<p>Is there such a thing as unadulterated nature? All that surrounds us is culturally modified by man somewhere along our past. But culture is only a fictitious conception itself, created in an attempt to break the world into controllable objects.</p><p>So in what do we find culture? In everything? In the objects or the stories they embrace? Who chooses what’s worth saving and how to save? Choosing what is culture is made from personal, ingrained dichotomies of what’s important and what is not. A selective eye creates a distorted truth, which could have unintentional long-term effects.</p><p>This thesis will give a historical account of the archaeological discipline’s development in tending to our cultural heritage. By demonstrating its many complications, with examples of forest remains, I will argue for the need of innovation, communication and documentation. Only then can we get a broader, more varied and slightly less modified picture of the culture we choose to keep.</p>

Is there such a thing as unadulterated nature? All that surrounds us is culturally modified by man somewhere along our past. But culture is only a fictitious conception itself, created in an attempt to break the world into controllable objects. So in what do we find culture? In everything? In the objects or the stories they embrace? Who chooses what’s worth saving and how to save? Choosing what is culture is made from personal, ingrained dichotomies of what’s important and what is not. A selective eye creates a distorted truth, which could have unintentional long-term effects. This thesis will give a historical account of the archaeological discipline’s development in tending to our cultural heritage. By demonstrating its many complications, with examples of forest remains, I will argue for the need of innovation, communication and documentation. Only then can we get a broader, more varied and slightly less modified picture of the culture we choose to keep.

Målet med denna uppsats var att undersöka de nomadiska folkets användning av trä i norra Fennoskandien, samt möjliga analytiska metoder att studera arkeologiskt trämaterial. Detta möjliggjordes genom relevanta etnografiska, historiska och arkeologiska studier och en genomgång av analytiska metoder. De nomadiska folken använde trämaterial i en stor del av deras vardag så som mat i form av den näringsrika inner barken, ved för eldning, till både temporära och permanenta kåtor, förvarning samt jakt. De analytiska metoder som presenteras var träidentifikation, dendrokronologi och 14C-metoden. Träidentifikation möjliggör de två senare metoderna som kan förse tillförlitlig datering beroende på trämaterialets struktur samt tafonomiska processer / The aim of this thesis was to investigate the nomadic people’s wood usage in northern Fennoscandia, as well as possible analytical methods of investigating wooden remains. This was achieved through relevant ethnographic, historical and archaeological studies and a review of analytical methods. Wooden material played a big role in the life of the nomadic people in the shape of food, firewood, storage, construction material for both temporary and permanent huts, and for hunting. The analytical methods presented are species identification, dendrochronology and 14C-method. Species identification enables the latter methods of which provides reliable dating of wood, depending on the structure and taphonomic processes.

Biocultural approaches to Environmental Management (EM) and monitoring are an emerging strategy in sustainability planning. Unlike functional ecological approaches to EM, which exclude humans from ecological systems, biocultural EM approaches incorporate humans, communities and their values as integral part of ecological systems, and are grounded in collaborative processes that develop locally relevant management objectives and monitoring practices. Biocultural indicators are a key aspect of biocultural EM, providing links between worldviews, knowledge systems, agencies and institutions at various scales to guide and streamline implementation of management objectives. Although many Indigenous Peoples have been continually practicing biocultural approaches to EM for thousands of years, challenges exist in contemporary EM scenarios where multiple worldviews, political boundaries and knowledge systems collide. Some of the challenges or gaps in contemporary biocultural approaches are based in theory, and others are in practice. In Chapter One I highlight one of these gaps – the lack of guiding criteria to develop biocultural indicators in contemporary biocultural EM and monitoring. To address this gap, I propose a novel suite of six criteria (culturally salient, supportive of place-based relationships, inclusive, sensitive to impacts, perceptible, linked to human well-being) drawn from a case study in Kitasoo/Xai’xais Territory in the area now referred to as the North and Central Coast of British Columbia, Canada. In Chapter Two, I highlight a challenge in practice—the development of spatial models that incorporate a community-led approach. I show how this community-engaged approach benefitted the development and application of a landscape scale suitability model for culturally modified trees, a priority biocultural indicator. In conclusion, this theoretical and practical work identifies opportunities to amend existing Provincial and Federal legislation in order to support biocultural approaches to EM in Canada and shows how biocultural approaches may be applied in other social-ecological systems near and abroad. / Graduate