proposed that new forms of material culture and…
Haunting Heritage in an Enchanted Land
This article addresses the functions and meanings of Second World War German material heritage in northern Finland from a haunting perspective and in terms of magical thinking. While archaeologists and heritage professionals have primarily been interested in the historical information that Second World War sites and military material culture may contain, this article explores how encounters and engagements with Second World War materialities in t…
Unearthing Atlantis and performing the past
This article discusses fabrications and alternative histories, and their relationship with antiquarian and early archaeological practice, in the Baroque world through the case of an alabaster urn reportedly found in the garden of a Swedish royal castle in 1685. The urn, decorated with a strange inscription, is used to address broader issues of how the past was conceived in the Baroque world, and how the relationship between the past and present w…
Nazi memorabilia, dark heritage and treasure hunting as “alternative” tourism
Sites connected to the Second World War (WWII) are increasingly recognized as worthy of archaeological investigation. Researchers are also becoming aware that that the collectors market in objects connected to WWII, particularly those connected to Germany, is encouraging the stripping of conflict landscapes in the search for “collectors items.” Finnish Lapland is sometimes regarded as peripheral compared to more centrally located regions of Europ…
Applying a synthetic approach to the resilience of Finnish reindeer herding as a changing livelihood
Sarkki, S., T. Komu, H. I. Heikkinen, N. Acosta García, É. Lépy, and V.-P. Herva. 2016. Applying a synthetic approach to the resilience of Finnish reindeer herding as a changing livelihood. Ecology and Society 21(4):14.http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-08819-210414
History (43 obras) · Archaeology (38 obras) · Geography (32 obras) · History (27 obras) · Art (25 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (23 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Aesthetics (20 obras) · Epistemology (16 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras)