ABSTRACT
Stone and rock are prominent elements of northern landscapes and bear distinct marks left by glacial and postglacial processes. The various ‘peculiar’ and attention-grabbing features of northern rockscapes have engaged with and signified in various ways through the ages. The notion that particular rocks and cliffs are sacred is a persistent feature in northernmost Europe, ranging from prehistoric rock art to the historically known sacred sites of the indigenous Sámi or folklore concerning the mythical origins of strange rock formations, such as glacial potholes known as giant’s kettles. The perceptions, meanings and engagements with stones and rockscapes have taken many different forms over time, from the fascination with special stones and minerals and their extraction to historical and present-day mining. In addition to being fascinated with stony landscapes, the worlds beneath the surface of rock also closely inspired the curiosity of the northerners and were associated with shamanic travels to other worlds.
This chapter traces continuities and changes in northern modes of perceiving and engaging with rockscapes from prehistory to the present, analysing and interpreting the different engagements, from the extraction of minerals to rock art and other symbolic constructions of stone-worlds. The engagements with stone-worlds have ranged from quarrying special places in bedrock to grinding and polishing stone artefacts made of particular types of stone to engagements with orebodies in the context of industrial mining, inspired, for example, by discoveries of silver in the northern mountains. All these different practices involved engaging and negotiating with non-human beings and powers thought to reside in the stone-world, a notion to which both the learned and common people subscribed to still in the early modern period. Mining therefore involved much more than just a practical or technical pursuit; it was embedded in a relational understanding of reality, and even small-scale penetration into the subterranean world necessitated negotiations with its powers and residents. The recurrent ‘mining fevers’ in the (sub-)Arctic echo the utopian, dreamwork character of extractive industries, where the actual economic gains of mining have often been minimal but cultural repercussions significant, as clearly evidenced by the ‘gold rushes’ in Finnish Lapland since the latter nineteenth century.
