2006 Annual Meeting and Arctic Forum | Abstracts

The Search For a Past: The Prehistory of the Indigenous Saami of Northern Coastal Sweden

Noel D. Broadbent^1
1Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History (MRC 112), Smithsonian Institution, 10th & Constitution Avenue, Washington, DC, 20013-7012, USA, Phone 202-633-1904, Fax 202-357-2684, broadben@si.edu

The goal of this project has been to document and evaluate the long term evidence for Saami settlement and land use on the Bothnian coast of Northern Sweden. Archaeological, ethnographic, historical and place-name evidence indicate that Saami territory once extended as far south as Olso, Stockholm and Helsinki. The Saami had been involved in widespread independent social and economic networks until the 14th Century. By AD 1300 the Swedish State and Church had extended its influence into the far north leading to the displacement of the Saami from the Bothnian coastal regions and into the interior. Taxation and ecological imperatives led to a greater reliance on reindeer. Agrarian and mercantile expansion, combined with the effects of the Black Death and Little Ice Age, transformed the Saami from a northern hunter-gatherer-based society into a nomadic herding society within a complex state system. Saami land rights are still tied to this historical transformation.