Summary:

Matti Leiviskä, Toponymy as a Source for the Settlement History of Siikajoki River Valley

The article discusses the settlement history of Siikajoki River Valley in Northern Ostrobothnia until the mid-17th century. The main source materials for the study were the oldest remaining document sources and names, such as personal names and names of places, which have been compared with the corresponding materials in the whole of Finland. The study provides a more detailed picture of the earlier settlement history of the Siikajoki River Valley, its stages in various regions in the area and the origins of the settlement. The study changes the earlier understanding of the settlement history of the area. The oldest onomastic stratum in the area – and correspondingly the oldest settlement stratum – was found to be in Häme and upper Satakunta. Particularly at the estuary of the river, this stratum can be dated as extremely old, established before the year 1000. At the headwater of the river, the Sámi onomastic stratum may be older than that; this discovery consolidates the theory of Sámi settlement in the surroundings of Oulujärvi in the Middle Ages. Karelian settlement, which according to the nomenclature spread everywhere all the way to the estuary with the exception of the middle portion of the river in the current Rantsila region (the nomenclature of which is wholly Western Finnish), seems to be somewhat younger than the Western Finnish habitation. Contrary to the results of earlier research, the influence of lower Satakunta and Southwest Finland, which was considered strong, seems to have been fairly weak in the region. Likewise, settlement activities from Savonia seem to have been less extensive than previously thought, since it reached only up to the villages closest to the source of the river. Elsewhere in the river valley, Karelian settlement was stronger than Savonian in the 1500s. On the other hand, the internal migration in the river valley from the coastal areas inland was stronger than previously thought.