Ground slate technology is a trademark of circumpolar hunter-gatherers occupying coastal ecotones. However, a causal framework for explaining what drives the apparent adaptive success of slate technology is lacking. Attempting to remedy this, the current paper provides the first palaeodemographic and environmentally informed review of a maritime slate complex. Employing what is arguably the best ...

A few kilometers from the border with Russia, in the town of Kirkenes in the easternmost corner of Northern Norway, there stands a bronze statue of a Soviet soldier looking out over the borderland. The Soviet Liberation Monument, as the statue is called, was unveiled in 1952 by the Norwegian authorities, in gratitude for the Soviet liberation of the East Finnmark area in 1944. The statue has served ...

This report summarises consequences of a planned wind park at the Sneqord peninsula, Måsøy municipality. Impact assessments are conducted for landscape perspectives, flora, fauna, outdoor recreation, cultural heritage and reindeer herding. The whole peninsula, 150 km2. is evaluated, with the main focus on higher parts where the potential wind turbines will be located. For the landscape, a wind park ...

Arctic Shaman Circle was founded in Oslo in November 2018. This article discusses what the Circle’s founding document refers to as “spiritual activism”, and how this was translated into action over the year that followed. I will follow one case in particular, which concerns plans for a power plant at the base of the mountain Aahkansnjurhtjie in the South Sámi area. Aahkansnjurhtjie is a sacred Sámi ...

This article addresses emergent religious formations at protest scenes in the broader context of indigenous organization and identity-building. Our central example is the Standing Rock protest in North Dakota, 2016–2017, a local encampment-based event that quickly expanded into an international indigenous peoples’ movement. We argue that religion was a key register in the camps, during direct ...

The research and commercial activity in the Scandinavian portion of the Arctic increased appreciably in the last decades of the 19th century and up until the 1920s. Not unexpectedly, the idea arose during this period to bring the largest group of the as yet unclaimed Arctic islands, Spitsbergen, under Norwegian or Swedish control. Norwegian political ambitions in the far north seem to have expanded ...

In 1936 an extraordinary find of a clothed skeleton wrapped in a blanket and covered with birch bark appeared in a bog at Skjoldehamn on Andøya Island. The wrapped body was laid on a reindeer pelt, which in turn was placed on sticks of birch. The grave dates to the 11th century, probably the later half. Compared with relevant Norse, Sámi, and Christian graves and burial customs, the Skjoldehamn grave ...