Connecting Things through the Visual Arts: Medieval Crescent Moon Pendants as Horse Ornaments

Medieval archaeology as a discipline is usually defined in relation to written sources and history, while other kinds of sources and scholarly traditions studying the same period are overlooked. With a small group of 14th-century crescent moon pendants of bronze from Finland as its focal point, the present article analyses the way in which archaeology connects with the visual arts and the discipline specialized in studying them, art history. Instead of some shared methodology, the inquiry proceeds along the tensions between the material and the visual. After the artefact and its technical qualities are examined in the framework of medieval material culture, the object is reduced, first, to an iconographical motif and, second, into a represented object. Third, the anthropomorphic features applied on the pendant are extracted and considered against the body of medieval grotesque art. This reveals how the visual is also an effective force in the sphere of material culture and human interaction. In the interdisciplinary work between archaeology and art history, the visual and the material emerge as travelling concepts destabilizing traditional approaches and inspiring new insights.     

Roadlessness and the Person: Modes of Travel in the Reindeer Herding Part of the Kola Peninsula

Five wooden spoons dated to the Sub-Neolithic and Bronze Age are known from Finland. Four of them have an animal head carved onto their handles. The decoration has usually been seen as a sign of the spoons' totemistic and ceremonial use. Three of the spoons are stray finds, one comes from a possible cult site and one from a dwelling site. Two spoons are made of Siberian pine, which makes them objects of trade exchange; the westernmost natural occurrence of the raw material was in the Ural Mountains. Previous interpretations of the spoons have inconsistencies and rigid categorizations, which are reconsidered here from the perspective of cultural biographies of things. The functional aspects, ceremonial use and find contexts of the spoons are re-examined along with their connections to totemism, shamanism and ancient trade.     

Heritageisation as a material process: the bishop’s crosier of Turku Cathedral,Finland

The old episcopal crosier of Turku Cathedral is a typical heritage item: a clearly identifiable object pregnant with traditions, including both medievalism and nationalism. A subject of the heritageisation process, it has become a familiar and discursive part of the past. The damaged and worn state of the crosier, which has lost its hook of silver, is a necessary indicator of the passage of time traced back to the Middle Ages. In 1931, the crosier was used as a model for a new one made for the Archbishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, which aroused public debate. The crosier was re-examined scientifically in 2009, and the results complicate its history, providing a new angle to its heritageisation. Not only does the fragmentary state of heritage objects destabilise the familiarity of the past, but also materiality as such is both a necessity and a risk for heritageisation.     

Book review

Folket: Studier i olika vetenskapers syn på begreppet folk, Derek Fewster (ed.), Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2000. 2l6 pp. ISBN 951 583 059 1.     

Teaching Archaeological Heritage Management. Towards a Change in Paradigms

ABSTRACT

The concept of archaeological heritage management (AHM) has been key to wider archaeological research and preservation agendas for some decades. Many universities and other education providers now offer what is best termed heritage management education (HME) in various forms. The emphasis is commonly on archaeological aspects of heritage in a broad sense and different terms are often interchangeable in practice. In an innovative working-conference held in Tampere, Finland, we initiated a debate on what the components of AHM as a course or curriculum should include. We brought together international specialists and discussed connected questions around policy, practice, research and teaching/training, at local, national, transnational and World Heritage levels. In this article we take the Tampere discussions further, focusing especially on the meaning, necessity, implications and prerequisites of interdisciplinary HME. We offer our thoughts on developing HME that reflects the contemporary aspects and needs of heritage and its management.