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Kjel Knutsson
In 1993, I excavated a small hunting camp in the south Swedish mountain
areas close to Tärnaby in southern Lapland. The site, the remnants of a small
hut with a central hearth situated on a small rock in the lake Tärna, contai
of arrow points related to this event. The formal variability was large, going
and transverse arrowheads (Knutsson 1998). The material had, due to point
the site belonged to period III, as three different analyses gave a date of
c. 6500 BP (c 5400 cal BC) (Knutsson 2005: Manninen 2005). Scanning
the region for comparable material it soon turned out that this period was
of an “expansionist” character, as it was at this stage in the settlement of
northern Norway that the inland was occupied (Olsen 1993). Apart from
the known coastal sites, a few localities had been found during survey in
inland northern Norway and still fewer (Devdis and Auksojavrri) excavated.
Recent work in northernmost Finland has revealed yet another group of sites
2005). Apart from Rastklippan, a handful of surveyed and excavated sites of
this time period with its characteristic lithic industries are found throughout
northernmost Scandinavia today. I will now turn to the past from the van
tage point of the beginning of this tradition around 7000/7500 BP (6400 cal
BC) (Olsen 1993).
Departing from the notion of the visibility of “the sacred past” in the
north Norwegian coastal area represented by the period I lithic assemblages
on sites in the coastal area, it comes as no surprise that the change in ma
terial culture as shown by period III lithics has strong bearing on period I
(Fig. 6:a and b). As a matter of fact, points from the two periods are at times
impossible to separate from each other. If culture is materialized as public
symbolism (see Ortner 1984 above), the drastic change in material culture
in this period indicates a paradigmatic cultural change. The fact that period
III so heavily bears on period I aesthetics seem to indicate that period III
lithics actually is a material representation of an active effort to copy forms
and processes found on period I sites, here, similar to what was discussed
concerning the Hamburg culture above, seen as the sacred time of origins
providing mnemonic devises for a mythical “history”.
Assuming that paradigmatic changes around or slightly before 6500 BC
cation of culture bearing narratives, the reappearance of the oblique point
tradition as shown in Fig. 6a and b may be interpreted as the result of a pe
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