147 M. Naum and J.M. Nordin (eds.), Scandinavian Colonialism and the Rise of Modernity: Small Time Agents in a Global Arena, Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology 37, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-6202-6_9, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Introduction The differences in language, culture and economy were so great that it is reasonable to suggest that the forest Finns, despite Swedish citizenship, had their own nationality. Their situation can therefore to some degree be compared to that of today’s immigrants (Stenman 2001:135, translation by the author). Early modern Scandinavian colonialism is an area of study largely under development. While the idea of Scandinavia as a colonial space has grown stronger within the past few decades of research, gradually focusing on both political expan- sion and situations where cultural similarities and differences are expressed and negotiated, there are still research areas with a tendency for an essentialist view of culture and peoples. One of these is the research on the so-called forest Finns who migrated from eastern Finland and settled in central and northern Sweden in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Members of this group were later included among the settlers of the colony New Sweden in America in the early seventeenth century. The introducing quote above may be taken as representative of the general idea of forest Finn ethnicity and identity prevalent in much ethno- graphic and historical research, as well as the widespread view on their relation- ship with other groups. The issue of ethnicity and cultural identity has been central to the research on the forest Finns from the onset (cf. Jordan and Kaups 1989; Pikkola 1990; Norman 1995; Jordan 1995; Wedin et al. 2001; Welinder 2003). The features traditionally considered underlying the ethnic identity of the forest Finns were a common cultural origin in eastern Finland, the Finnish language, their agri- cultural practice, their mode of building houses, as well as their experience of F. Ekengren (*) Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund University, Box 117, 22100 Lund, Sweden e-mail: fredrik.ekengren@ark.lu.se Chapter 9 Materialities on the Move: Identity and Material Culture Among the Forest Finns in Seventeenth-Century Sweden and America Fredrik Ekengren