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Throughout history, humans have told stories to one another. Although these stories have largely disappeared over the course of time, they have sometimes left material remains, for instance in the form of rock art. However, rock art might not be the only materialization of prehistoric storytelling practices. On the contrary, if made active again, other prehistoric artefacts might also bring past storytelling practices back to life. In this paper, we examine how storytelling might have taken place in Late Mesolithic Finland (c. 6800-5200 cal BCE). As a case study, we investigate a zoomorphic wild reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) antler artefact from southern Finland, the so-called 'Lepaa artefact', with multidisciplinary methods arising from the traditions of experimental archaeology, 3D technologies, and artistic research. As a result, we suggest that Mesolithic storytelling might have been entangled with ritual practices and accompanied by performances that resemble traditional shadow theatre.

Burial practices in the large area of the north-eastern European and especially the western Russian forest zone are not as well-known as contemporary sites in, for example, western or southern Europe. To fill this gap in our knowledge of north-western Russian Stone Age hunter-gatherer burial traditions and to better understand the similarities and differences in burial traditions between these areas, a new Russian-Finnish collaboration was launched in late 2016. The main aim of this collaboration is to systematically investigate previously excavated mortuary materials from north-western Russia and study them in the broader context of hunter-gatherer funerary practices in north-eastern Europe. As a first case study, we revisited the burial finds from the Stone Age site of Kubenino, a multi-period site with at least six inhumation burials. Burials have been excavated here since the 1930s, but only three have been published so far. Here we describe all the Kubenino burials and present the results of new analyses, namely the osteological study of bone artefacts, the traceological study of flint artefacts, and new radiocarbon determinations. According to the novel radiocarbon data, the Kubenino burials date to the emergence of the Neolithic, which in this region is marked by the appearance of the first pottery-using hunter-gatherers. As our new analyses show, this transition towards the Neolithic is not only present in the everyday life of these hunter-gatherer groups but also resulted in subtle changes in the funerary realm. These changes include, for example, the intentional breakage of grave goods and the introduction of new artefact forms for animal raw materials that were present already in pre-pottery burials.

Firms in Finland are experiencing an immense shortage of skilled workers, and one of the many ways to cope with this shortage is the internationalisation of firms. The starting point of internationalisation of the firm is the smooth induction process of foreign background employees in the firm and utilising digital solutions. This paper explores different ways firms use to enhance the employees’ induction process and promote internationalisation. The data has been collected from 36 firms from Finland in the interview form between 2020-2021. The collected data were analysed qualitatively and provided widespread information. This paper focuses on the induction and internationalisation side of data. The study explains digital solutions, orientation-training programs, promoting an inclusive work culture and background evaluations to enhance the induction process. The practical implication of this study is to provide guidelines and bases to develop further digital solutions for the induction process in Finnish firms.

This research seeks to identify how to design accessible training for semi-literate immigrants that promotes the learning of the Finnish language, culture and digital skills. Semi-structured interviews with 12 semi-literate learners, the teacher and two native language speakers were conducted. The dataset was collected from a private service provider, and it includes a digital footprint of training. The training was a 20 weeks pilot experiment, and it was implemented in early 2020. The design was based on the user's previous experience. The perceived major crucial success factors are empathic and equal interaction, encouragement, ease, trust, security, multilingual and technological support, and competencies of the parts of training. The empathy-based, carefully planned interactive digital design may be effective, attractive and easy for semi-literate learners. The case study of the tablet course encourages further investigation and the development of online training for low-literate learners.

Developed countries have vastly depleted workforces because of their ageing populations. Finland is one of the countries suffering from labour shortages in all areas. At the same time, existing immigrants cannot find suitable work in Finnish firms due to language and integration barriers. This paper aims to explore the importance of the Finnish language in recruiting workers with foreign backgrounds, the need for a foreign workforce and the openness of Finnish firms to cooperation in solving these issues. The focus is on the recruitment barriers and the shortage of the workforce side of the data. The data have been collected from 36 firms from Finland in an interview form between 2020 and 2021 and qualitatively analysed and interpreted. The study explains the level of need for foreign workforces in Finnish firms and their willingness to cooperate with facilitating projects and funding bodies. It also connects the project findings to Finland’s official strategic focus for 2030.

Human and Artificial intelligence (AI) collaborations have contributed to improve our daily lives. AI can be used to promote employment, social inclusion and service innovation. To improve social inclusion, the integration of foreign origin workers is crucial for economic growth. In Finland, the MALVA project 'preparing immigrants for working life' aims to develops Human-Artificial services that promote social inclusion and service innovation. One important goal of the project is to create a chatbot for companies and develop mobile guiding practices to enhance employment solutions for foreign origin workers. This work is in progress, the present article reports the initial development stages and literature review related to the collaboration of human and artificial intelligence systems (HAS). The paper contributes to the understanding of the AI-based chatbots and their use in the integration of skilled migrant workers to promote social inclusion and economic growth.

Finnish integration training for immigrants aims to improve social inclusion into Finnish society and to promote employment. The first fully online integration training and the still ongoing program has conducted since 2015. During the training activities, the education provider has collected varieties of data from 2015 to 2019. Utilizing design science theory, authors demonstrate that integration training succeeds online at least as well as in the classroom when the design is implemented in a customer-oriented way lingually, pedagogically, and technically accessible. When teachers and the group learn collaboratively, and with ensured interaction, the training supports integration and finding career pathways. This study describes frugal and inclusive educational innovation. One main finding is that the teacher’s ability to facilitate learning situations in distance-based synchronous e-learning differs from classroom instruction and requires detailed planning in advance. The training needs to prepare immigrants for the requirement of Finnish society. The desires of the students shape the training from the beginning.

The Corded Ware complex represents an archaeologically defined culture whose people inhabited large areas of Europe during the third millennium BC. Although Corded Ware graves are known also from Finnish territory – the northernmost area of Corded Ware expansion – these graves represent a special challenge and methodological problem for archaeological research. This is because unburnt bone material is generally not preserved in the acidic soils of Finland, and Finnish Corded Ware complex graves have typically been recognized mainly due to the occurrence of a Corded Ware assemblage (i. e. complete pottery vessels, adzes and ground-stone axes). Furthermore, since most Finnish Corded Ware grave discoveries have been made during the early and mid-20th century, they generally lack good-quality archaeological documentation. Despite these challenges, new insights into Finnish Corded Ware burials can be gained by thoroughly investigating the region’s burial customs and material culture as an entity and comparing them to the Corded Ware complex of the eastern Baltic region and beyond. Finnish Corded Ware graves not only follow the standard material culture and burial customs of the Central European Corded Ware complex but show additional evidence of wooden chambers and laid-out furs, and they may have occasionally even possessed small mounds. However, even though the material culture of the Finnish graves follows traditions present in the central European Corded Ware complex, the grave custom is far from uniform. Hence, Finnish Corded Ware graves represent a melting pot of ideas, ideologies and connections, likely reflecting differing origins of relocating people. Aside from being influenced by the Corded Ware populations of nearby regions, a close link to contemporary local hunter-gatherers seems to have been present, too.

Although not often discussed in an archaeological context, religion plays an important role in human migrations by working as an anchor of collective identity and distinction among the migrants. By...

This paper concerns the material culture of Finnish Mesolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherer mortuary practices. Although the perishable materials - including the human remains - are poorly preserved, the graves nevertheless contain large numbers of objects made of unperishable materials. In this paper, this largely unpublished material is complied for the first time into a single study. As a grand narrative, the find material is viewed in the light of change and continuity in the material culture of death among ancient hunter-gatherers. The general trends in how certain materials or artefact types were used in mortuary practices are also explored. In conclusion, it seems that although most of the finds derive from the graves of the Neolithic Typical Comb Ware Culture (c. 3900-3500 cal BC), the artefacts are not merely imported exotic raw material, but are also packed with symbolic overtones. © 2018 Association pour le traitement automatique des langues. All rights reserved.

Amorphous hydrogenated silicon carbide (a-SiC:H) films are produced by remote microwave hydrogen plasma (RHP)CVD using triethylsilane (TrES) as the single-source precursor. The reactivity of particular bonds of the precursor in the activation step is examined using tetraethylsilane as a model compound for the RHP-CVD experiments. The susceptibility of a TrES precursor towards film formation is characterized by determining the yield of RHP-CVD and comparing it with that of the trimethylsilane precursor. The effect of substrate temperature (Ts) on the rate of the RHP-CVD process, chemical composition, and chemical structure of the resulting a-SiC:H films is reported. The substrate temperature dependence of the film growth rate implies that film growth is independent of the temperature and RHP-CVD is a mass transport-limited process. The examination of the a-SiC:H films, performed by means of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), elastic recoil detection analysis (ERDA), and Fourier transform infrared absorption spectroscopy (FTIR), reveals that the increase in the substrate temperature from 30 °C to 400 °C causes the elimination of organic moieties from the film and the formation of a Si-carbidic network structure. On the basis of the results of the structural study, the chemistry involved in film formation is proposed. © 2009 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.