Oula Seitsonen

I am an archaeologist and geographer, and through the years I have been occupied with whatever has paid my bills, e.g. the archaeology of pastoralist societies in Mongolia, East Africa and Fennoscandia, GIS and remote sensing applications in archaeology, and the past of Lapland’s wilderness areas. I have acted, for instance, as a field archaeologist, cartographer, surveying equipments salesman, and GIS engineer, for example in northern Siberia, Alaska, and Norway.

I have been studying since 2006 the recent past conflict archaeologies in the North, and in my PhD I marveled the landscapes and materialities of Hitler's Arctic war, for example how the various communities have related, signified and engaged with those. At the moment I work with, for instance, the archaeological applications of the airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) data, the early pastoralism in Mongolia, the domestication of reindeer in Sápmi, the (military) aviation archaeology, and the geophysical and remote sensing methods to locate clandestine Second World War mass graves.

Currently I direct the projects "An archaeological perspective on inequality in welfare society" funded by the Kone Foundation (2022-2027) and "Eerie Arctic Aviation: Impacts and Cultural Legacies of 20th Century Military Aviation in the Circumpolar Zone" funded by the Research Council of Finland (2024-2028).