From around 1980 and onwards an increasing number of archaeologists and population geneticists turned their attention to the prehistory of the Sami, the indigenous people of northern Scandinavia - and tried to answer questions about their origins. In spite of assumedly dealing with the same issue, however, archaeologists and geneticist didn't necessarily ask the same questions. While Norwegian archaeologists studying Sami prehistory saw ethnic groups as socio-cultural entities, and tried to understand the social processes that led to the establishment and reproduction of the Sami as an ethnic group, the geneticists studied the Sami as a biologically defined entity - a population that shares a gene pool - and tried to map the history of this population and its gene pool.
So, geneticists and archaeologists involved in the study of Sami prehistory studied different entities; a biological population and a socio-culturally defined ethnic group, and they asked different questions. These issues are however related; knowledge about prehistoric biological populations should ideally contribute to the understanding of prehistoric ethnic groups and vice versa. The question is; to what extent did the geneticists and the archeologists in question, base their research on a common conceptual and theoretical understanding of the relationship between "ethnic groups" and "human populations"?
In this lecture, Kyllingstad will deal with some influential archeological and population genetic studies from the 1980s and 1990s. He will show that they contained conflicting accounts of Sami prehistory, and were based on conflicting preconceptions about the relationship between linguistic, cultural, ethnic and biological variation. He will also discuss whether these differences in theoretical approach were interlinked with differences in the social and disciplinary context, including differences in the social and political relationship between the researchers and their research object; the ethnic group in question, the Sami.