World Archaeology

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Daughters of magic: esoteric traditions, relational

ontology and the archaeology of the post-medieval
past

Vesa-Pekka Herva , Kerkko Nordqvist , Anu Herva & Janne Ikäheimo

To cite this article: Vesa-Pekka Herva , Kerkko Nordqvist , Anu Herva & Janne Ikäheimo (2010)
Daughters of magic: esoteric traditions, relational ontology and the archaeology of the post-
medieval past, World Archaeology, 42:4, 609-621, DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2010.517679

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2010.517679

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Daughters of magic: esoteric traditions,
relational ontology and the archaeology
of the post-medieval past

Vesa-Pekka Herva, Kerkko Nordqvist, Anu Herva and

Janne Ikäheimo

Abstract

Animistic and other alternative ontologies have recently been discussed in archaeology and material
culture studies, but these discussions, while not entirely unfamiliar to historical archaeology, have so
far had a limited impact on our understanding of the post-medieval Western world. This paper uses
Western esoteric thought and folk beliefs to engage with the idea of the relational constitution of
reality. It is argued that forms of ‘magical thinking’ are relevant not only to the interpretation of
particular ‘special’ activities and things but can provide new perspectives on the very dynamics
of how people perceived and engaged with the world. The proposed reassessment of esoteric thought
and folk beliefs has implications for, and is informed by, material culture studies. The paper begins
with alchemy and proceeds to discuss broader issues.

Keywords

Alchemy; folk beliefs; historical archaeology; material culture studies; relational ontology; Western
esoteric traditions.

Introduction

Archaeology and material culture studies have recently become increasingly engaged with
ontological issues. This development stems from the recognition that modern Western
thinking may actually build on false assumptions about what the ‘real world’ is like.
Consequently, animistic and relational ontologies have attracted interest among archae-
ologists; a recent issue of the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (15(4), 2008) and
a special section in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (19(3), 2009), for example, have
been devoted to this topic. Yet, as the discussions referred to indicate, ontological issues

World Archaeology Vol. 42(4): 609–621 Debates in World Archaeology

ª 2010 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2010.517679
610 Vesa-Pekka Herva et al.

and their implications for the study of material culture have been considered mainly in the
context of non-Western or pre-modern societies, and they have so far had a limited impact
on the archaeology and understanding of the post-medieval Western world.
This paper is an attempt to link the recent ontological discussions to historical
archaeology from a particular perspective. We follow Alberti and Marshall’s (2009: 344)
general proposal ‘that ‘‘ontological breakthrough’’ (Henare et al. 2007) in archaeology is
possible if indigenous theories are taken seriously as ontologies rather than epistemologies
and combined with insights from Western theories of materiality that reveal matter as
ontologically relational and inherently indeterminate’. This paper takes Western esoteric
thought and related notions in folk thought as ‘indigenous theories’ and uses them to
generate a new view on the post-medieval world. It will be proposed that the nature of
what might broadly be called ‘magical thinking’ may have been misunderstood, and that a
reassessment of this topic has implications for archaeological interpretation. To a degree,
our approach is comparable to Tarlow’s (2002) discussion of nineteenth-century Utopian
communities: both seek to tease out wider implications of seemingly odd and marginal
historical phenomena.
The esoteric and occult traditions in the post-medieval Western world make up
a disparate group which is commonly taken to include, for instance, Renaissance
hermeticism, theosophy, freemasonry and spiritualism, and arts such as astrology,
alchemy, Kabbalah and various breeds of magic. Historical relationships between different
esoteric philosophies, movements and practices are complex, as are their links to the wider
world where they developed and flourished (e.g. Goodrick-Clarke 2008). In this paper, all
these philosophies and arts are discussed under the umbrella terms of esotericism or
esoteric traditions despite their divergent historical origins and other major differences.
This is because we are interested mainly in some broad assumptions which esoteric
traditions often make about the world, such as the idea of an animate cosmos where things
are linked together by correspondences (see Faivre 1994: 10–15; Goodrick-Clarke 2008:
3–14). Thus, the use of the general terms is intended to imply neither unity nor,
particularly in the context of the pre-Enlightenment world, any neat distinction from, say,
the ‘rational’ or the ‘scientific’. Esotericism is simply a convenient shorthand term: one
can similarly speak of, for example, religions on a general level without meaning that
Christianity and Buddhism were the same.
While the actual scope of the paper is much broader, alchemy provides an appropriate
starting point because it is, more obviously than some other esoteric arts, a practice which
involves direct manipulation of the material world, and because it has been subject to
some archaeological research (e.g. Martinón-Torres 2007; Martinón-Torres and Rehren
2005; Osten 1998; Ternström 2002). Alchemy is a natural starting point also because the
paper has been written while searching for the remains of a late eighteenth-century
laboratory which is known to have been located in the estate of the Nordenskiöld family
in Mäntsälä, southern Finland (Cleve 1964: 78), and which may have been used for
alchemical purposes. At least three members of the family had alchemical interests, and
the most famous of them, August Nordenskiöld (1754–92), was even supported by King
Gustav III of Sweden (Arppe 1870; Bodman 1944).
Rather than offering a case study in the archaeology, history or nature of alchemy, the
present paper provides a discussion of why esoteric traditions are, or should be, of interest
 Daughters of magic 611

to post-medieval archaeology – and not only in contexts directly related to esoteric

thought but much more generally; that is, when considered against the idea of the
relational constitution of reality, esoteric traditions can help in the reassessment of some
elementary assumptions about how people have perceived and related with the material
world in a relatively recent and seemingly familiar past (see also Herva 2010a; Herva and
Ylimaunu 2009).

Alchemy and its material culture and archaeology

Alchemy is popularly associated with the transmutation of metals and the discovery of the
philosopher’s stone (the elixir of life), but this idea is a relatively late one; during the high
period of European alchemy in the Renaissance, alchemy was a practice concerned with
metals, minerals and medicine, and not separate from early chemistry (or ‘chymistry’)
(Martinón-Torres and Rehren 2005; Newman and Principe 1998). As Principe and
Newman (2001) have shown, modern scholarly and popular conceptions of alchemy have
been heavily influenced and misrepresented by Enlightenment rationalism on the one
hand and nineteenth-century occultism on the other – more or less in the same way that
modernist assumptions have misrepresented early modern esoteric arts in general (see
Henry 2008).
It is quite clear today that early modern alchemy was neither bad science nor spiritual
folly, but an inherently practical art driven by practical motivations. At the same time,
however, it is equally important to recognize that all sciences, in the past and the present,
are embedded in a particular understanding of what the world is like and how it works. In
the Renaissance, for example, matter was considered to have properties which are not real
in the modern natural-scientific view (see below), and such conceptions had an influence
on what was do-able and how, both in laboratories and in everyday life. Thus, our view on
(early modern) alchemy in association with esoteric thinking is neither about taking up an
attitude to the nature of alchemy nor about denying its practical and materially grounded
character, but simply recognizing that the world where it was practised was different from
ours.
Alchemy has apparently been known in Europe since late antiquity, but the heyday of
European alchemy was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when new natural
philosophies and sciences were being developed, and alchemy was associated with – or not
even neatly separable from – related fields such as medicine and metallurgy (see Debus
2004; Martinón-Torres and Rehren 2005; Principe 2007). Early modern sciences were,
of course, very different from today’s sciences, and not least because the world was
understood in terms very different from ours (see below). It is well known today, for
example, that Isaac Newton had a keen interest in alchemy and esoteric traditions,
whereas his theory of gravity was received with some suspicion among the proponents of
mechanical philosophies because it postulated an occult force operating at a distance
(Katz 2007: 31; Kidd 2009: 93).
The status of alchemy changed towards the later seventeenth century and during the
eighteenth century, but serious alchemical work continued to be done despite increasing
criticism, dismissal and the bad press courtesy of adventurers and charlatans such as the
612 Vesa-Pekka Herva et al.

Comte de Saint-Germain (Maxwell-Stuart 2008: 137–44). In 1758, for example, the

Swedish mineralogist and chemist Axel Fredrik Cronstedt listed six Swedes in high
positions and with honest intentions in alchemy. Cronstedt himself described alchemy as ‘a
daughter of magic’ and attacked it along with other esoteric arts such as astrology (Fors
2007: 247–8). Alchemy, too, however, was practised in the spirit of the Enlightenment in
the eighteenth century (see Häll 1995: 89, 148–9; Maxwell-Stuart 2008: 140–3).
It is widely agreed today that the study of material culture can contribute to the
understanding of early modern (laboratory) science. Hannaway (1986) and Shackelford
(1993), for instance, have discussed how the spatial arrangements and built forms of
Tycho Brahe’s castle, Uraniborg on the Danish island of Hven, were related to Tycho’s
idea and practice of science (which included alchemical and astrological pursuits). A few
early modern laboratories and their contents have been archaeologically and scientifically
studied. Martinón-Torres (2007) correctly emphasizes that material culture studies and
scientific analyses can provide new and important information especially on the practical
side of early scientific pursuits, because historical documents on such matters are often
one-sided and quite problematic. This is true, of course, but the study of alchemy and
other esoteric arts (as they are known today) can also make a broader contribution to our
understanding of the post-medieval past.

Alchemy in a broader context

While operating, in part, with powers and mechanisms of causation which are nonexistent
in the modern scientific view, early modern alchemy attempted to imitate the workings of
nature rather than tap the supernatural. Indeed, since the entire Renaissance cosmos was
conceived as organic and thoroughly networked by different kinds of correspondences,
knowledge about the relationships between things was important to understanding
everything from minerals to plants and to human physiology and psychology (Livingstone
1988: 277; Thomas 1971: 337–8). Astrology, for example, was central to Renaissance
geographical knowledge because the heavenly bodies influenced the sub-lunar world by
affecting the composition and distribution of earthly matter (Livingstone 1988: 274–8;
Sack 1976: 314).
The workings of this networked world could be manipulated through both mechanical
and magical arts (Livingstone 1988: 277–8), but the understanding of the two arts and
their mutual relationship was very different in the pre-Enlightenment world from today.
This was largely because the division between the natural and the supernatural was drawn
differently then from now (e.g. Henry 2008). While a variety of natural philosophies
flourished in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Europe, it was quite unanimously accepted
that things and materials had special powers and properties which might be hidden
(‘occult’) but not (necessarily) otherworldly in origin, even though aspects of Renaissance
magic and the nature of occult forces were always a matter of debate (see Thomas 1971;
Vickers 1984). In essence, however, natural magic was about the study of the (occult)
networks that linked all things in the cosmos together (Katz 2007: 26–7). As such, it was
based on observation rather than irrational belief and closely associated with other forms
of early science (e.g. Debus 1977: 33–73; Henry 2008). Capturing astral powers in
 Daughters of magic 613

talismans or pursuing the philosopher’s stone required specialized knowledge and

techniques but nonetheless appropriated natural properties and powers of things
(Goodrick-Clarke 2008: 40–1; Henry 2008: 8–9).
Enlightenment rationalists were eager to dismiss the reality of extraordinary properties
of the material world as mere superstition and ignorance, and that image continues to
plague our understanding of what esoteric and magical thinking were actually about.
The rationalist dismissal notwithstanding, a majority of people in the eighteenth century
and later did, of course, continue to accept that things can have special or extraordinary
properties. This is reflected in, for instance, folk beliefs (see below). ‘Proper’ esoteric
traditions also survived into and beyond the Enlightenment. To take just a few
examples, freemasonry emerged in the eighteenth century, which also saw the birth of
Swedenborgian Christian mysticism, whereas the spiritualist movement and the esoteric
revival occurred in the nineteenth century (see, further, Goodrick-Clarke 2008: chs 7–12).

Esoteric thought, folk beliefs and their material expressions

Historians of ideas recognize today that esoteric and magical thought can be important to
understanding certain broader developments in the past, such as the emergence of science
in the early modern period. Still, esoteric and magical thought are not exactly regarded as
major historical forces or particularly relevant to understanding the ordinary business of
life in the post-medieval Western past. One reason for that, no doubt, is simply hindsight;
we seem to know now that esoteric and magical modes of thinking are faulty. The stories
of the Western esoteric traditions also tend to revolve around particular persons whose
thinking may or may not have been deviant and/or influential in its own time, but who
were usually not just any Joe Averages. Since the esoteric arts were studied mainly by
higher-class people, the connection of those arts to the ordinary everyday life of common
people may appear tenuous. Furthermore, esoteric thought and practices may seem either
to concern highly specialized issues, such as gold making, or to relate to quite abstract
matters which had only a limited impact on material practices and mainly in very specific
contexts.
It is true, to begin with, that a common farmer in fifteenth-century Italy or eighteenth-
century Finland probably knew little about Marsilio Ficino’s or Emanuel Swedenborg’s
views of the cosmos, but at least some ideas found in ‘high’ esoteric traditions were
familiar among the masses. Astrological knowledge, for instance, was much in demand
among both the elite and common people in early modern Europe, even if that demand
was satisfied in different ways; kings and generals could consult specialists, such as
Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, whereas common people resorted to almanacs and
horoscopes (Clark 2005: 44; Cosgrove 2001: 119–20). What is even more interesting here is
that popular folk beliefs appear to express basic ideas similar to those of learned esoteric
philosophies. Those similarities are very general, of course, and we are not suggesting any
unity between the different esoteric traditions and folk beliefs. The point is rather that they
do share a certain basic-level understanding of what the world is like and how it works.
For example, the Finnish folk beliefs documented over the last centuries describe a
world where people lived and engaged with a variety of spirits and other ‘extraordinary’
614 Vesa-Pekka Herva et al.

beings; where all things were linked by correspondences, resemblances and other occult
networks of causalities and influences; and where ordinary things from certain materials to
landscape elements could have special powers and properties (Herva and Ylimaunu 2009
with references; also cf. Harvey 2005; Ingold 2006). Both esoteric traditions and folk
beliefs, then, envision a world out there which is richer, more dynamic and more deeply
and thoroughly networked than the world described by the ‘official’ Western thinking with
its essentially mechanistic and physicalist assumptions.
Esoteric thought and folk beliefs have taken different kinds of material expressions. The
operative and material aspect of alchemy, as seen above, is particularly obvious and open
to archaeological research. Many other arts are likely to have left behind less substantial, if
any, material traces, especially of the kind that would be archaeologically recoverable
or identifiable. But while Renaissance magic, for instance, has often been considered in
distinctively intellectual terms, it did take material forms and influence material practices
including architecture. Renaissance architects endorsed the idea that numbers, shapes and
sounds resonated with the cosmic order and thus had to be taken into account in designing
the built environment (Sack 1976: 317–19). Broadly magical concerns may have influenced
spatial planning and building more than is commonly recognized, though distinguishing
magical motives from aesthetic or other factors can be quite difficult (Sack 1976: 317; see
also Lilley 2009, and below).
Similar problems are involved in the identification of archaeological and other material
evidence of folk beliefs. The known variety of the material expressions of folk beliefs in
Finland, for instance, ranges from magical marks on buildings to special (uses of) artefacts
and natural things, but the archaeological evidence of folk beliefs seems scanty in
comparison to the richness of such beliefs in documentary sources and especially folklore.
It goes almost without saying that many factors have contributed to this relative
invisibility of folk beliefs in archaeology, ranging from the ephemeral nature of belief-
related practices to the use of ordinary everyday things in such practices, and to
archaeological formation processes (e.g. Gazin-Schwartz 2001; Hukantaival 2006). Yet we
argue that the core of the problem lies deeper, specifically in a misunderstanding of what
so-called folk beliefs are about and how they (and esoteric thought) influenced material
practices.

‘Magical thinking’ and materiality in the post-medieval world

An example drawn from early modern cartography illustrates the problems of identifying
the influence of magical thinking on material culture. It is commonly known that some
Renaissance maps had more or less explicit esoteric or magical associations, but, in
general, the functions and meanings of early modern maps tend to be considered in
modernist rational terms (see, further, Herva 2010b). Maps are considered, for example, to
record geographic information and make symbolic statements about something, even if
the specific uses and meanings of particular maps are not necessarily obvious. A need to
discuss maps in light of magical or esoteric thought has usually been recognized only in
very specific cases where, for instance, calendar or astrological information has been
included in them (e.g. Ehrensvärd 2006: 88–9).
 Daughters of magic 615

Yet the magical dimension or special properties of maps neither originated in nor can
simply be identified on the basis of some odd features, designs or symbols. Rather, the case
can be made on both historical and theoretical grounds that maps potentially worked a
form of image magic, which means that they could (be used to) directly interfere with the
workings of the richly interconnected networked Renaissance world. That does not imply,
however, that maps were made for specifically magical purposes or that possible magical
aspects of maps somehow excluded so-called rational functions (Herva 2010b).
‘Map magic’ was not based on some otherworldly force but embedded in the very
constitution and dynamics of the Renaissance cosmos and human bonding with it (also cf.
Glucklich 1997).
The above example reveals the relative arbitrariness of identifying and isolating
certain (features of) material things as expressions of magical thinking and practice in a
world very different from ours (see also Brück 1999). It may still be useful for some
purposes to identify more or less ‘clearly special’ things and phenomena, but that
may also result in their isolation from the broader dynamics of the world in which
specific beliefs would have been embedded to a varying depth, degree and complexity.
Rather than treating them as unfounded misconceptions about (the workings of)
the world, esoteric thought and folk beliefs can be taken to reflect particular modes of
perceiving the world and engaging with it (see further Herva and Ylimaunu 2009). If
so-called beliefs were embedded in, and arising from, everyday life and experience of
the world, they can potentially tell us something about how people went about their
lives beyond the specific contexts identified as belief-related today. In this view, the
literal content of given individual notions (‘iron artefacts hidden in buildings protect
from the evil eye’) is less important than the broader implications of so-called beliefs
for how people perceived and understood the nature and dynamics of the world
around them.
The embeddedness of beliefs in everyday life perhaps goes some way towards explaining
the scarcity of archaeological folk-belief-related material. That is, beliefs would mainly
have influenced material practices only subtly and/or in ways which archaeologists do not
expect and therefore fail to notice and identify (see also Gazin-Schwartz 2001: 277). Thus,
only the most special or clearly anomalous cases are likely to be identified with beliefs. Yet
taking a few selected cases to represent the influence of folk beliefs on material practices is
as much at fault as taking certain (fairly marginal) forms of Renaissance magic to
represent what magic was about in the Renaissance, despite the fact that those non-
representative forms of magic have had a major influence on modern conceptions of early
modern magic in general (see Henry 2008: 8–9).
The above discussion calls for using esoteric traditions and folk beliefs in a new manner
for the purposes of archaeological interpretation. That is, instead of interpreting
occasional odd finds and features by associating them with particular beliefs, there is a
need to integrate esoteric traditions and folk beliefs – or rather what they have been
argued to be about – into more general-level understanding of human relationship with the
world in the post-medieval past, and then into very frameworks of archaeological
interpretation. In other words, archaeology needs to acknowledge and account for the
richness of the post-medieval world and the complexity of its dynamics and modes of
causation, as hinted at in different forms of ‘magical thinking’.
616 Vesa-Pekka Herva et al.

The lessons that can be learned from esoteric traditions and folk beliefs are relevant in
different ways and to different degree in different studies and contexts, of course, but the
point is that their relevance is not limited to so narrow and specialized cases as has
conventionally been thought. It must also be emphasized that accounting for the richness
of the world does not mean idle speculation about possible belief-related dimensions of
apparently ordinary things and activities. Rather, the very logic of doing things and
relating with the world in the seemingly familiar past requires reassessment if we are to
understand how and why things happened as they did. Esoteric traditions and folk beliefs
can provide some clues towards that end.
To illustrate some implications of the above view, consider urban planning and the
built environment in early modern northern Sweden, specifically on the northern Gulf
of Bothnia. One might ask, for example, why the towns founded in the seventeenth
century were laid out as they were. All kinds of ‘purely practical’ factors undoubtedly
played a major role when, for instance, Dr Olof Bureus laid out the ‘organic’ (rather
than strictly orthogonal grid) plans for several towns on the order of the king of
Sweden around 1620 (Fig. 1) (see further Ahlberg 2005). Nonetheless, urban planning,

Figure 1 Early map of Söderhamn. King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden ordered Olof Bureus to stake off
a plan for Söderhamn and some other towns founded on the Gulf of Bothnia in 1620–1. The dating
of the actual map is uncertain, and it has varyingly been dated to the early 1620s and the early 1640s,
but the case can be made that the map, along with other similar maps of other towns, documents the
original plan of Söderhamn (see, further, Herva and Ylimaunu 2010 with references). Original map
(LMV: V50–1:2) in Lantmäteriet, Gävle (Sweden).
 Daughters of magic 617

like all practices, was embedded in a particular cosmology which in early seventeenth-
century Sweden was in part influenced by esoteric thinking (see further, for example,
Åkerman 1998; Lindroth 1943). Olof Bureus, a learned man, King Gustav II Adolf’s
personal physician, and a cousin to the famous scholar-mystic Johannes Bureus,
would have been enfolded in this intellectual atmosphere. Also, if the inference is any
good that early Swedish map-making had associations with magical thinking (Herva
and Ylimaunu 2010), it seems possible that broadly similar concepts were associated
with the organization of urban space too (also cf. Lilley 2009). The point here,
however, is that the logic of the apparently plain and simple urban plans, while
presumably not embodying intentional esoteric or cosmological meanings, is not
necessarily transparent. The understanding of nature and the cosmos, and the
relationship between its various constituents, would be implicated in urban planning
in one way or another.
Similar considerations apply to the study of the actual built environment in the northern
towns. For example, issues could be addressed, such as how the perceived special
properties and non-human inhabitants of certain (types of) places and landscape
influenced decisions on where to build and how (cf. Korhonen 2009) – that is, how
buildings were related not only to the physical environment as described by the natural
sciences but also to the world rich in (what would today be understood as) ‘magical’
relations and properties. The influence of such notions is perhaps likely to have been more
prominent in non-urban than in urban contexts for various reasons, but an ‘animistic’
mode of perceiving and engaging with the environment was arguably also preserved in at
least some urban environments in the northern periphery of seventeenth-century Sweden
(Herva 2010a).
In the end, relational ontology and epistemology provide a basis for a theoretical
understanding of the special properties of the material world. Relational ontology
basically proposes that the identities and properties of all entities (organisms and things)
are determined by the relationships with which entities are endowed; entities do not have
independent inner essence, but what they ‘are’ is context-dependent (see, further, Bird-
David 1999; Ingold 2006; Willerslev 2007). Thus, for example, landscape elements or
artefacts can in certain situations have properties of sentient and animate beings, which
in turn influences the ways people engage with them, and ultimately affords a degree of
two-way relatedness or sociality between people and things (e.g. Ingold 2000; Harvey
2005).
Knowledge about different aspects of this rich, relationally constituted world can, and
indeed must, be gained in various ways which go beyond ‘scientific’ approaches. It is, we
would suggest, a sense of that richness of the world, of deep mutuality between people
and the world, and of complex interconnectedness between things that is ultimately
looming behind esoteric thought and folk beliefs. That sense, in turn, would have been
based on perception and experience of the world and how it works but – as can be
expected – conceptualized and interpreted in different ways among different (groups of)
people in different times. In brief, the Western esoteric traditions and folk beliefs can be
understood to reflect a relational mode of knowing a relationally constituted world
although, of course, both esoteric thought and folk beliefs have a number of other
aspects as well.
618 Vesa-Pekka Herva et al.

Conclusion

The study and significance of the Western esoteric traditions have recently been taken
increasingly seriously among the historians of ideas and science, and we have argued
in this paper that historical archaeology could also benefit from the study of
esotericism. While esoteric traditions and the associated material culture are certainly
interesting and worth attention in their own right, the case has been made above that
the relevance of esotericism for post-medieval archaeology is not limited to the study
of specialized cases, such as alchemical laboratories. Rather, esoteric traditions, and
broadly similar ideas expressed in folk beliefs, can actually help us to understand
how people have perceived and engaged with the material world in the post-medieval
past.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their comments which helped to
clarify the argument of this paper. The support from the Nordenskiöld-samfundet is
gratefully acknowledged for it has allowed our fieldwork at Alikartano in Mäntsälä which
in turn inspired this paper. Vesa-Pekka Herva’s research has been funded through a post-
doctoral fellowship granted by the Academy of Finland.

Vesa-Pekka Herva and Janne Ikäheimo

University of Oulu
Kerkko Nordqvist and Anu Herva
University of Helsinki

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Vesa-Pekka Herva is a post-doctoral fellow in archaeology at the University of Oulu,

Finland. His current research focuses on the northern Baltic Sea region in the early
modern period. His research interests are varied and include material culture studies and
human-environment relations.

Kerkko Nordqvist has an MA in archaeology from the University of Helsinki, Finland,

where he is currently doing research on early metal use in Finland and north-western
Russia. He has worked in various archaeological projects in Finland and abroad, and his
research interests range from the Stone Age to the contemporary past.
 Daughters of magic 621

Anu Herva has a BA in archaeology from the University of Helsinki where she is currently
studying for an MA. She has been involved in various fieldwork projects and is
particularly interested in rock art.

Janne Ikäheimo obtained a PhD in archaeology from the University of Oulu, Finland,
where he is presently a university instructor. He has conducted research in the Roman
world and Finland. His current research interests include archaeometry and the uses of the
past in the contemporary world.