The North has traditionally been viewed as a marginal zone whose hunting and gathering populations are often portrayed as the passive recipients of technological developments dispersing from the South via local adoption and/or population migrations.

More recently, many northern regions have been drawn into modern political states, with the result that scholarly debate has tended to reflect national research traditions which focus on the emergence of ethnic groups and identities. As a result, the present day cultural diversity of the North is understood from a categorical perspective.

Together, the shared emphasis on northern marginality and crisp group-based identities has increasingly come to obscure our understanding of the active roles played by northern communities in long-term historical transformations.

The main emphasis has been on the period 6000 BC to 1600 AD, covering the initial contact between distinct regional groups up to the transition to reindeer herding. Some more recent linguistic data has also been employed in order to shed light on the development of linguistic diversification. Thus the focus is on the northern hunter-gatherer-fisher societies, their interaction with each other and later with neighbouring agricultural groups, which gradually developed into state societies. The main point of interest is the investigation of the dynamics of the resident groups and of the constituting processes and consequences of their active and strategic involvement in regional and interregional networks.