1915. He was also the founder of the journals Suomen Museo and Finskt Museum. Theodor Schvindt carried out significant studies on the Iron Age culture of Karelia, and Julius Ailio presented the first comprehensive systematization of the Stone Age in Finland.

The problem of ethnic origin as an element of national identity still dictated the theoretical orientation of Finnish archaeology. In 1905, Alfred Hackman published Die Eisenzeit Finnlands, a fundamental work on the Finnish Iron Age presenting a subsequently accepted model of the migration of the ancestors of the present-day Finns into western Finland from Estonia and other parts of the eastern Baltic area around the beginning of the Common Era. Hackman’s colonization theory assumed the depopulation of Finland in the last centuries before the birth of Christ, with only bands of nomadic “Lapps” hunting and fishing in its wilderness regions. One of the reasons for the depopulation was a cooling of the climate. Hackman’s theory also posited a gradual spread of the Finnish colonists, with the country pushing the Lapps further north in a manner analogous to the spread of European settlement into the western parts of North America. It also presupposed a “Gothic,” i.e., eastern Baltic, influence on the Finnish language. Although Ailio disputed the theory, suggesting that the Finns were in fact descendants of the Stone Age population, Hackman’s model remained the accepted explanation of Iron Age ethnic developments until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

With analyses and syntheses of northern Eurasian Bronze and Iron Age materials, aarne michaël tallgren began his career by addressing the problems of archaeologically identifying and defining the “original” Finno-Ugrian culture. Tallgren’s thesis of 1911 conclusively proved that Aspelin’s original assumption of a Ural-Altaic Bronze Age culture, identifiable as Finno-Ugrian, was incorrect. Although Finnish archaeologists now rejected the straightforward interpretation of northern Russian and Eurasian archaeological cultures in terms of Finno-Ugrian ethnogenesis, the philological paradigm of ethnic prehistory dating back to Castrén and his predecessors persisted. The changing of perspective for archaeologists and prehistorians was also dictated by political developments. Finland gained its national independence in 1917, and the new Soviet Russia closed its borders to western researchers. With his encyclopedic knowledge and fruitful contacts, Tallgren remained the sole representative of the Eurasian orientation of Finnish archaeology.

During the years between the two world wars, newly independent Finland carried on the processes of cultural nation building that had been launched in the late nineteenth century. Although archaeology had a definite role within this broad paradigm, prevailing ideological trends were reflected only indirectly in scholarship and perhaps more in the general concerns and areas of interest than in specific content or conclusions.

Though practiced professionally on a full-time basis by only a very small group of experts, Finnish archaeology had developed into a full-fledged discipline by the 1920s. The University of Helsinki established a chair of archaeology in 1923, with Tallgren as its first holder. Tallgren was fundamentally a liberal who distanced himself from the narrow-minded nationalist sentiments that emerged in Finland in the 1920s and 1930s, and his influence was possibly instrumental in helping Finnish archaeology avoid the nationalist overtones that emerged in central Europe in the interwar years. Tallgren’s Suomen muinaisuus [Antiquity of Finland], a general presentation of Finnish prehistory published in 1930, also reflected a sober attitude toward the nationalist fervor that surfaced in other fields. In general, archaeology in the 1920s and 1930s followed an explicitly antiquarian and typological line.

Aarne Äyräpää (1887–1971) was the leading Stone Age expert of the inter– and post–world war years. He applied the results of geological studies on shoreline displacement and land upheaval, based on the fact that the hunter-gatherer sites of the Stone Age were predominantly shore-bound and could thus be linked to ancient shorelines in a broad chronological system. Äyräpää’s typological and stylistic classification of Comb Ware and other Stone Age pottery has remained largely valid to the present day. Äyräpää held a supernumerary (honorary) professorship in archaeology from 1938 until 1954.