Blast from the Past III: Time for the Field School

It was May 2017. The winter had been long, but finally the spring was here and it was time to return on the field. This time the season would start with a field school organized by the University of Helsinki to all first-year archaeology students. It was finally our time to face Tursiannotko – a site that older students and archaeologists talked with a touch of nostalgia and a little bit of infamy.

Birckala 1017 exhibition featuring finds from Tursiannotko among others.

Tursiannotko is a well-known Late Iron Age dwelling site in Pirkkala, which has been archaeologically excavated since 1990. So far, the excavations have uncovered remains of houses dated from Late Iron Age to 13th century, containing a broad variety of finds. What makes the site fairly unique in Finnish context, are the suitable soil conditions, which have preserved many bone artifacts from beautifully decorated spoons to arrowheads.

For the past few years, the site has seen quite a few rounds of student and public excavations, which culminated as the Birckala 1017 exhibition in the museum centre Vapriikki and book Tursiannotko: tutkimuksia hämäläiskylästä viikinkiajalta keskiajalle. Now it was time for us to leave our mark to the research history of this iconic site!

As you can imagine, field school is the place for archaeology students to put the skills learned in the lecture halls into practice. While the excavation itself was the main focus and most of the two weeks went digging as usual, the schedule also included different educational activities to practice essential field skills, such as drawing and measuring.

While learning might have been the main point of these two weeks, what everyone seemed most excited about were the finds themselves. As it was the first time on the field for many of my co-students – and the first time at an Iron Age site for everyone – we all were looking forward to making the discoveries that we had dreamed of ever since we applied to study archaeology. And while archaeology itself is often times about patience and sites of varying degrees of finds, Tursiannotko was surely different. As you could imagine from a dwelling site with such good soil conditions, finds were everywhere and one could say that they almost disturbed otherwise consistent digging - arrowheads, various kinds of tools, a plenty of bone, a dirham and even a spearhead!

Sieving the soil for macrobotanical analysis.

Besides various kinds of finds, what was also memorable about the site were the weather conditions. The older students had hinted before that the site would be awful when it rains and when it eventually did, it sure wasn't pretty. Soon we found ourselves pumping water out of the trenches and trying to find a way to sieve the muddy soil properly in order to find all the small fish bones and beads. When we eventually finished up with the work, my car really needed a good scrub for all the mud it had gathered inside. Even still, now two years later, I'd say that the conditions at Tursiannotko were actually pretty mild and pleasant in comparison to certain other sites, but maybe it was still a good first test for any aspiring field archaeologist!

Anyways, after the excavation was over, our involvement with the research continued still a bit longer, as the field course was followed by cleaning the finds and preparing soil samples for further analysis. During these dozens of hours at the university laboratory, all finds from the site would become even more familiar to each of us. And while the finds and other research results might not have been early enough for the exhibition or the book, they will surely continue expanding our understanding of Tursiannotko and the time period in general, hopefully one day being included in further articles and maybe even other exhibitions to come. Research of Tursiannotko is definitely not over yet!

If you’re interested in participating this year’s student excavation, now there’s an unique chance, as the Open University is offering some seats to anyone interested. You can also read more about the site (in Finnish) and see photos of the finds at the Tursiannotko website.