Changing histories and ethnicities in a Sámi and Norse borderland

ABSTRACT

Hedmark County is a large inland district in southeast Norway that represents the southern part of the Sámi settlement area, and a Sámi–Norse borderland. Centred on the municipalities Rendalen and Engerdal, the study investigates the long-term cultural and social processes involved in the construction and maintenance of a borderland using theories of ethnicity and cultural tradition. Over time, different groups of people have used the diverse landscapes, and two periods are highlighted: the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age (2350–500 BC), and the Iron Age and the Middle Ages (500 BC–AD 1500). The focus is on how different groups of people used the landscapes as seen through variation in settlement, subsistence, borders and contact networks with neighbouring and distant regions.

KEYWORDS:

• Borderlands
• archaeology
• Sámi
• Norse
• ethnicity
• cultural traditions

Acknowledgements

This study is part of the research project Cultural History, Cultural Heritage Management and Mediation in a South Sámi and Norse Borderland (2012–2015), funded by the Research Council of Norway (grant number 212882). I would like to thank the members of the project’s researcher group for early comments on the study: Inger Zachrisson, Jostein Bergstøl, Ewa Ljungdahl, Birgitta Fossum, Jan Åge Riseth, Marit Myrvoll, Wera Grahn, Grete Swensen, Kjell Overvåg, Terje Skjeggedal, Laurajane Smith and Hege Skalleberg Gjerde. I would also like to thank my colleges Kristin Os and May-Liss Bøe Sollund, NIKU, for preparing the GIS-maps, and Per Olav Mathiesen, Rendalen, for his long-running documentation of the hunting systems within the study area. Thanks to Roger-A. Amundsen for a critical review of the content and language. Last but not least, thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the text.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.