Abstract
Abstract This article presents a comparison of material records of two nearby regions on the coast of the Bothnian Bay. The timeframe is 5300–2000 BCE. The focus is on regional differences, which indicate a schizmogenesis of communal identities. The study calls for a reorientation of research concerning Fennoscandian prehistory. More attention should be paid to localized prehistories. It is argued that when prehistoric society is used as a fundamental group category, especially in the context of forager communities, the modern concept of state society distorts the underlying framework. Focusing on the regional level by constructing local prehistoric narratives limits the anachronistic effect and allows the proliferation of local communal identities. Such local prehistories, when collated and compared, offer a pathway to understanding prehistoric stateless societies, which are misrepresented by simplistic material cultural zones and the inherent homogeny ingrained within the concept of society. In this paper, the analysis is focused on practices representing local traditions. Two divergent themes that arise from the local prehistoric narratives are the Late Mesolithic use of local stone materials and regional changes in Neolithic dwelling forms.
Highlights
We will focus on identifying local traditions within a culturally associated archaeological record
The differences inform us about local communal identities, which are understood here in terms of schizmogenesis
This study uses the Swedish chronology, which is based on the wider European chronology relating to the expanding influence of agricultural practices
Summary
We will focus on identifying local traditions within a culturally associated archaeological record. Since the region’s postglacial land uplift has remained consistently stronger than sea-level rise (e.g., Poutanen & Steffen, 2014), the coastal archaeological record has become arranged into elevation zones representing different eras (see e.g., Hakonen, 2017; Okkonen, 2003). While the majority of the archaeological sites in the region remain unexcavated, this arrangement allows the minimum of terminus post quem dating for all sites, when they first emerged from the sea. This makes the region uniquely suited for the study of long-term developments (see Tallavaara & Pesonen, 2020). We will be taking advantage of recent leaps in digital archaeology, including lidar and digitized archives, which allow us to efficiently draw the two separate datasets, reconstruct past landscapes, and identify the most comparative archaeological indicators
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