Living with death: what moral consideration of mortuary practices reveals about the plurality of worldviews in the multi-millennial past of Central Fennoscandia

ABSTRACT

Mortuary practices evident in the materiality of Central Fennoscandia in Northern Europe are interpreted here rather unconventionally as expressions of morality. This is defined as the culturally approved way to manage death, without scruples. The last seven millennia are set on a flat temporal scale in this paper, revealing contradictions between different ideologies and worldviews over that time. The ubiquitous themes that emerge are agency of place and the bond between fire, life, and death, along with the main criticism, which asserts that the overwhelming fear of the dead reported in the region during 2nd millennium may have been aggravated by Christian dogma. Thus, projecting similar notions of fear to local prehistoric burials is problematic and should be made with caution. The study acts as a reminder that archaeological interpretation is drawn from theory – the interpretational key – which affects both the hypotheses and the results. Changing the key may turn even an established interpretation on its head.

KEYWORDS:

• Archaeology
• Bothnian Gulf
• mortuary practice
• morality
• respect

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the participants of the 2017 Workshop of Archaeology of Religion in Tvärminne for much-needed guiding criticism. Also, professor Vesa-Pekka Herva’s invaluable comments are always appreciated. Aki would like to dedicate this paper to his grandmother Laina, who, after a long and contented life, in accordance with the modern Finnish culture of death in 2016 was made to disappear.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The study was partly funded by Otto A. Malm Foundation.

Notes on contributors

A. Hakonen

A. Hakonen is an early stage researcher and an archaeologist in the University of Oulu, Finland. The paper is part of his PhD, which focuses on the prehistoric local communities of Central Fennoscandia.

V. Hakamäki

V. Hakamäki is an early stage researcher and an archaeologist in the University of Oulu, Finland. He has recently studied several Late Iron Age burial sites and his forthcoming PhD focuses on the Late Iron Age in Finland’s interior regions of Kainuu and Northern Ostrobothnia.