and introduced them into the study of Finnish prehistory. At a later stage, he conducted studies in Copenhagen, making the acquaintance of j. j. a. worsaae and sophus müller and experiencing important influences and impulses from the Danish museums and archaeological collections.

Between 1870 and 1890, Aspelin was actively involved in organizing Finland’s archaeological museum collections, establishing an antiquarian administration, founding the Archaeological Society of Finland (later the Finnish Antiquarian Society), and engaging in archaeological fieldwork including expeditions to Russia. The Russian studies were primarily motivated by a quest for the “original home” of the Finno-Ugrians.

Although Aspelin was familiar, via Scandinavia, with the typological method and sought to establish chronology and a basic systematization of materials, these were not his prime concerns. The ethnic identification of materials—or the “ethnographic aspect” as it was called at the time—overrode typology and the analysis of the archaeological record in natural-scientific terms. Aspelin was no less inspired by the national-romantic paradigm of ethnic origin than his predecessors, but he managed to develop their amateur approaches into a serious scholarly inquiry corresponding to the standards of the day. Based on the work and theories of Castrén, Aspelin investigated the Ural-Altaic regions, establishing a basic chronological and spatial systematization for the area and its diverse antiquities and finds. Compared to contemporary Scandinavian scholarship, Finnish archaeology, with its linguistically defined agenda, laid claim to a far larger domain—the extensive northern Eurasian regions inhabited by the present Finno-Ugrians and their assumed ancestors. Aspelin’s five-volume compendium Antiquités du nord finno-ougrien (1877–1884), was a monument to this concept of national prehistory.

That perspective also reflected in very practical terms Finland’s political status as a grand duchy of the Russian Empire. Finland enjoyed a considerable degree of cultural and administrative autonomy that was not seriously curtailed until the “Russification” policies at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In principle, and often in practice, Finnish scholars were free to work and study in all parts of the vast Russian realm.

Archaeological research and antiquarian administration achieved organized forms during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The Archaeological Society of Finland was founded in 1870 to promote the official care and protection of antiquities, and in 1883, the predecessor of Finland’s present Antiquities Act was passed, declaring prehistoric finds and antiquities to be the property of the state and falling under its automatic protection and the administration of the State Archaeological Commission, the predecessor of the present National Board of Antiquities. The head of the commission was known as the state archaeologist, and the first holder of this position was Aspelin. In 1893, the country’s main archaeological and antiquarian collections were incorporated into a state historical museum, with separate departments for archaeological, ethnographic, and historical materials. It was later reorganized as the National Museum of Finland.

Although Aspelin held a supernumerary professorship at the University of Helsinki, there was no chair of archaeology in Finland until 1923. Finnish archaeology thus was predominantly a state concern, administered by a government office, organized into central state-owned collections, and regulated by antiquarian legislation that was among the strictest of its kind in all of Europe. This orientation was to survive almost intact until the 1970s, and it dictated the way archaeology was perceived by archaeologists and the general public alike—the culturally and nationally important work of an enlightened government. The only significant exception to this pattern of Finnish archaeologists in government service was aarne michaël tallgren, whose career is discussed later in this entry.

Aspelin was state archaeologist until his death, but after the early 1890s he concentrated on medieval research and left the field of archaeology to a younger generation. Hjalmar Appelgren-Kivalo (1853–1937) was his main successor. A specialist in Iron Age hill-forts and costumes, Appelgren-Kivalo became state archaeologist in