Professor Vesa-Pekka Herva, the project’s PI, recently had a paper published in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology.

The paper, entitled ‘Haunting Heritage in an Enchanted Land: Magic, Materiality and Second World War German Material Heritage in Finnish Lapland’, features in Volume 1 Issue 2 of the journal. It has the following abstract:

This article addresses the functions and meanings of Second World War German material heritage in northern Finland from a haunting perspective and in terms of magical thinking. While archaeologists and heritage professionals have primarily been interested in the historical information that Second World War sites and military material culture may contain, this article explores how encounters and engagements with Second World War materialities in the northern wilderness of Lapland can be considered to affect people and manipulate their perceptions, awareness and understanding of the surrounding world. Second World War sites and matériel may be taken to promote a kind of magical consciousness which enables a degree of restructuring of relationships between the self and world and the past and present.

If you would like to find out more about this and other literature connected to the project, please contact us via the project email address (DarkHeritageLapland[at]gmail.com).

Prof Herva busy at work!

On Friday 13th February, Dr Suzie Thomas gave a keynote lecture at the 6th annual Tahiti conference, held at the University of Jyväskylä.  Her talk was titled “When Cultural Environments hurt: ’Dark Heritage’, the wilderness and the war in Finnish Lapland”.

The slides from her talk are available below to download as a pdf document. Some images, for which permission for web publication is not confirmed, have been removed from the original presentation.

Suzie-Thomas-Tahiti6-Slides

On the morning of Friday 13th February, project researcher Dr Suzie Thomas will present a keynote lecture at Tahiti 6 (the 6th annual Art History Days – Taidehistorian päivät), which will be held at the University of Jyväskylä Seminarium, 12-13 February 2015.

Suzie’s presentation is entitled: When Cultural Environments hurt: ’Dark Heritage’, the wilderness and the war in Finnish Lapland

The abstract is as follows:

Within the wider discussion of cultural environments and landscapes, it is important to acknowledge that some elements of these spaces can be the result of traumatic events. This is notable in particular with spaces, monuments and environments that have been shaped by conflict or other atrocities.

The cultural environment of Finnish Lapland has been shaped by the impact of the Lapland War during the Second World War, with remnants of Prisoner of War camps, military bases and vehicles still visible in the landscape. Yet this legacy has been further affected by contemporary responses to this particularly difficult period of history. Different responses come into play, informed by touristic motivations (both preserving and destroying the material culture of the Lapland War), attempts to distance the peaceful present from the turbulent past, and more commercial connections to the portable material through militaria trade and treasure hunting.

In this paper I first outline what we mean by ‘dark’ or ‘difficult’ heritage and how this may be expressed or suppressed in cultural environments, and then apply these ideas to the case study of Finnish Lapland.

University of Jyväskylä, creative common licence image by Tiia Monto.