Debates over the ethnogenesis of the Sámi and their historical presence in Fennoscandia have long affected scholarly and public discourses. More recently, these debates have been fueled by new propositions launched by Finnish linguists regarding the origin and development of the Sámi language. In this article, we target this corpus of linguistic research and the wide-ranging implications it suggests for the Sámi past. While based on historical and comparative linguistics data, a notable feature of the studies examined is that they also lean heavily on assumptions about the archaeological record in their reasonings. These assumptions, we argue, are, to a large extent, based on very limited or outdated knowledge of archaeological research on the Sámi past, and in particular, that of northern Norway. The article raises critical questions regarding the notions of cultural areas, ancestral homelands, and migrations that abound in these linguistic studies and challenges the a priori primacy assigned to language as the constituent of cultural identity. In conclusion, we outline a Sámi archaeological past that does not concur well with recent linguistic accounts and which, in the end, begs the question of whether this discrepancy can be reconciled and, if so, how this can happen.

关于萨米人的民族起源及其在芬诺斯坎迪亚的历史存在的争论长期以来影响着学术和公众的讨论。最近，芬兰语言学家提出的关于萨米语起源和发展的新主张加剧了这些争论。在本文中，我们的目标是这个语言研究语料库及其对萨米人过去的广泛影响。虽然基于历史和比较语言学数据，但所研究的研究的一个显着特点是，它们在推理中也严重依赖于有关考古记录的假设。我们认为，这些假设在很大程度上是基于对萨米人的过去，特别是挪威北部的考古研究的非常有限或过时的知识。本文对这些语言研究中大量存在的文化区域、祖先故乡和迁徙等概念提出了批判性问题，并对语言作为文化认同的组成部分的先验首要地位提出了挑战。总之，我们概述了萨米人的考古历史，它与最近的语言学记载并不一致，最终引出了这样的问题：这种差异是否可以调和，如果可以，如何实现。