northern Scandinavia and historical-linguistic evidence. the chapter also draws on later medieval Icelandic sagas, loan-words, and place-names. Archaeological material includes the slab-lined pits of the northern Norwegian coast, used for extracting oil from whale blubber; silver hoards in the same region; Stallo sites in the Scandinavian interior; hunter-gatherer settlements in the South Sámi area; lapinrauniot (Finnish) or lapprösen (Swedish; 'Lapp cairns') in what is now Finland. Bringing in the history of the Sámi languages and their descent from their common ancestor with Finnish, Hansen and Olsen argue that even before the widespread adoption of Sámi language among hunter-gatherers of the interior of Fennoscandia and Germanic by coastal populations, the first millennium BCE featured a hunter-gatherer culture in the interior alongside a southern-orientated, agricultural/pastoralist culture on the coasts. The latter later adopted Germanic language and material markers of identity to cement their economic connections with the south. Meanwhile, on the northern shores of the Gulf of Finland, the common ancestor of Finnic and Sámi languages came to be spoken among hunter-gatherers during the last millennium BCE. Some speakers of this language adopted agriculture, and their dialects became the Finnic languages, while the dialects of the hunter-gatherers who adopted it became Sámi. The access of proto-Sámi speakers to trade with Finnic-speakers encouraged other hunter-gatherers to adopt this language and ethnicity, with Sámi developing dialectal variation in the first centuries CE, remaining a single dialect continuum into the eighth century, but breaking up into distinct languages by the sixteenth century. During the first millennium, there is little evidence for Fennoscandia's hunter-gatherers articulating ostentatious ethnic identities in their material culture. The authors argue that a consolidated Sámi identity took shape as trade connections with other people accelerated, to the East with Novgorod from the ninth century CE and to the West with the Norse. This trade led Sámi people to increase their economic specialisation as hunters, relying with agriculturalists for other goods. The authors also emphasise evidence suggesting that while the boundary between agriculturalist/Norse and hunter-gatherer/Sámi culture was fairly stable throughout the Iron Age and early Middle Ages, Sámi settlement extended beyond the interior of Fennoscandia. Hansen and Olsen note the lack of Norse settlement in some agrictulurally attractive fjords of northern Norway and Sámi presence in south-east Norway in the later medieval Eidsivathing and Borgarthing laws. Chapter 4, 'Colonization, contacts, and change 1220-1550' picks up on the increasing Viking-Age involvement of the Sámi