Oula Seitsonen

Biography

I am an archaeologist and geographer working as a postdoc at the University of Oulu. 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 working since 2006 with the Second World War archaeologies and in my PhD I marveled the landscapes and materialities of Hitler's Arctic war, for instance, how the various communities have related, signified and engaged with those. At the moment I work in the project Domestication in Action, wondering about the domestication of reindeer in Sápmi from a landscape perspective. My other ongoing research deals with pastoralism in Mongolia, the Finnish Winter War (1939-1940) heritage, developing geophysical and remote sensing methods to locate clandestine Second World War mass graves, and archaeological applications of the airborne laser scanning (LiDAR) data.