20 May 2009 The Kierikki Stone Age Center

    Six or seven times now I have been to the **Kierikki Stone Age Center **in Yli-Ii, an excellent museum and center for research and education on this area’s prehistory.  

Outside the museum building are dozens of pits in the ground that were foundations of row houses for the hunter-gatherer people who lived here about 5000 years ago.  Down on a sandy beach by the river the Center’s staff has reconstructed several of the row houses as they might have looked. 

Who were these people?  We don’t know everything about them.  For the lack of a better name, I will call them the Kierikki People.  Their culture is also called comb ceramic culture because they made clay pots decorated by dragging a comb across the surface of the wet clay before firing.

We do know that they were hunter-gatherers, living on seals, fish, game, and presumably berries.  They lived in relatively large, relatively permanent settlements on the sea shore.  (Sea level here was higher 5000 years ago.)  They might have been the direct ancestors of the modern Sami People. 

You mustn’t think that all they left behind is stone flakes and fire-cracked rocks just because that’s what we’re finding.  (Actually, we’ve found something much more impressive than that – stay tuned!)  The museum has a lot of artifacts, including parts of a wooden fish weir, amber buttons that must have been imported, stone tools and points, comb ceramic pottery, and an "elk head” slate dagger.  Only four of these daggers exist in the archaeological record.

It appears that 5000 years ago the Kierikki people were living in sturdy and well-build row houses.  Their communities were quite large, stable and prosperous for hunter-gatherers.  After that time (~4000 years ago) there were still people here but living in smaller, more scattered settlements in smaller, less organized houses.  Something in their environment had changed.

It's a sobering thought for people like me who were brought up on the idea of continuous human progress:  Sometimes successful societies revert to simpler ways in response to environmental factors such as sea level or climate change.