Borderlands as spaces: Creating third spaces and fractured landscapes in medieval Northern Finland

Abstract

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.

Effects of population dispersal on regional signaling networks: An example from northern Iroquoia

“…In the case of northern Iroquoia, the influence of JC sites was limited to at most a 100-year time span, recognizing that the chronological uncertainties limit our ability to precisely estimate the period of influence. Our results suggest that the JC sites formed a short-lived frontier or borderland fostering interaction between emergent nations and confederacies and provided contexts for the negotiation of power and identity ( 24 , 85 ). Although the literature on sociopolitical borderlands focuses primarily on colonial and state-building contexts, this study suggests that these phenomena also played out among nonstate societies.…”

Copper worlds: a historical archaeology of Abraham and Jakob Momma-Reenstierna and their industrial enterprise in the Torne River Valley, c. 1650–1680

“…At the same time, there is evidence of the making of a particular way of urban life, related and similar, but not identical, to the towns of the southern part of the Gulf of Bothnia (Ylimaunu 2007;Herva and Nurmi 2009;Herva and Ylimaunu 2010;Nurmi 2011). The region's distinct features as a borderland between different power structures, religious traditions, cultures, economies and ethnic groups have led Timo Ylimaunu et al to label the region as a "third space" during the late mediaeval and the early modern periods (Ylimaunu et al 2014).…”

“…e.g. Wallerström 1995;Ylimaunu et al 2014;Bergman and Edlund 2016;Kuusela, Nurmi, and Hakamäki 2016).…”

Unravelling identities on archaeological borderlands: Late Woodland Western Basin and Ontario Iroquoian Traditions in the Lower Great Lakes region

“…Recent archaeological approaches have worked to redefine borderlands as spaces where people engage the material world under very specific geopolitical circumstances (Ylimaunu et al ) and where “two or more groups come into contact with each other, where people of different cultural backgrounds occupy the same territory and where space between them grows intimate” (Naum , 101). Frontiers can be defined, after Lightfoot and Martinez (1995, 472), as “socially charged places where innovative cultural constructs are created and transformed.” These notions of negotiation, contact, and interaction are probably a realistic view of borders in the past.…”

“…Following this thinking, archaeology's strength in border studies, as a subdiscipline of anthropology, may be found in the ability to examine ancient social boundaries and constructions of group and individual identities in the past. With the exception of a few pioneering studies (De Atley and Findlow 1984;Greene and Perlman 1985;Lightfoot and Martinez 1995), the concepts of borders, frontiers, and boundaries and the experience of living in between or on the edges of cultural groups were not principal foci of archaeological attention until the early 2000s (Parker 2006;Parkinson 2006;McCarthy 2008;Naum 2010Naum , 2012Mullin 2011aMullin , 2011bMullin , 2011cChase et al 2014;Ylimaunu et al 2014). This paper builds on and contributes to the growing field of borderland archaeology and helps establish archaeology's place in multidisciplinary dialogues by illustrating ways in which modern and ancient borders are alike.…”