 All right, so, so, my turn next, my name is Martin Kalanan. I'm from the Department of Historical Studies, Entenu and Thronheim. And I'd like to talk to you today about an interesting case that concerns the relationship between ritual, or well, ritual and spiritual objects and landscape is one of the main themes. And one of the other themes is issues related to management of these kind of sites and well, objects, and in a specific context. We're talking about the area in central Norway, or central Scandinavia, as you know, that we have two indigenous populations in the north of Scandinavia. They have the Swedish and Norwegian populations, but also the Sami indigenous populations, too. They stretch over a large area across the national borders and split into various distinct language groups. The group that we're gonna be talking about is the southern Sami and they have their area across the Norwegian-Swedish border. And as finds appear, there are discussions about how far south this area is, has gone in the past. The city of Thronheim is here. And the area we're talking about is this mountainous ridge between Norway and Sweden. I think the landscape is an important part of this story. The border between Norway and Sweden was drawn up as a result of negotiations and the mountains themselves were used as points to draw the different points along. So when you look at a modern map, they mark the boundary between these two states, but the people that live there and use the landscape and see it in another way and the landscape appears as a unit with the mountains in the middle. So from the mountains in the center, the landscape slopes down to two coasts on either side. So if you see, for example, southern Sami representations of maps of the southern Sami land, that is how the land appears. It appears quite differently to the way we portray it for the national boundaries. In that respect that we're talking about a landscape that includes the coast, it includes all the different eco zones across from the Norwegian sea over to the Swedish side with the high alpine in the middle. Also, if we're talking about, to give you some hints, if we're talking about southern Sami or Sami archaeology today, there's a couple of important points to highlight. We're talking about relationships back in time. We're talking about minority, majority populations. The southern Sami are at the southern end of these ethnic borders and in that sense they have the most active and hard ethnic border where all these ethnic processes have gone on in through time. There is ongoing processes in society today about negotiation and re-establishment of what is southern Sami identity today and ethnicity in which place they have as a minority in the Norwegian society or the Swedish society but also within the Sami society. They are a minority there too. Dealing with the archaeology of the region or southern Sami archaeology, what is southern Sami archaeology but it's important to recognize that there are special sites associated with the region and they have in some cases a different character to the sites that we usually would encounter within other context. And it's important that we learn to recognize these different kinds of sites and so on. The background for what I'd like to talk about is an exhibition that we have had in 2017 in cooperation with the local southern Sami Cultural Center in Snosa and some other partners and the title of the exhibition was Who Owns the Past? And in this case it talks directly to these power relationships and this minority-majority relationship that goes back in time. Specifically this exhibition focused on a particular southern Sami drum that was the center of the exhibition. In this case ownership means several different things. It means the physical fact, the actual ownership of it but also the interpretive ownership and so on. There's some different levels to this title. There's not really time to go into all the details of the use of the drum but the drum has played a particular role in that we will be in this context of core religion and ritual but it's also important to recognize that this ritualized action is part of everyday life and that the ritual action is not necessarily something separate but that it bleeds into every aspect of the lived life. In this case the object has this special sense of being something unique and special but it also is something that's embedded in everyday life and it's important to recognize that in our attempts to understand these objects is that the totality of the power of these objects or their agency that it isn't just something that is separate and can be turned on or off, that they are active in many different aspects of life. Of the, I think it's called 90 extant examples that are, there are two different types of drum that was used. There's a northern type which is a particular character, kind of a shell type. In the southern Samyarys we have this frame type which is where the skin is stretched over a round open frame. There are also special objects associated with the use of the drum. There is an object for beating for the percussion of it but there are also objects associated that will dance on the skin as it is played. And the objects will move around on the surface of the skin as it is beaten. There are, trying to learn more about how they are used and how they are viewed and so on. There are source critical issues with it because a lot of the sources that we have, at least written sources, are written by a specific class of people. They are written by the clergy and lay scientists. And there is this like filter that our information has gone through a specific bias, cultural bias. There is also this issue that we people, the Western written knowledge on, we only know what people have been told. There is, we have to recognize also that there is a whole system of knowledge and understanding that we are not part of and that it still exists today. So you have to view some of this information critically and also view it as very much incomplete and only partial interpretations. The very interesting studies done of the ornamentation along the sides of the drum and some of these ornamentation can be drawn back quite far into, even into iron objects that we have recovered in different contexts. And it speaks a little bit to these ethnic processes where there's crossover of symbolism and ornamentation and so on between the different groups. The skins, the drums themselves are ornately decorated on the surface. They're individually decorated. There is a kind of a format or a template for it but they are individually decorated with figures and shapes and so on. And they contain both Christian and Sami symbolism. The drums, some of them have also include votive offerings. The drums themselves are known as individuals. They have their own power, they have their own identity and through use over a long time they've been given votive offerings to the drum itself which is tied onto the bottom of the drum. Very often brass objects, brass rings and emulets and so on. So some of the best preserved drums have large accoutrements that belongs to them. And as I pointed out, I said the drum itself although it is a unique and individual object it is part of the everyday life and it has a specific role and even a specific place within what we understand as the Sami cosmological life picture it would have had a specific space within a traditional living space. Some of them, as you'll see from the pictures or you'll see on the way, some of them are extremely well preserved like this example which was the centerpiece of the exhibition. We know more or less where it comes from and it has a connection to the landscape. It is called after the place that it has come from. And actually the first time that I personally heard about it was when I was visiting this place and I was told about this is the area where this particular drum came from. So the drum is known as an individual who's got his own individual character but it also has got this important link to the specific place where it was recovered from. The background for some of this preservation is that the drums themselves were actually forcibly collected in by clergy at different times in the recent past as partly as a sort of a part of a missionary activity but it also seems that it's part of a sort of a power relationship that by gathering drums, it's kind of a submission by collecting the drums. And the reason that they're so well preserved is that they went from the clergy to different scientific organizations around the place. So when they were collected from the local populations they were then given to clergy colleagues, scientific colleagues as exotic areas, interesting specimens. And in that way they've trickled into different museum collections. And there are memories of this collection today and when you visit villages they will tell you that this is where the drums were collected. Here's an example of this particular drum that today is exhibited in Germany in a music museum. But what has happened here is that the drum has gone but the memory of it is still connected to the landscape and although the relationship is broken and is weakened, it is still intact. This connection between landscape and memory. I wanted to talk a little bit about what's happening in recent years is that people have been recovering and discovering drums in contexts within the mountains themselves. Now these are not drums that are in collections around the place in the countryside or in other countries but they are drums that were hidden as a response to this forced collection. So when the orders came to hand in your drums, some people decided that we don't want to do that and we're gonna rather hide them in specific contexts in the mountains. And there's very interesting information emerging about what kind of contexts these drums are can be found today. There are sort of liminal areas often hidden deep within sort of crevices and in particular mountain spots and I've heard also mentioned water as a part of these contexts and people are actually trying to see a pattern in where frames can be found. There's a couple of very interesting local examples in recent years where frames have been recovered and the discussion is what should be done with them? Should they be taken into the museum and our reflex is to take them in and collect them and put them in collections. But part of the problem here is and from a decolonization perspective which it is problem is that at the present moment the interconnections means into the collections of the central museums which is actually the same exactly same process that we saw in the 1800s and 1700s. So when you look at it like the real material conditions the exact same thing is happening today as happened when they were forcibly collected. In our case this drum will actually end up in an ethnographic collection which is actually quite problematic from a decolonizing perspective. And that was the background for when I've been looking at this collection and then this power relationships have changed of course through time and there are of course southern Sami cultural authorities are deeply involved in this and they have made decisions about these but I think that they need to discuss future collection of them are we actually denuding the landscape in a way or breaking the relationship between the object and the landscape and have to look critically at the material what actually is happening to the drums. But there isn't any simple answer to this and I think it's important to underline that the decision to collect in these frames was made in the end by the southern Sami different institutions themselves. But the question arose then at the moment I'm told what should we do? Who are we collecting it for? Why are we collecting it? And why will it go in the museum? And in the end they have decided to put it into the museum instead the option being to leave it there. I wonder if we ask the question is this the right approach? What other approach could we take? Perhaps sampling is a suitable approach that perhaps you could say that it has scientific value but that in an attempt to leave it in the context where it is that we could find other ways of documenting and the sampling but still maintaining the object landscape relationship. I also think it's important not to that decolonizing theory or decolonizing reflexes don't become a theory of dominance in themselves. I think it's of course very important to recognize the legitimacy and the importance of actually independently deciding what to do with your own heritage. And this is a very good example where the Southern Sami authorities and private groups have decided we want to collect it, recover it and take it into the museum. In a way that's an expression of independence. I mean it's an importance of having your own decision making process. In a sense actually the act of recovering objects itself becomes a part of a ritual that is archeological recovery in itself. And I think from the perspective of power relationships it's important also that visibility is an important aspect of these minority-majority relationships. A colleague of ours from Östersund in Sweden, the Southern Sami researcher Eva Nungal has a title of a book that says if we're not visible we don't exist. So from this perspective it is actually important to get objects in and registered and on the map. Anyway I'll leave it there. My intention was to show some perspectives on the relationship between object and landscape within a particular mountain context and also to show that some of the interesting questions that they can raise for us as not just as researchers but also in the management and in the actual moment of discovery and so on. Thank you very much.