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Equally disturbing for the critics has been the economic-deterministic approach of the theory and the following disregard of complexities of socio-political structures and their nuances, which may manifest for example as syncretism and creolisation (Webster 1997; 2005), bilateral borrowing and adaptation of cultural elements (Price 2002), selective adaptation, abandonment and re-adaptation of cultural elements (Webster 1999; Nurmi 2009; Kuusela et al. 2016) or simply as internal factors within a society that drive cultural change forward (Stein 1999; 2002). Put simply, the critics point out that the theory enforces a "one size fits all"-model on a sweeping manner ignoring local unique circumstances and resulting historical processes (McGuire 1996, 51; Galaty 2011, 4). Alternatives and amendments Colin Renfrew was among the early and arguably most famous critics of the use of the worldsystem theory in archaeological research, and he presented an alternative model, which he termed peer polity interaction (Renfrew 1986). Peer polity interaction, like world-system theory (from an archaeological perspective), tackles the problem of culture change and interregional interaction, and like world-system theory it, too, acknowledges that the latter is an integral part in these dynamics, and it shares with the world-system theory a systemic approach to the relations of human societies (McGuire 1996, 54). Where it significantly differs is that it does not acknowledge a power asymmetry or a dominative relationship between interacting parties but, like its name denotes, assumes such interactions take place between autonomous peers (Renfrew 1986, 1).

Cultural anthropologists and historians have successfully adopted a borderlands perspective to investigate interaction, power, and identity between emerging or expanding state societies. This article develops an archaeological approach to such interstitial landscapes. It conceptualizes borderlands as spaces where people engage the material world under very specific geopolitical circumstances and create very specific materialities and subjectivities in the process. Political, social, and ideological dynamics between state societies produce two kinds of cultural spaces: hybrid “third spaces” and “fractured landscapes.” Although seemingly contradictory, these often emerge side by side in the same physical space. We illustrate this process by exploring the expansion of the Catholic Church and the Swedish kingdom to the Northern Ostrobothnian coast in northern Finland during the Middle Ages (ca. 1300–1600). During this era, church buildings and cemeteries became sites where locals, ecclesial officials, and state agents negotiated their relations through complex material and spatial practices.

This paper considers the functionality and biographies of artifacts in the context of historical archaeology. It is argued that in order to understand how human life in the recent past unfolded in relation with material culture, artifacts must be recognized to perform various unobvious functions and also be conceived as processes rather than bounded physical objects. The paper begins with a theoretical discussion and then focuses on the post-acquisition life of artifacts and humanartifact relations in the seventeenth-century town of Tornio, northern Finland.

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