Sweden and Finland were ordered to gather information on springs, groves, and stones known as sites, offerings, and sacrifices in addition to other historical data on their parishes. The early legislation and decrees had a “state-patriotic” basis—the antiquities were regarded as evidence of the glorious past of the realm.

Finland’s first university, the Academy of Turku (the predecessor of the University of Helsinki), was founded in 1640. A larger number of minor published theses describing parishes and localities, prepared at the academy as part of the curriculum, regularly contained topographic information on historic sites and antiquities. The philologist and polymath Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739–1804), professor of rhetoric (Greco-Roman literature) at the academy, was the first Finnish scholar to address the prehistory of Finland and the Finnish people with reference to the Finno-Ugrian family of languages and their speakers. Based on contemporary central European studies, Porthan presented the rudiments of the subsequently adopted “family-tree” model of the descent of the Finno-Ugrian languages and peoples, which in various forms was to define the general conception of Finnish prehistory well into the late twentieth century. Porthan was actively involved in the study of Finnish ethnography and history in addition to promoting the collection of antiquarian material.

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, clergymen in the then-province of Southern Ostrobothnia undertook excavations of prehistoric burial cairns. However, this activity did not have any broader scholarly purpose other than collection in the spirit of the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus.

Finland was annexed into the Russian Empire in 1809, but as an autonomous grand duchy the country was allowed to have its own institutions of government and to keep its laws and statutes laid down during Swedish rule. With regard to prehistoric and historical antiquities, existing legislation provided for their protection, but there was no longer any official body that would handle the tasks of the former Swedish authorities. In 1827, the Academy of Turku was moved to the new capital, Helsinki, to become the University of Helsinki and the center of antiquarian and related interests well into the 1870s. This period of early national romanticism was marked by an avid collection of folk poetry and ethnographical and archaeological materials.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the archivist K.A. Bomansson undertook excavations of burial cairns in the Åland Islands to establish their cultural context, and the philologist M.A. Castrén sought to distinguish the antiquities of the Lapps (Sámi) from those of the assumedly later Finnish settlers. Castrén developed the philologically defined model of ethnic descent, suggesting that the original “home” of the Finno-Ugrians, prior to their dispersal and descent, was in the Minussinsk steppe region of western Siberia. On an expedition to Siberia in the 1850s, Castrén excavated a number of graves in Minussinsk.

Those ventures, however, were isolated. In 1863, parts of the prehistoric collections of the Museum of the University of Helsinki were published by the naturalist H.J. Holmberg in an illustrated catalog, and although Holmberg was familiar with the Scandinavian three-age system, he had no grasp of stratigraphy, and his presentation of the material was purely theoretical—and inevitably mistaken. These isolated efforts, however, demonstrated the potential of antiquities and prehistoric artifacts as sources and promoted the adoption of systematic methods to establish a chronological basis. Working in this spirit, the historians Yrjö Koskinen and K.F. Ignatius excavated at two late–Iron Age cemeteries, dating the graves with coin finds and applying the results in a work on the early Middle Ages.

Johannes Reinhold Aspelin (1842–1915) is regarded as the founder of Finnish archaeology as a discipline in the modern sense. In response to the problems of ethnic identification of antiquities raised by his early investigations (1868–1869) of prehistoric burial cairns in Ostrobothnia, in western Finland, Aspelin undertook a study trip to Stockholm to investigate the archives and collections of the state historical museum there. In this connection, he also studied the new archaeological methods developed by oscar montelius and h. o. hildebrand. Aspelin recognized the potential of the new methods