A comprehensive spatial model for historical travel effort - a case study in Finland
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11143/fennia.98357Abstract
Contributing to multidisciplinary studies of human population history, this paper presents an analysis chain to comprehensively model the historical travel environment in Finland, based on a study of spatial patterns of overall accessibility within the country. We created a spatial historical travel environment model over the whole country using high-quality terrain and landscape spatial data, combined with information from historical sources that characterize the landscape in terms of travel effort given the environmental and human-related factors current up until the late 19th century. Spatial analyses of historical travel effort based on the travel environment model indicate travel speeds for different parts of the country, ranging from 0.6 to 5.3 km/h. This is nearly a tenfold range, potentially highly significant for studies relying on historical travel effort and contacts between population groups in Finland. The results show that the overall travel effort in southern Finland is significantly smaller than in the north: almost all areas in southern Finland have average travel speeds above 3 km/h, whereas the average travel speeds below 2.5 km/h are typical in the north. A more detailed study using random 100 km transects highlights the variability of the least-cost routes in different landscapes and between different source data combinations in each cost surface. The paper identifies great potential in combining the existing spatial data archives with archaeological, linguistic, and genetic data in a GIS analysis, to study the travel effort and its impact on the observed spatial patterns of languages, genetic traits, and archaeological findings.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Timo Rantanen, Harri Tolvanen, Terhi Honkola, Outi Vesakoski

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with Fennia agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The license of the published metadata is Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0).
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a doctoral dissertation or book compilation), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
.png)



