Engaging with Sea and Seals: Environmental and Human-Animal Relations on the Northern Coast of the Early Modern Gulf of Bothnia

Abstract

The nature of environmental and human-animal relations in past societies has been subject to much discussion in archaeology and other disciplines, but the significance of environmental beliefs may not have been fully appreciated in post-medieval European contexts. This paper argues that a reassessment of how people engaged with animals and the natural environment is nonetheless needed especially in such contexts as the northern Gulf of Bothnia in early modern Sweden. This is because pre-modern conceptions about the world persisted there for a long time and were arguably more integral to human life than has previously been thought. This paper takes sea and seals in the northern Gulf of Bothnia region as a springboard for addressing broader issues of environmental and human-animal relations in a northern periphery of the early modern world, and for discussing some problems of interpreting archaeological bone material. A new view on the dynamics of human-seal relations, and more generally environmental relations, is derived from relational thinking.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank the editors and referees for their very valuable comments and criticism on an earlier draft of the paper. Risto Nurmi and Timo Ylimaunu have provided help and support for which we are grateful. Vesa-Pekka Herva's work has been funded through a post-doctoral fellowship granted by the Academy of Finland. Anna-Kaisa Salmi has gained funding from two projects funded by the Academy of Finland: ‘The Town, Border and Material Culture’ (project number 134499) and ‘The Body Size, Body Shape and Robusticity of Post-Pleistocene Europeans’ (project number 218267).