Almost 30 years have passed since gender studies entered archaeological discourse in earnest. What is the current status of gender research? One of the aims with this book is to contribute to answering this and other related questions. Another is to shed some light on the pasts and possible futures of gender research.Contributions deal with publication statistics in journals over the last theirty

Almost thirty years have passed since gender studies entered archaeologicaldiscourse in earnest. What is the current status of gender research? How arethe theoretical and analytical insights from feminisms used within archaeo-logical research? Have these insights been adapted to the archaeologicaldiscipline, have they been developed and deepened? What about other sub- jects in academia, academic d

The study of the movement of ‘things’ — the exchange of objects as gifts or through trade, the itineraries that they followed when on the move, and their changing importance from location to location — can offer unique insights into our understanding of past societies; and archaeology plays a vital role in allowing such movements to be traced. Nonetheless the circulation of objects across time, an

This chapter examines cultural exchange, change, and continuity through the lens of population movement: migration, immigration, refugees, displacement, diaspora, and the modes of transportation that brought diverse people into direct engagement with each other.

Swedish museums curate numerous objects made by indigenous peoples of North America. Collected already in the seventeenth century, their numbers increased in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. While some of them were collected systematically by scientific expeditions, majority of these objects were obtained as personal mementoes. Scrutinizing examples of North American souvenirs collected

We present a hitherto unresearched part of a shared Danish and American cultural heritage: Native American objects in Danish regional museum collections. Thus far, we have identified more than 200 Native American artefacts in 27 local museums, largely a result of Danes abroad privately collecting in the late 1800s and 1950s–70s. The majority of these artefacts, many of which are prehistoric in age

The article examines the ideology of improvement in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mining in northern Sweden in the province of Sápmi. It discusses how the rhetoric of improvement and “civilizing” projects were intertwined with the mining enterprises; how they informed the regulatory and disciplinary ordinances issued for the region; and how the ideas of reform, discipline, and

This paper explores overlapping of economy and politics with ideology in 17th-century northern Sweden. Focusing on silver mining conducted in Sápmi (Lapland), the paper investigates the rhetoric of mines as arenas of moral and cultural improvement, the ways this rhetoric was expressed and aided by material culture and the ways the civilizing projects were contested by the indigenous Sami, towards

The northernmost regions of Fennoscandia attracted attention of travellers and geographers for centuries. These regions were often imagined in ambivalent terms as homelands of evil and dearth or as places of true happiness. From the seventeenth century onwards, Sápmi (Lapland) became a destination of regular exploration undertaken by Swedish and foreign travellers. These travels made it possible t

The New Sweden Colony (1638-1655) is often regarded as an anomaly in the context of 17th century Swedish politics and in the context of other European colonies in America. Equally, the colony's importance in the historical narrative of early modern Sweden and colonial America has been modest. However, more recent research on Scandinavian involvement in the Atlantic economy and early modern politic

A metal pipe forming part of an ethnographic collection which had arrived in Lund University by around 1820 is said to have been recovered from ‘wildmen’ in North America. This short paper provides a description and images of the object and discusses a set of issues that it implies. Where was it made, by whom, when and by what method? Can credible comparisons be found? Could it possibly have been

In the early decades of the 17th century, when the idea of the Swedish colony of New Sweden was conceived and realized, America had a vague place in popular consciousness. Knowledge of the new continent was rather limited, and early Swedish images of it were influenced by tales told by foreign travellers and sailors, by pictorial representations in prints and maps, and by news and reports publishe

The Atlantic world looms large in discussions of how the modern world emerged, and what modernization was about; but there have been calls to engage with these topics from the perspective of ‘margins’. Covering large areas of Fennoscandia, the seventeenth-century Kingdom of Sweden represented a northern end of urban Europe, but also encompassed the mythical Lapland, homeland of the Sámi and of nat

Food encodes social and cultural values and has an important role to play in defining identities. In mixed populations, diet can be used to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This study investigates the extent to which the inhabitants of mediaeval Tallinn, an important trading centre, used food to maintain distinct identities. Human skeletal material was selected from four mediaeval cemeteries i