Published with license by Koninklijke Brill NV | doi:./- © Asgeir Svestad and Bjørnar Olsen,  | ISSN: -X ( print) - ( online) Acta Archaeologica . () – brill.com/acar Archaeology, Language, and the Question of Sámi Ethnogenesis Asgeir Svestad | ORCID: --- Professor, Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway , Tromsø, Norway Correspoding author asgeir.svestad@uit.no Bjørnar Olsen Professor, Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway , Tromsø, Norway bjornar.olsen@uit.no 1 Introduction The question about Sámi ethnogenesis has long been a recurring issue in Nordic humanities research, most notably in linguistics, archaeology, history, ethnography and ethnology. Physical and social anthropologists have also added their share, and more lately, genetic studies on the topic have flourished. Given the cross-disciplinary interest and the shifting social and theoretical condi- tions of research, opinions have, of course, varied and changed (for summaries, see, e.g. Schanche 2000, 20–93; Ojala 2009, 115–141; Hansen & Olsen 2014, 9–34). While many scholars before the mid-19th century believed the Sámi to be the original population of Scandinavia (e.g. Nilsson 1838–1843; Keyser 1839; Munch 1852), sub- sequent scholars proposed a more confined north- ern Fennoscandian or eastern origin (e.g. Rygh 1867; Worsaae 1872; Montelius 1874; Hansen 1907). In 1929, the Swedish archaeologist Gustaf Hallström launched one of the most influential and persistent theories ascribing the current presence of the Sámi to a migration taking place at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the Pre-Roman Iron Age (Hallström 1929; see also Wiklund 1932). A cli- matic deterioration was thought to have depopulated large areas of northwestern Fennoscandia, leaving the land open to Sámi migrants moving from their home- land in northern Finland and the adjacent regions of Russia/Karelia. The archaeological signatures of this migration were eastern bronzes and asbestos ceram- ics, the former with quite rare occurrences, the latter a Abstract Debates over the ethnogenesis of the Sámi and their histori- cal presence in Fennoscandia have long affected scholarly and public discourses. More recently, these debates have been fueled by new propositions launched by Finnish linguists regarding the origin and development of the Sámi language. In this article, we target this corpus of linguistic research and the wide-ranging implications it suggests for the Sámi past. While based on historical and comparative linguistics data, a notable feature of the studies examined is that they also lean heavily on assumptions about the archaeological record in their reasonings. These assumptions, we argue, are, to a large extent, based on very limited or outdated knowledge of archaeological research on the Sámi past, and in particular, that of northern Norway. The article raises critical questions regarding the notions of cultural areas, ancestral homelands, and migrations that abound in these linguistic studies and challenges the a priori primacy assigned to language as the constituent of cultural identity. In conclusion, we outline a Sámi archaeological past that does not concur well with recent linguistic accounts and which, in the end, begs the question of whether this discrepancy can be reconciled and, if so, how this can happen. Keywords Fennoscandia – Sámi past – Saami – linguistics – archaeology – ethnicity Downloaded from Brill.com08/17/2023 09:17:52AM via communal account