Oula Seitsonen
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 870569 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Oula Seitsonen |
| PRENOMES | Oula |
| SOBRENOME | Seitsonen |
| ASSINATURA | SEITSONEN O |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Helsinki |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3792-0081 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 42 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 175 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2005 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
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…
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…
Phantasmic Encounters in the Arctic
In the vast north, ghostly experiences are common for locals and outsiders alike. Here, we explore how cultural-natural attributes, like remoteness and extreme seasonal variation, compound experiences of the haunting in visceral ways. This provides the Arctic region with an unusually pronounced baseline of other-than-human agency, which in the Sápmi region is further accentuated by unsolicited traumas of the past. Among the more recent tragedies …
Class or no class? A contemporary archaeological approach to a working-class neighbourhood in northern Finland
This paper focuses on the contemporary archaeology of a former working-class neighbourhood in Oulu, Finland, and traces the changes that took place in the lifestyle of the community in the 40-year postwar era from 1947 to 1987. We examine specifically how the sometimes-conflicting material processes of the welfare state and capitalism manifest in the materials, and in the lives of working-class Finns at the time. It is important to put class expe…
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…
Contemporary archaeological perspectives on intersectional inequality in a welfare state in twentieth-century Finland
Social inequalities and marginality often go unrecognised in the Nordic welfare states. This project examines the effects of neoliberalism and intersectional inequality in Finland from a contemporary archaeology perspective; the case study is a Second World War German military camp turned into a working-class community occupied until the 1980s
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…
Monumentos da Guerra de Inverno (1939-1940) no Ártico Selvagem
O artigo apresenta os resultados de pesquisa produzida sobre monumentos, valas e sepulturas soviéticas em território finlandês (região da Lapônia), historicamente constituídos desde a primeira fase da Segunda Guerra Mundial desenrolada naquele território, conhecida como a Guerra de Inverno (1939-1940). Com o fim da maior contenda mundial, foram se produzindo memoriais ao longo de todo o norte da Finlândia, com especial destaque para áreas próxima…
Resilient herders
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…
Toward a holistic understanding of pastoralism
Rain, reindeer, digging and tundra
In this paper Idiscuss aset of photographs taken by my daughters with disposable cameras, to consider how they perceived an archaeological expedition to northernmost Sápmi (Finnish Lapland). My daughters’ photographic documentation illustrates the views that children from southern Finland have on archaeological fieldwork in an extreme northern environment. Their photographs resemble partly the tourism promotional imagery and Instagram posts, whic…
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…
Transnational Landscapes of Sámi Reindeer
This paper presents the development of Sámi reindeer domestication and pastoralism in northwestern Sápmi, the homeland of the indigenous Sámi people, based on recent surveys in the Gilbbesjávri region, Finland. We have documented about 99 percent of known sites in the study area and present the first radiocarbon dates from herding sites in this part of Finnish Sápmi. Since Sápmi is transnational, archaeological data from the adjoining countries a…
Dark Heritage
Pälsi, Sakari
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…
Public memory, National Heritage, and memorialization of the 1918 Finnish Civil War
The Finnish Civil War in 1918 left the newly independent country (1917) scarred for decades. In this paper, we assess the difficult public memory, national narrative and memorialization of the war. We take as our starting point a public crowdsourcing organized by the State-broadcasting company about the material traces of conflicts in Finland. Themes raised by the public in the crowdsourcing are used as foundation to map heritage perspectives. Sp…
Landscapes of Loss and Destruction
The so-called Lapland War between Finland and Germany at the end of the Second World War led to a mass-scale destruction of Lapland. Both local Finnish residents and the indigenous Sámi groups lost their homes, and their livelihoods suffered in many ways. The narratives of these deeply traumatic experiences have long been neglected and suppressed in Finland and have been studied only recently by academics and acknowledged in public. In this text,…
Sakari Pälsi
Lithics in the steppe landscape
‘Where the F… is Vuotso?’
In this paper we discuss the heritage of the WWII evacuation and the so-called ‘burning of Lapland’ within a Sámi reindeer herding community, and assess how these wartime experiences have moulded, and continue to mould, the ways people memorialise and engage with the WWII material remains. Our focus is on the village of Vuotso, which is home to the southernmost Sámi community in Finland. The Nazi German troops established a large military base th…
Abandoned Refugee Vehicles “In the Middle of Nowhere”
Vehicles abandoned by multinational refugees during the winter 2015–2016 in northern Finnish Lapland’s border checkpoints represent an offshoot of the ongoing global refugee crisis on the so-called “Arctic Route” to Europe via Russia. In the summer 2016 this material reminder of refugee mobility vanished almost totally, as the vehicles were auctioned in a show for promoting Lapland tourism. This photo-essay highlights and discusses some of the ma…
The transition to farming in eastern Africa
The exploratory investigation of two sites in Kenya throws new light on the transition from a 'stone age' to an 'iron age'. The model of widespread cultural replacement by Bantu-speaking iron producers is questioned and instead the authors propose a long interaction with regional variations. In matters of lithics, ceramics, hunting, gathering, husbandry and cooking, East African people created local and eclectic packages of change between 1500BC …
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…
Crowdsourcing cultural heritage
Following a recent worldwide boom in the democratization of knowledge, crowdsourcing and Participatory GIS, heritage practice increasingly draws on crowdsourced geographical data. In this paper, I discuss a public crowdsourcing of twentieth century conflict heritage in Finland, launched by state-owned broadcasting company Yleisradio. Here emphasis is on analysing the user behaviour and incentives, which can inform analogous future initiatives. Ma…
Pastoral Neolithic sites on the southern Mbulu Plateau, Tanzania
As part of a larger project examining the introduction of herding into northern Tanzania, surveys and excavations were conducted at the southern edge of the Mbulu Plateau, documenting the presence of Narosura ceramics dating to the early third millennium BP, as well as a Later Stone Age occupation dated via ostrich eggshell to the tenth millennium BP. This marks the southernmost extent of the Pastoral Neolithic in eastern Africa. The paucity of s…
Lithics use at Kansyore sites in East Africa
Recently a series of active investigations have been launched on aspects of the Kansyore tradition such as ceramics, subsistence and chronology. However, Kansyore lithic assemblages have been little studied and its quartz-based technology has often been simply dubbed as 'non-descript.' Here I attempt an overview of the organisation of Kansyore lithic technology based on assemblages from four recently excavated sites in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Kan…
Public engagements with Lapland’s Dark Heritage
Research project Lapland’s Dark Heritage organized a one-week public excavation in Inari, Finnish Lapland, at a Second World War (WWII) German military hospital site in August 2016. #InariDig took place with the help of international experts and pre-registered volunteers. In this field report, two of the archaeologists leading the excavations and an ethnographer who took part in documenting this community archaeology experiment introduce the exca…
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…
Lithics in the steppe landscape
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,…
Public memory, National Heritage, and memorialization of the 1918 Finnish Civil War
The Finnish Civil War in 1918 left the newly independent country (1917) scarred for decades. In this paper, we assess the difficult public memory, national narrative and memorialization of the war. We take as our starting point a public crowdsourcing organized by the State-broadcasting company about the material traces of conflicts in Finland. Themes raised by the public in the crowdsourcing are used as foundation to map heritage perspectives. Sp…
Lambs to the Slaughter
Stone circles are a common monumental feature of the Mongolian Bronze Age (c. 1500-800BC), frequently occurring in association with other monument types, especially khirigsuurs. Until now the content of the stone circles has not been identified, a fact which has hampered our understanding not only of khirigsuurs and their related cosmology but also of the contemporary economy, owing to a research paradigm that was monument-focused until very rece…
Pastoralists in the northeastern Mara Plains, Kenya
During the 1980s, a fairly detailed picture was constructed of the prehistory of the Loita-Mara region, Narok District, southwestern Kenya, up to Elmenteitan times. However, the archaeological sequence after the Elmenteitan period remained poorly understood. Researchers from the University of Helsinki therefore undertook an initial examination of this post-Elmenteitan period in 1984 and 1986. This paper presents results of the work thus undertake…
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…
Archaeological research in the northern Lake Manyara Basin, Tanzania 2003–2004
The University of Helsinki, Department of Archaeology's “Cultural ecology of the East African savanna environment in a long-term historical perspective”—project between 2002 and 2004 focused on the prehistory of the Northern Tanzanian Rift Valley and its environs. The main research emphasis has been on the vast Late Iron Age Engaruka complex, but during the fieldwork several other new sites were also encountered. This paper presents the new archa…
Shoreline displacement chronology of rock paintings at Lake Saimaa, eastern Finland
Finnish hunter-gatherer rock paintings are situated on steep cliff faces that typically face onto bodies of water. Because of isostatic land uplift and lake level changes some rock paintings are situated several metres above present day lake level. Using the shoreline displacement history of Lake Saimaa, a relative chronology of different rock painting motifs is presented. There has hitherto been almost no study of diachronic change in Finnish ro…
Transnational Landscapes of Sámi Reindeer
This paper presents the development of Sámi reindeer domestication and pastoralism in northwestern Sápmi, the homeland of the indigenous Sámi people, based on recent surveys in the Gilbbesjávri region, Finland. We have documented about 99 percent of known sites in the study area and present the first radiocarbon dates from herding sites in this part of Finnish Sápmi. Since Sápmi is transnational, archaeological data from the adjoining countries a…
Resilient herders
Landscapes of Loss and Destruction
The so-called Lapland War between Finland and Germany at the end of the Second World War led to a mass-scale destruction of Lapland. Both local Finnish residents and the indigenous Sámi groups lost their homes, and their livelihoods suffered in many ways. The narratives of these deeply traumatic experiences have long been neglected and suppressed in Finland and have been studied only recently by academics and acknowledged in public. In this text,…
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…
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…
Abandoned Refugee Vehicles “In the Middle of Nowhere”
Vehicles abandoned by multinational refugees during the winter 2015–2016 in northern Finnish Lapland’s border checkpoints represent an offshoot of the ongoing global refugee crisis on the so-called “Arctic Route” to Europe via Russia. In the summer 2016 this material reminder of refugee mobility vanished almost totally, as the vehicles were auctioned in a show for promoting Lapland tourism. This photo-essay highlights and discusses some of the ma…
Burnt bones by Europe's largest lake
Ahvola 1918
The Finnish Civil War (1918) has received very little attention from the archaeologists until recently. This paper describes the first archaeological investigation of a Civil War battlefield in the Karelian Isthmus, nowadays northwest Russia. The battlefield of Ahvola, which saw one of the decisive battles of the war, was surveyed briefly in November 2007. With relatively little subsequent landuse, the general landscape has remained roughly simil…
Remembrance
Shoreline displacement chronology of rock paintings at Lake Saimaa, eastern Finland
Finnish hunter-gatherer rock paintings are situated on steep cliff faces that typically face onto bodies of water. Because of isostatic land uplift and lake level changes some rock paintings are situated several metres above present day lake level. Using the shoreline displacement history of Lake Saimaa, a relative chronology of different rock painting motifs is presented. There has hitherto been almost no study of diachronic change in Finnish ro…
Archaeological research in the northern Lake Manyara Basin, Tanzania 2003–2004
The University of Helsinki, Department of Archaeology's “Cultural ecology of the East African savanna environment in a long-term historical perspective”—project between 2002 and 2004 focused on the prehistory of the Northern Tanzanian Rift Valley and its environs. The main research emphasis has been on the vast Late Iron Age Engaruka complex, but during the fieldwork several other new sites were also encountered. This paper presents the new archa…
The transition to farming in eastern Africa
The exploratory investigation of two sites in Kenya throws new light on the transition from a 'stone age' to an 'iron age'. The model of widespread cultural replacement by Bantu-speaking iron producers is questioned and instead the authors propose a long interaction with regional variations. In matters of lithics, ceramics, hunting, gathering, husbandry and cooking, East African people created local and eclectic packages of change between 1500BC …
Waterways and the stone age and early metal period studies on the Karelian Isthmus – The pre-World War II studies and research carried out by the University of Helsinki in 1998–2006
Ahvola 1918
The Finnish Civil War (1918) has received very little attention from the archaeologists until recently. This paper describes the first archaeological investigation of a Civil War battlefield in the Karelian Isthmus, nowadays northwest Russia. The battlefield of Ahvola, which saw one of the decisive battles of the war, was surveyed briefly in November 2007. With relatively little subsequent landuse, the general landscape has remained roughly simil…
Pastoralists in the northeastern Mara Plains, Kenya
During the 1980s, a fairly detailed picture was constructed of the prehistory of the Loita-Mara region, Narok District, southwestern Kenya, up to Elmenteitan times. However, the archaeological sequence after the Elmenteitan period remained poorly understood. Researchers from the University of Helsinki therefore undertook an initial examination of this post-Elmenteitan period in 1984 and 1986. This paper presents results of the work thus undertake…
Lithics use at Kansyore sites in East Africa
Recently a series of active investigations have been launched on aspects of the Kansyore tradition such as ceramics, subsistence and chronology. However, Kansyore lithic assemblages have been little studied and its quartz-based technology has often been simply dubbed as 'non-descript.' Here I attempt an overview of the organisation of Kansyore lithic technology based on assemblages from four recently excavated sites in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Kan…
Forgotten in the Wilderness
Pastoral Neolithic sites on the southern Mbulu Plateau, Tanzania
As part of a larger project examining the introduction of herding into northern Tanzania, surveys and excavations were conducted at the southern edge of the Mbulu Plateau, documenting the presence of Narosura ceramics dating to the early third millennium BP, as well as a Later Stone Age occupation dated via ostrich eggshell to the tenth millennium BP. This marks the southernmost extent of the Pastoral Neolithic in eastern Africa. The paucity of s…
Burnt bones by Europe's largest lake
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…
Lambs to the Slaughter
Stone circles are a common monumental feature of the Mongolian Bronze Age (c. 1500-800BC), frequently occurring in association with other monument types, especially khirigsuurs. Until now the content of the stone circles has not been identified, a fact which has hampered our understanding not only of khirigsuurs and their related cosmology but also of the contemporary economy, owing to a research paradigm that was monument-focused until very rece…
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…
‘Where the F… is Vuotso?’
In this paper we discuss the heritage of the WWII evacuation and the so-called ‘burning of Lapland’ within a Sámi reindeer herding community, and assess how these wartime experiences have moulded, and continue to mould, the ways people memorialise and engage with the WWII material remains. Our focus is on the village of Vuotso, which is home to the southernmost Sámi community in Finland. The Nazi German troops established a large military base th…
Abandoned Refugee Vehicles “In the Middle of Nowhere”
Vehicles abandoned by multinational refugees during the winter 2015–2016 in northern Finnish Lapland’s border checkpoints represent an offshoot of the ongoing global refugee crisis on the so-called “Arctic Route” to Europe via Russia. In the summer 2016 this material reminder of refugee mobility vanished almost totally, as the vehicles were auctioned in a show for promoting Lapland tourism. This photo-essay highlights and discusses some of the ma…
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,…
Crowdsourcing cultural heritage
Following a recent worldwide boom in the democratization of knowledge, crowdsourcing and Participatory GIS, heritage practice increasingly draws on crowdsourced geographical data. In this paper, I discuss a public crowdsourcing of twentieth century conflict heritage in Finland, launched by state-owned broadcasting company Yleisradio. Here emphasis is on analysing the user behaviour and incentives, which can inform analogous future initiatives. Ma…
Public engagements with Lapland’s Dark Heritage
Research project Lapland’s Dark Heritage organized a one-week public excavation in Inari, Finnish Lapland, at a Second World War (WWII) German military hospital site in August 2016. #InariDig took place with the help of international experts and pre-registered volunteers. In this field report, two of the archaeologists leading the excavations and an ethnographer who took part in documenting this community archaeology experiment introduce the exca…
Sakari Pälsi
Lithics in the steppe landscape
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…
Public memory, National Heritage, and memorialization of the 1918 Finnish Civil War
The Finnish Civil War in 1918 left the newly independent country (1917) scarred for decades. In this paper, we assess the difficult public memory, national narrative and memorialization of the war. We take as our starting point a public crowdsourcing organized by the State-broadcasting company about the material traces of conflicts in Finland. Themes raised by the public in the crowdsourcing are used as foundation to map heritage perspectives. Sp…
Landscapes of Loss and Destruction
The so-called Lapland War between Finland and Germany at the end of the Second World War led to a mass-scale destruction of Lapland. Both local Finnish residents and the indigenous Sámi groups lost their homes, and their livelihoods suffered in many ways. The narratives of these deeply traumatic experiences have long been neglected and suppressed in Finland and have been studied only recently by academics and acknowledged in public. In this text,…
Dark Heritage
Archaeology (26 obras) · Geography (26 obras) · History (23 obras) · History (15 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (14 obras) · World War II (11 obras) · Ancient history (10 obras) · German (9 obras) · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology (9 obras) · Political science (9 obras)