The history of settlement on the coastal mainland in Southern Finland. Palaeoecological, archaeological, and etymological evidence from Lohjansaari Island, Western Uusimaa, Finland

Abstract

According to earlier views, the southern coast of Finland was a peripheral area until the 12th and 13th centuries, when Swedish colonists arrived with technological advances and the maritime landscape could be settled. In the course of multidisciplinary work over the past ten years, plenty of new data has been collected, and it should no longer be assumed that the area was empty before the Swedish colonization. In order to better understand the settlement history in the zone between the coast and the inland, we studied the small island of Lohjansaari, which is situated in the large lake of Lohjanjärvi, approximately 62 km northwest of Helsinki.The evidence from archaeology, palaeoecology, and etymology suggests that sedentary settlement based on agriculture became established on the NE shore of Lake Lohjanjärvi by the beginning of the Viking Age at the latest, and the island of Lohjansaari has been used for resources from about AD 570 onwards. A major change towards an open cultural landscape was dated on the island of Lohjansaari to about AD 1095. In general, this dating agrees with former pollen analyses from the coastal areas, where the shift to a fully agrarian landscape becomes visible starting from the period between AD 940 and 1100. A change interpreted as a shift to a two-year crop rotation system took place from AD 1250 onwards.