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A genealogy of reflexivity: the skilled lithic craftsman as “scientist”
Figure 6 a, b. Oblique arrowheads from
two different periods of the north Scandinavian
prehistory. Although almost identical
they belong to two different material
culture symbol systems separated by 2000
years. This may be an example of reuse of
the aesthetics from the past whereby the
sign qualities of the ancient stones represented
something “known and safe”.
riod of crisis, whereby the sacred times of origin were activated in attempts
to reconstitute part of a crumbling world view. Through an active effort to
maintain its culture bearing narratives it materialized as a socially charged
technology in the present, thus once again part of the ongoing material dis
culture, the past is “activated to bring a vision of permanence into a social world that is
always in the process of change”.
Writing of this change in a paper in 2004 (Knutsson 2005), I did not pre
sons being part of the hunter gatherer sociality at that time, and the idea of
aesthetics and its relation to ontological security, to discuss the return of the
oblique arrowheads, devises used to kill reindeer, as caused by the metapho
rical relation to the reindeer tied to the cosmology of these groups.
In a recent paper on the early history of the reindeer in Finland the aut
hors (Rankama & Ukkonen 2001) can show that mountain reindeer must
have been present in northernmost Scandinavia in 11500 BP. This animal
entered in the Bromme world around this time, came to northernmost Scan
dinavia soon thereafter, and must have been important to early colonists of
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