This article assesses the construction of cultural geographies of the European far North through an exploration of how Arctic motifs and imaginaries are used in the Christmas tourism industry in Finnish Lapland, and particularly in the city of Rovaniemi, which advertises itself as the ‘Official Hometown of Santa Claus’. Specifically, we draw parallels between Christmas tourism and Arctic mining by examining the similarities and interconnections between them. This highlights how these industries are related to the Arctic landscape they operate in and how both are ultimately embedded in similar cultural perceptions of and engagements with Lapland dating back centuries. A long-term perspective on Arctic geographical imaginaries enables a critical assessment of how the tourism and mining industries are both steeped in the exoticization and mythologising of the Arctic on the one hand and in a tradition of material and symbolic exploitation of northern resources on the other. This approach helps researchers to highlight a problematic character of the current development of Christmas tourism in Lapland.

The author shows how houses in the northern Baltic were constructed using two realities: the reality of timber and the equally potent reality of spirits supporting and controlling the fate of structures. Excavations in seventeenth-century Tornio (now in modern-day Finland) showed that houses were furnished with special offerings when founded and refurbished, while evidence from living folklore suggested that the houses themselves were originally given spiritual personalities and were treated as members of the family. As more modern thinking took hold, this spirituality was transferred to the more mobile and skittish household sprites.

This article develops the idea that the emergence of the Neolithic world was closely linked to discovering and becoming aware of new aspects and dimensions of reality. Practices such as pottery making and cultivation promoted attentiveness to new aspects of things and the environment, which in turn generated a new kind of lived world that was, in a sense, richer, larger and deeper than before. It is proposed that new forms of material culture and new material practices – new ways of engaging with the material world – expanded people’s horizons of perception and thinking. This cultivation of perception was an important mechanism through which new ways of life and thought associated with the Neolithic came into being.

This article discusses relational ontology and its significance for interpreting archaeological material from post-medieval contexts. The general theory of the relational constitution of the world is first introduced and some of its implications discussed in relation to the ‘meaning’ of artefact biographies. Second, by drawing from folk beliefs, the article considers how people in early modern Finland recognized the relational constitution of the world, which in turn provides new insights into the local mode of perceiving and engaging with the material world. The case of household spirits and human relationship with buildings is taken as an example. The archaeological material discussed in the article derives from the seventeenth-century town of Tornio in northern Finland.