Sámi Boat Building in a Cultural Revitalization Context: Unifying Community and Anthropological Goals

Summary

The arctic indigenous people known as the Sámi inhabit northern Norway, Russia, Finland and Sweden, comprising distinctive cultures and languages. The group has experienced a legacy of subjugation strongly evidenced to this day. In northern Finland, the expansion of community-driven cultural heritage revitalization programs have focused on the reclamation of traditional knowledge perceived as lost or disappearing. This remembering is an active process which involves engagement with past material culture detailed in museum records, the archaeological record, oral histories, and tools and materials of production themselves. The paper examines a specific case study involving the building of a traditional Sámi boat made of planks sewn together with pine roots. This project sought to create tangible benefits for the community undertaking the work, after establishing they wished to have the project recorded in detail. Simultaneously, we sought to address specific research questions comparing the community’s engagement with past techniques and productions to that of experimental archaeologists.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Combating Inequality: Archaeology and the Production of Capital in the 21st Century

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