Beyond Consumption: Functionality, Artifact Biography, and Early Modernity in a European Periphery

This paper considers the functionality and biographies of artifacts in the context of historical archaeology. It is argued that in order to understand how human life in the recent past unfolded in relation with material culture, artifacts must be recognized to perform various unobvious functions and also be conceived as processes rather than bounded physical objects. The paper begins with a theoretical discussion and then focuses on the post-acquisition life of artifacts and human-artifact relations in the seventeenth-century town of Tornio, northern Finland.