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- Title
Petkulan miekkalöytö ja A. M. Tallgrenin tarkastusmatka Sodankylään 1907.
- Authors
Salminen, Timo
- Abstract
Aarne Michaël Tallgren (1885-1945) travelled to Sodankylä, situated in Central Lapland, NNE of Rovaniemi, in August 1907 to investigate the site where four Bronze Age swords had been found in spring 1906, and he took his friend Aarne Europaeus (later, Äyräpää, 1887-1971) with him. The correspondence between Tallgren and Europaeus in preparation for the trip shed light on their thoughts, how they saw the journey, and what it meant for both of them. Tallgren published the sword find already before the journey in 1906, connecting the swords to the Scandinavian Bronze Age culture. In 1907, he conducted a small excavation at the site and was able to state unambiguously that the find could be considered as a deposit. The swords can be placed in the fifth period of Oscar Montelius's Bronze Age chronology, dating from the 10th to the 8th centuries BCE. On the way back from Sodankylä, Tallgren also investigated other sites, especially the find place of the Bronze Age mould of a socketed axe in the village of Ala- Paakkola in Kemi(nmaa), that is, the rural parish of Kemi next to the town by the same name. Tallgren had just started to work on his doctoral dissertation on the eastern Bronze Age, and he had a strong personal interest in the Bronze Age finds of Lapland. He concluded that the finds from Ala-Paakkola and Petkula provided evidence of Scandinavian Bronze Age settlement in northern Finland. In early-20th-century archaeology, and not only in archaeology, Lapland was mostly seen from a southern point of view and considered as a periphery under the economic control of southern cultural centres. Tallgren did not question this line of interpretation. Both in Finland and Sweden, Lapland was woven into a view of past that was constructed for the purpose of building Finnish and Swedish identities. Also, the practical fact that few archaeological finds were known from the north helped to maintain this view of prehistory. However, Tallgren's and Europaeus's trip also had other dimensions than archaeological investigation alone. In the 19th century, modern technology and the rise of new classes in industrialising societies had created the phenomenon of modern tourism, and both Tallgren and Europaeus expected their journey to also be a touristic experience. It was connected to the idea of the exotic. In Finland, certain views and landscapes from each province had been signified as carrying meanings of true Finnishness, and thus tourism also served to construct Finnish identity in the same way as history. The trip had a significant influence on the Finnish community of archaeologists because it was one step in the process of convincing Aarne Europaeus to study archaeology as his principal subject at university.
- Publication
Faravid, 2019, Vol 47, p33
- ISSN
0356-5629
- Publication type
Article