The Uralic expansion into Fennoscandia and Eastern Europe starting ca. 2000 BCE brought about intensive contacts with the Indo-European speakers in the area. Thus, ca. 200 Balto-Slavic / Baltic loanwords in the Finnic languages (2000–1000BCE or 1^st Mill. BCE), 32 in Saamic, and 36 in Mordvinic are found. Particularly interesting type of loanwords would be the kinship loanwords between these language groups.

On one hand, they enable us to formulate several hypotheses as to how the family structure and marriage practice of the donor language are reflected in the recipient language. On the other hand, ancient demographic investigation could test those hypotheses, leading to a more concrete reconstruction of their contact situation.

In this mini seminar, we will present the summary of kinship loanwords between Baltic and Finno-Ugric languages with the Indo-European background of the family structure. We will further discuss the implication of these loanwords in this context.

Arguments have been made that the North Swedish groups mainly utilized the raw material sources present in the mountain region, producing preforms that are then brought to the forest settlements where they are finished. There is a lack of provenance studies based on quartz and quartzite material, however, partly owing to the ubiquitous distribution of the material in the landscape. This makes it difficult to establish a link between the potential sources and the artefacts. In a recent PhD project at Umeå University an interdisciplinary approach incorporating exploratory spectroscopic and spatial analysis was used in the study of bifacial points from Västerbotten County. Reliable characterization of the raw material is necessary in order to understand human mobility related to raw material extraction and use. There are a number of confounding factors related to the material and artefact type, however, including chronology, data availability, instrumentation and excavation context.

Towards the end of the Neolithic period significant cultural change seems to occur among the hunter-gatherer communities of northern Fennoscandia. In Sweden the hunter-gatherer communities seemingly abandon a long tradition of a more sedentary settlement system based around the semi-subterranean dwellings, and instead adopt a more mobile pattern. This occurs alongside other significant changes in the material culture, as well as in their symbolic imagery. A technology that appears to be reintroduced to northern Fennoscandia around this time is the bifacial point (arrow- and spearheads). These are largely made from locally sourced materials like quartz and quartzite (in some areas also flint).