Special Section Animating Archaeology

Living (with) Things: Relational Ontology and Material

Culture in Early Modern Northern Finland

Vesa-Pekka Herva

This article discusses relational ontology and its significance for interpreting archaeological
material from post-medieval contexts. The general theory of the relational constitution
of the world is first introduced and some of its implications discussed in relation to the
meaning of artefact biographies. Second, by drawing from folk beliefs, the article considers
how people in early modern Finland recognized the relational constitution of the world,
which in turn provides new insights into the local mode of perceiving and engaging with
the material world. The case of household spirits and human relationship with buildings
is taken as an example. The archaeological material discussed in the article derives from
the seventeenth-century town of Tornio in northern Finland.

The relationship between people and things, or
mind and materiality, has recently attracted much
theoretical interest in archaeology and various other
disciplines (e.g. Ingold 2000; Knappett 2002; Manzotti
2006; Renfrew 2007). It is widely held today that the
subjectobject and related dualisms are not univer-
sally recognized and, more importantly, may not
adequately describe what the world is really like
and how people relate to it. This has given rise to the
consideration of alternative ontologies and episte-
mologies which can also open up new perspectives
on archaeological interpretation (e.g. DeMarrais et al.
2005; Harvey 2005; Herva & Ylimaunu 2009; Ingold
2006; contributions to this Special Section). While
perhaps not a representative sample, the articles in this
Special Section, Animating Archaeology, nonetheless
illustrate that alternative ontologies have mainly been
considered in association with non-Western and pre-
modern societies. Epistemological and ontological
issues are not unfamiliar in post-medieval archaeology
(see e.g. Hicks 2005; Hicks & Horning 2006), but they
have so far had a limited impact on the interpretation
of archaeological material (see also Mrozowski 2006,
245).
This article discusses relational ontology and its
significance for the interpretation of archaeological
material from post-medieval contexts. Relational
ontology, as it is understood here, proposes that all
Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19:3, 38897 2009 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research
doi:10.1017/S0959774309000572 Received 1 April 2009; Accepted 20 May 2009; Revised 22 July 2009
388
entities in the world (organisms and things) are con-
tinuously changing, or coming into being, and that the
identities and properties of entities are determined by
the relationships between entities (e.g. Ingold 2006).
Relational thinking will be addressed on two levels.
First, the article discusses relational ontology as a
general theory of how the world is constituted and
illustrates some of its implications for archaeological
interpretation through a brief look at artefact biogra-
phies from the seventeenth-century town of Tornio
on the northern Gulf of Bothnia (Fig. 1). Second, the
article addresses the question of how the relational
constitution of the world was perceived and under-
stood in the context of early modern Finland. It is
argued that the local way of being and engagement
with the material world can be accessed by combining
the general theory of relationality with certain Finnish
folk beliefs. As an example of that engagement, human
relationships with buildings are considered, which
in turn suggests a new interpretation of the special
deposits associated with buildings in seventeenth-
century Tornio.
Tornio and northern Finland: historical context
Tornio is located on the small island of Suensaari in
the delta of the River Tornio (Fig. 2). The town was
founded in 1621 during a period of intensive urbaniza-
 Herva Relational Ontology and Material Culture in Early Modern Northern Finland
Figure 1. Location of Tornio and other early modern towns on the northern Gulf of Bothnia.
(Map: V.-P. Herva.)
tion in the Kingdom of Sweden which had established
itself as a northern European great power in the early
seventeenth century (Karonen 1999). The early inhab-
itants of Tornio are likely to have consisted mainly of
local peasants, but burghers from other towns also
moved in. While Tornio controlled trade over a huge
area in northernmost Fennoscandia, there were only
a few hundred residents in the town throughout the
early modern period (Mntyl 1971). Like most small
towns in Sweden, Tornio was village-like and agrarian
in character especially in the seventeenth century, and
its economy relied heavily on traditional rural activi-
ties such as keeping livestock and fishing (Lilja 1995;
Mntyl 1971; Ylimaunu 2007).
The northern Gulf of Bothnia, where Suensaari
lies, had been Christianized since the early fourteenth
century, but the pre-Christian understanding of the
world co-existed with Christianity for centuries. Even
the adoption of Lutheranism as the state religion in
Sweden in the sixteenth century did not mark abrupt
changes on the northern periphery, and both pre-
Christian and Catholic beliefs and practices continued
to flourish (Lehtonen 2002, 2389; Luukko 1954,
6536; Virrankoski 1973, 699709). The residents of
seventeenth-century Tornio were formally Protestant
Christians, but there is no reason to assume that Prot-
estantism, or Christianity in general, or in any ortho-
dox form, dictated common peoples understanding
of the world (also cf. Ginzburg 1992). On the contrary,
historical sources and folklore reveal a richness of folk
389
beliefs which may be more important in appreciating
the perception of, and engagement with, the material
world than has been recognized so far. Before embark-
ing on that discussion, however, relational ontology
must be addressed on a more general level.
Relationality and the engagement with things
While outdated in many ways (see e.g. Pylkknen
2007), dualistic and/or mechanistic assumptions
still underlie the modern Western understanding of
the world. Modern Western ontology represents the
universe as composed of bounded and autonomous
physical objects, organisms and things, which are
sealed by an outer boundary or shell that protects their
inner constitution from the traffic of interactions with
their surroundings (Ingold 2006, 11). Thus, the prop-
erties of physical entities are taken as not depending
on how those entities relate with other entities. A stone
is always really just a lump of matter regardless of
its particular context and the network of relationships
within which it is enmeshed; it is of no significance
to the properties of the stone what people happen to
think about it or how they treat it. In other words,
the inner physical constitution of entities suppos-
edly defines what things are (see further, Goodwin
1988; Ingold 2000; 2006; Manziotti 2006). Modernist
ontology, then, also regards an organism and its
environment as separate but interacting systems, and
this idea, as Jrvilehto (1998, 326) puts it, seems to be
 Special Section Animating Archaeology
Figure 2. Tornio in the late 1730s. (From R. Outhier, Journal dun voyage au nord en 1736 &
1737 (1744).)
so self-evident that we usually do not see any reasons
to doubt it; actually, it would be strange to maintain
anything else. The organismenvironment dualism,
combined with the conceptual division between
subject and object, maintains that things out there in
the world are ontologically and categorically separate
from human beings.
Relational ontology, by contrast, proposes that
the identities and properties of all material entities
in the world are relationally constituted that is,
defined by the physical, biological, social and other
relationships that entities develop with other entities
over time (for varying perspectives on this view, see
e.g. Bateson 2000, 1513; Bird-David 1999; Gell 1998;
Ingold 2000; 2006; Jrvilehto 1998). This means that the
identities and properties of organisms and things are
contextual and continuously being generated rather
than inscribed in the physical constitution of entities
(Ingold 2006). One and the same artefact or landscape
element, for instance, can be an agent or person-like
being in one situation and just an object in another
(e.g. Willerslev 2007, 11618). A further implication of
relational ontology is that causation is not limited to
mechanical cause-effect operations because organisms
and things can be manipulated by manipulating the
390
relationships that are constitutive of these material
entities. Another implication is that people are spatio-
temporally distributed beings which spread out into
the world through the material traces associated with
them (see Gell 1998).
Relational ontology, then, dissolves the boundary
between organism and its environment and rejects
the subjectobject dualism (Gibson 1986; Ingold 2006;
Jrvilehto 1998). When people engage with material
things, those things become parts of, and continuous
with, people and their perceptual-behavioural-cogni-
tive capacities (Clark 1997; Day 2004; also cf. Turner
2000). As Clark & Chalmers (1998, 89 emphasis in
original) put it:
In these cases, the human organism is linked with an
external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a
coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system
in its own right. All the components in the system
play an active causal role, and they jointly govern
behaviour in the same sort of way that cognition
usually does. If we remove the external component
the systems the behavioural competence will drop,
just as it would if we removed part of its brain.
The relevance of these admittedly abstract notions
to practical archaeological interpretation is that they
 Herva Relational Ontology and Material Culture in Early Modern Northern Finland

encourage a reconsideration of the nature and mean-

ing of everyday engagement with material culture
in the past. Recent thinking and research in various
disciplines indicates that material culture mediates
and shapes social and environmental relations, or
human engagement with the world, in ways that are
not always obvious and can be difficult or impossible
to grasp within conventional dualistic frameworks
(e.g. Clark 1997; Day 2004; DeMarrais et al. 2005; Gell
1998). The need to rethink humanartefact relations is
particularly necessary in post-medieval archaeology
which covers a period that appears as a relatively (and
deceptively) familiar past (cf. Tarlow & West 1999),
and this sense of familiarity may discourage scrutiny
of some very basic modernist assumptions about the
relationship between people and the material world.
Relational thinking, as a general-level theory, can help
to focus attention on overlooked aspects of material
culture and reassess the significance of both ordinary
and special features of everyday archaeological mate-
Figure 3. Owners marks incised on the bottom of
rial. This is briefly addressed, followed by a more
a maiolica plate (left) and a clay-pipe bowl (right).
contextually informed relational interpretation of
(Photograph, R. Nurmi.)
material culture.

Relationality and artefact biographies in Tornio
A look at the biographies of clay pipes and pottery
from seventeenth-century Tornio illustrates the
implications of relational thinking for archaeological
interpretation on a general level. To begin with, con-
sider owners marks. There is hardly anything special
about an owners mark as such, but it is intriguing
that the three cases that have been identified in
the Tornio material appear on the most ordinary
everyday artefacts: a decorated maiolica plate, an
earthenware bowl, and a clay pipe bowl (Fig. 3). The
maiolica plate was found in a back-filled cellar pit
which produced an assemblage that may (or may not)
be special, whereas the other two finds derive from
ordinary domestic contexts associated with buildings
(Herva & Nurmi 2009, 167; Herva & Ylimaunu 2009,
23940). The pipe bowl is particularly interesting as
clay pipes have generally been considered disposable
goods, used for a very short time and then discarded
(e.g. Fox 2002, 69; Mellanen 2002, 36). If clay pipes
were disposable goods, why bother incising a mark
on them? Little, of course, can be said about the
meanings and broader implications of the marks
on the basis of only three examples, but they may
nonetheless hint at some kind of special relationship
between the marked artefacts and their owners, and
certain other features of the clay-pipe material and
pottery elucidate further this idea.
While owners marks are rare, signs of wear,
repair and recycling appear frequently on such
everyday artefacts as pottery and pipes derived
from ordinary domestic contexts associated with
seventeenth-century building remains. While some
patterning in the distribution of these signs can be
identified, at least in the clay-pipe material, it suf-
fices here to note that the evidence of wear, repair
and recycling appears to be fairly evenly distributed
and does not show any obvious anomalies (Herva &
Nurmi 2009, 16773; Salo 2007). Such signs could be
taken to indicate low economic status (e.g. Niukkanen
2002, 378) or limited availability of household goods,
but they can also be considered from the point of
view of humanartefact relations. Wornness through
use is particularly clear in the clay pipe material and
especially in the form of teeth marks on pipe stems
(Salo 2007). These marks are indicative of (very) long
use-life, which in turn may be indicative of bonding
between particular artefacts and their owners, that
is, some kind of organic unity between people and
things (Meskell 2004, 47). A number of potsherds
from Tornio, and less certainly some fragments of clay
pipes, show evidence of repair (Herva & Nurmi 2009,
167, 16970; Salo 2007). Repairing obviously expanded
the involvement of artefacts in social life, but like wear,
it also contributed to the physical personalization
of artefacts. Wear and repair, then, produced a form
of patina on artefacts and thus signalled (relatively)

391
 Special Section Animating Archaeology
long-standing relationships between certain artefacts
and their owners (cf. Lucas 2006, 425; McCracken
1988). In addition to becoming identified with their
owners through physical wear, long-term involvement
with particular artefacts would also have resulted,
in Gells (1998) terms, in the artefacts abducting and
externalizing some properties of their owners.
There is also noteworthy evidence of recycling in
the archaeological material from Tornio. The recycled
material includes, for instance, potsherds and pieces
of glass which have been shaped into gaming pieces,
counters, and spindle whorls, but other materials
were also recycled, including stone and wood from
buildings (Herva & Nurmi 2009, 1667; Ylimaunu
2007, 312). Clear patterns of what was recycled and
how do not stand out, and the impression is that
recycling was frequent, if not statistically that com-
mon, and somewhat unspecific. Recycling can be
understood in economic terms, of course, especially
in regard to building materials. However, economic
or other straightforward practical explanations seem
insufficient for understanding the recycling potsherds
and the like, and it seems that recycling was (also)
symbolically important (Herva & Nurmi 2009, 1736).
This symbolic recycling, in turn, could perhaps be
understood as willingness to hold on to artefacts, even
if only through tokens of them. After all, pieces of
broken artefact retain some (relationally constituted)
properties of the original artefacts.
Peoples relationship with artefacts could extend
beyond breakage, but artefacts could continue to be
functional and meaningful even after discard and
deposition. For instance, potsherds, pipe fragments,
and other such rubbish were apparently laying around
in seventeenth-century Tornio. The incorporation of
pieces of broken artefacts into the soil not only altered
the texture of the ground but also tempered it with
the relationally constituted properties of artefacts.
That is, something of the people themselves was
incorporated into the land through the bits and pieces
of the artefacts associated with them. The presence of
rubbish in the ground was a visual index of dwelling
and mixed (as we would understand it) the natural
with the social in a very concrete manner (see also
DeSilvey 2006; Edensor 2005; Evans 2003, 11921, 125).
Rubbish thus promoted a sense of continuity and
belonging to the place (cf. Douny 2007).
The above notes on artefact biographies do not,
as such, constitute an interpretation of the pottery and
clay-pipe material from Tornio but rather represent
an attempt to see ordinary post-medieval finds in a
new way. The main point is that the later biographies
of artefacts are not merely reflective of something
392
behind immediate humanartefact relations (eco-
nomic status, identity, etc.), but rather that they can
also point to modes of engaging with things, and
understanding materiality, beyond the subjectobject
dualism. Indeed, Finnish folk beliefs imply that vari-
ous artefacts, materials and landscape elements were
considered to possess special properties and powers
that are not reducible to the physical constitution of
those things (various examples can be found in e.g.
Eilola 2003; Herva & Ylimaunu 2009; Sarmela 1994;
Stark-Arola 2002). However, the significance of these
folk beliefs have not been properly appreciated by
archaeologists and historians; the following section
attempts to reassess folk beliefs and their implications
for understanding human relationships with the mate-
rial world in early modern Finland.
Folk beliefs and relationality in context
Historical records and folklore suggest that people
in early modern Finland co-inhabited the world with
non-human beings, such as trolls, giants, extraordi-
nary animals, and different kinds of spirits. Some
beings were associated with particular places or
landscape elements in the wilderness (springs, lakes,
forests, rocky places) and others with the cultural and
domestic sphere. While capable of being invisible,
non-human beings could also manifest themselves
in, for instance, human and animal form or as natural
phenomena. Moreover, a variety of things from land-
scape elements to artefacts were considered to have
special properties and powers (see further Asplund
Ingemark 2004; Eilola 2003; Herva & Ylimaunu 2009;
Sarmela 1994; Stark-Arola 2002).
The folk conceptions of non-humans and special
properties of ordinary things have conventionally
been understood to reflect animistic and/or shaman-
istic belief systems deriving from the pre-Christian
era (e.g. Eilola 2003, 9094; Siikala 1992), but rela-
tional thinking provides a different perspective on
the matter. Relational ontology, as discussed above,
proposes that things can have properties of animate
beings and persons in certain contexts of interac-
tion, which in turn enables a degree of two-way
relatedness and sociality between people and things.
Considered against this background, folk beliefs can
be taken to provide glimpses into the richness of the
everyday world and the dynamic humanenviron-
ment relations in the past. Folk beliefs in this view
were not beliefs at all that is, misconceptions about
the (workings of the) world but rather embedded
in and arising from a particular way of being in,
and relating to, the world. Finnish folk beliefs were
 Herva Relational Ontology and Material Culture in Early Modern Northern Finland
mainly documented during the nineteenth and
twentieth century, and there are also regional and
other variations in the material, which means that
specific beliefs cannot simply be projected back onto
such specific contexts as seventeenth-century Tornio.
When used with due caution and on a sufficiently
general level, however, the folk-belief data can help
to elucidate the dynamics of humanenvironment
relations in early modern Finland (see further Herva
& Ylimaunu 2009).
As indicated above, a main difference between
the traditional and relational perspective on folk beliefs
is that the former takes beliefs to have existed in the
heads of past people, whereas the latter holds that
non-human beings and special properties of ordinary
things were perceived rather than believed to exist
(see Bird-David 1999, 745; Bloch 2005, 112; Harvey
2005, 1227). For instance, to encounter a nature spirit
was to recognize that a particular tree, body of water,
or some other landscape element behaved in a man-
ner that sentient and conscious beings are expected
to behave, which was the basis for a social kind of
engagement with particular landscape elements or
other non-human entities in particular situations (see
Ingold 2000, 90100; 2006, 16). People, in other words,
negotiated their relationships with (certain constitu-
ents of) the world instead of understanding the world
reductively in terms of its material and symbolic
utility to humans (see further Plsson 1996). There is
no reason, furthermore, to assume that the perceived
special properties of things were attributed to some
beings or forces that were considered external to and
separate from the actual material things themselves. It
would not have been particularly problematic for peo-
ple to accept agency and other person-like properties
of things in a world where straightforward modernist
distinctions between the natural and the social, or the
natural and the supernatural, were not drawn (see
further e.g. Henry 2008; Ingold 2000).
Living buildings and building deposits from Tornio
It is widely accepted that buildings are in some ways
comparable to organisms. Buildings have their own
particular life-cycles and the relationship between
people (or culture) and the built environment is
mutual on a certain level (e.g. Gieryn 2002; Rapoport
1969; Thomasson 2004). Buildings have also been
regarded as living beings and active agents in dif-
ferent cultures around the world (e.g. Blier 1983;
Bradley 2007; Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1995; Joyce &
Gillespie 2000), but such explicitly animistic notions
of buildings have not been discussed in post-medi-
393
eval European contexts. A reinterpretation of certain
folk beliefs in a relational framework, however,
proposes that buildings were living entities in early
modern Finland, which in turn has implications for
the interpretation of special deposits documented
in association with buildings in seventeenth-century
Tornio and other sites (e.g. Herva & Ylimaunu 2009;
Hukantaival 2007).
Finnish folklore shows that spirits were associ-
ated not only with certain elements of the natural
landscape but houses and other buildings as well. The
tradition of household spirits is heterogeneous and
the character of spirits ambiguous, but spirits have
variously been described as impersonal and invis-
ible powers and anthropomorphic beings (Haavio
1942, 1313, 13943, 214, 403; Sarmela 1994, 15960).
It is clear from the folklore, however, that household
spirits could be seen, heard and felt they were
perceived and experienced, rather than believed, to
exist (Haavio 1942, 72109; Sarmela 1994, 1613). What
gave rise to perceptions and experiences of spirits is
unimportant here because the point is simply that
people took the existence of household spirits seri-
ously. For instance, food and drink were offered to
household spirits to maintain good relationships with
them (Haavio 1942, 41338; Jauhiainen 1999, 2268).
People also asked for permission from spirits to stay
overnight in uninhabited forest cottages and the like,
and the tradition of bidding good day when entering
empty houses is known from Sweden and Norway
(Haavio 1942, 11013). Household spirits were active
and engaged with people in certain situations. They
could, for instance, contribute to household chores
and save people in danger, but they could also express
discontent with inappropriate behaviour and turn
vengeful if mistreated (Haavio 1942, 929; Jauhiainen
1999, 21622, 226; Sarmela 1994, 1613). Overall, the
folklore shows that household spirits were considered
real-world beings with which people could, and did,
engage in two-way interactions.
The folklore of household spirits, as docu-
mented in the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
clearly combines notions of dwellings and dwelling
sites as being charged with power with Christian
ideas of non-human beings and relatively recent
fairytale traditions (Haavio 1942, 214). It is interesting
for the purposes of this article that spirits could be
identified with the very structure of buildings, espe-
cially the fireplace, and they could also be associated
with timber, but this theme is much more common
in the context of ships than buildings (Haavio 1942,
1717, 1926; Jauhiainen 1999, 225; Sarmela 1994,
15960). The problems of dating notwithstanding,
 Special Section Animating Archaeology
Table 1. Certain or probable special deposits associated with seventeenth-century building remains in Tornio.
Find Building Context
Cooking pot A under NE corner
iron bar A foundation
bear claws B/border clay lining/border
bone spoon handle B fireplace
axe head B foundation/under floor
slag D foundation
slag D between floors
pottery, cannon balls D cellar-pit fill
slag E clay lining
the understanding of household spirits as invisible
powers associated with buildings arguably predates
the anthropomorphization of household spirits, that
is, their representation as independent brownie-
like beings (see Jauhiainen 1999, 21622; Sarmela
1994, 160). It can plausibly be suggested against
this background, and from the relational perspec-
tive, that household spirits, especially in peripheral
regions of early modern Finland (see also Sarmela
1994, 15960), were not actually distinct entities that
inhabited buildings; rather, buildings as such, as
material things, were perceived to possess special,
person-like properties.
Provided that the traditional pre-modern
cosmology in Finland was in fact based on broadly
animistic-shamanistic conceptions, and that aspects
of that cosmology preserved well into the early mod-
ern period in peripheral regions (see Lahelma 2007,
1223 with references), there is nothing inherently
problematic with the idea of buildings as animate and
person-like entities. Furthermore, and more generally,
buildings are organic entities by nature, and houses
in particular are deeply involved in social life, which
makes them particularly prone to accumulating life
force and developing person-like properties (see Gell
1998, 222, 2256, 2523). It must also be noted that the
primary building material in early modern Finland
was wood, and wooden buildings call for continuous
maintenance especially in the climatic and environ-
mental conditions of the north. The vulnerability of
buildings and the importance of houses for successful
human life would thus have promoted attentiveness
and sensitivity to the built environment. The tradition
of household spirits must be understood as being
embedded in these broader dynamics between people
and buildings.
The proposed re-interpretation of the Finnish
household-spirit tradition provides a new frame-
work for understanding the function and meaning of
special deposits associated with buildings in seven-
394
Type Dating
foundation deposit pre-1630
foundation deposit pre-1630
foundation/border deposit 16201660
rebuilding deposit 16601690
rebuilding deposit c. 1700
foundation deposit pre-1630
rebuilding deposit 16301640
rebuilding/closing deposit pre-1640
foundation deposit 16501700
teenth-century Tornio (Table 1). These deposits range
from almost certain foundation deposits, such as the
cooking pot under a corner of a house, to intriguing
but slightly problematic concentrations of slag associ-
ated with some buildings (Fig. 4) (see further Herva
& Ylimaunu 2009). Building deposits similar to those
from Tornio have conventionally been interpreted as
a means of repelling evil spirits and/or bringing luck
to households (Hoggard 2004; Hukantaival 2007;
Merrifield 1987). However, it could be argued that the
power of the hidden artefacts was (also) directed to
buildings themselves. The incorporation of objects into
the structure of buildings, in this view, would have
served to infuse whatever (relationally constituted)
special properties the hidden things were considered
to have had into buildings. Thus, the making of build-
ing deposits could be compared, for instance, to the
incorporation of tufa blocks into sacred buildings
in Britain in order to infuse spiritual properties into
architecture, and to the installing of holy relics into
medieval churches in order to animate them in some
sense (Davies & Robb 2002; Gell 1998, 1423; see also
Sillar, this volume).
The making of building deposits in Tornio, then,
can be understood as a means of turning buildings
into something more than just matter. The invest-
ing of special properties into architecture, in turn,
enabled people to connect and engage with build-
ings by other than purely mechanical means. It must
be emphasized, however, that building deposits as
such did not determine whether or not buildings had
special properties, nor did they animate buildings in
some straightforward manner. Rather, the making of
building deposits facilitated sociality between people
and buildings and contributed to the development of
buildings into person-like beings, a status which is
reflected in the folklore of household spirits. Further-
more, buildings were probably active, or regarded
as living and person-like beings, only in certain situ-
ations rather than all the time.
 Herva Relational Ontology and Material Culture in Early Modern Northern Finland

Figure 4. Tornio in c. 1647, with the locations marked of six certain or possible special deposits in relation to building
remains. Numbers 13 (cooking pot, iron bar, axe-head) are probable foundation deposits; number 4 (bear claws)
is a possible foundation deposit; and numbers 5 and 6 (bone spoon handle, contents of a back-filled cellar pit) are
possible rebuilding deposits. (Drawing: V.-P. Herva, based on the maps by K. Arminen and R. Nurmi, Laboratory of
Archaeology, University of Oulu.)

Conclusion town of Tornio in northern Finland. Second, relational

This article has discussed the relevance of relational
ontology to the interpretation of post-medieval
archaeological material. In dissolving the boundaries
between organism and environment and subject and
object, relational ontology revises some very basic
modernist assumptions about the (workings of the)
world. Relational thinking is potentially useful for
archaeological interpretation in two ways, or on two
levels. First, relationality as a general framework for
thought provides a new perspective on material cul-
ture and thus encourages reassessing the meanings
of things. This aspect of relational thinking was illus-
trated by looking at the post-acquisition biographies
of pottery and clay pipes from the seventeenth-century
thinking can help us to reconsider attitudes to, and
our understanding of, the material world in a more
contextual manner. It was argued that so-called folk
beliefs provide clues to how people in early modern
Finland recognized the relational constitution of the
world, which in turn offers new insights into human-
environment relations in the past, that is, local modes
of perceiving and engaging with the material world.
In the case of the tradition of household spirits and
human relationship with buildings, I argued that
buildings in early modern Finland were potentially
animate entities, and that the making of building
deposits, which have been identified at Tornio and
other sites, contributed to the development of build-
ings into living and person-like beings. While this

395
 Special Section Animating Archaeology
particular case focused on special finds, the approach
informed by relational thinking and folk beliefs is in
principle relevant to all archaeological material.
Vesa-Pekka Herva
Department of Archaeology
Box 1000
90014, University of Oulu
Finland
Email: vesa-pekka.herva@oulu.fi
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Ben Alberti and Tamara Bray for inviting
me to WAC 6 in Dublin, Ireland, and for very helpful com-
ments on earlier drafts of the article. I am also grateful to
Janne Ikheimo, Eeva-Maria Viitanen and two referees for
reading and commenting on the article. The research has
been funded through a post-doctoral fellowship granted
by the Academy of Finland.
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Author biography
Vesa-Pekka Herva is presently an Academy of Finland post-
doctoral fellow (20082010) at the University of Oulu, Fin-
land. His current research focuses on humanenvironment
relations in early modern northern Finland. Other areas of
interest include various aspects of historical archaeology,
material culture studies and the Bronze Age Aegean.