From Neolithic Seal Hunters to Modern Hyrdo-electricity Producers
Andre Costopolous, Phd
McGill University
Andre Costopolous is an assistant professor of Anthropology at McGill University in
Montreal. His research deals with the application of computer simulation and other
computational methods to archaeology. Along with a group of international students, he
also researches the transition from stone to metal technology in Northern Europe
generally, and Northern Finland specifically.
Since 1997, I have been working with Finnish archaeologists and university students
from all over North America and Europe to reconstruct the economy of the Ii river
estuary as it existed 5500 years ago. In the 1960's, northern Finland, as in several
communities in northern Canada, saw the establishment of large hydro-electric damming
projects. These required archaeological surveys of river valleys and led to the
identification of very rich archaeological remains. One of these projects, in the Ii river
valley in Northern Finland, turned up several very large occupations ranging in age from
7000 - 4000 years old.
As one moves down river valleys in northern Finland (as in northern Canada) one
encounters increasingly young archaeological remains. This is due to isostatic land
uplift. At the height of the last glaciation, about 20 000 years ago, a large part of the
northern hemisphere was covered with very thick ice sheets. These were so heavy that
they actually pressed down on the earth's crust and depressed it. When the ice melted
away between 15 000 and 10 000 years ago, the earth's crust was released of this weight
and began rebounding like a spring. At first the land was rising very rapidly and the
process still goes on today, but at a much reduced rate. This land rise means that the
shore is constantly moving. By finding the elevation of a particular point on land in a
northern area, one can estimate the time when that point first emerged from the sea, and
therefore the first period during which it became available for exploitation by humans.
The site that we have been excavating since 1999, near the modern village of Yli-Ii, is
now located on the Ii river, about 20km inland. Things were very different in Yli-Ii 5500
years ago. Back then, the sea was 60 meters higher than it is now, and Yli-Ii was right on
the river mouth, in the middle of a very rich estuary ecosystem, which included
populations of seal, annually migrating birds and salmon, and of course the humans who
used them for subsistence and as raw materials for various technological applications.
When it was part of the nordic estuary adaptation of a human population, our little site
was most likely a seal hunting camp, but it is located within a few hundred meters of 3
large neolithic village sites. It served a particular economic purpose in the survival
strategy of its users. In summer 2003, we will begin excavating a new site that we
identified in a surface survey in 2002 and it is located on the south side of the paleoestuary. The archaeological remains on the north side of the estuary are starting to be
well explored, but very little is known of the occupations that might have been present on
the south side. This new excavation will help us fill in an important part of the economic
system of the area at the time the initial occupation. I am hoping that this in turn will
help us understand the long-term evolution of the area's population from neolithic seal
hunters to modern hydro-electricity producers.