Throughout history, people around the world have scarred, shaped, and used living trees for cultural purposes. Because trees can live for centuries,“culturally modified trees”(CMTs) that survive today are a biological archive that can tell us much about the historic relationships between people and forests. Indeed, CMTs constitute a unique and important source of information about the way different groups conceived of their place in nature.

The boreal Scandinavian forest is one of the great remaining CMT archives. Ancient ethnic groups in Scandinavia have modified living trees to create distinct features, and the practice was widespread up until the late nineteenth century. The practice ranged from scarring trees to mark boundaries and traditional paths, through the collection of Scots pine inner-bark for food by the native Sami nomads of Scandinavia, to religiously motivated scarring of certain trees. Each culturally modified tree gives clues about its role in previous times, which can foster understanding of earlier land-use patterns when put into the proper context. Research on culturally modified trees has been done in different ecosystems across the world. In United States and Canada, and especially in the Pacific Northwest, a considerable amount of archaeological and anthropological research has shown that such trees have a wide distribution throughout this region and that they have an inherent value for studying Native American forest use. 1 A few studies have focused specifically on the multiple-use of western red cedar. 2 A number of studies also have considered Native American use of Ponderosa pine in the drier ecosystems in the inland northwest of the United States, all the way from New Mexico in the south to Montana in the north. Also in Australia, the aborigines have scarred different species of trees for a various purposes. 3 In Scandinavia most of the research has focused on Sami use of the innerbark of Scots pine but there are also studies showing the magic use of trees as well as the inscription on blazed trees related to cattle herding in the eighteenth century. 4