Made by History

For an archaeology students, job opportunities are often scarce and sprinkled around the country, with a contract typically lasting only for the duration of a single excavation. It's also typical that the job ads appear only a few weeks before the said excavation, making it stressful to wait for potential work offers. That's why I've been glad and humbled to have a fixed schedule from early on, and while I have barely had a few days of holiday during summer, I happily moved straight from Hanko to the  beginning of the next journey of my summer – this time within the Finnish Heritage Agency. As it's said on their website, the Finnish Heritage Agency preserves Finland's material cultural heritage: collects, studies and distributes knowledge of it. They have various departments from museum services to preserving cultural environment and handling research permits for archaeological excavations. My position for the next three months will be within the trial excavati...

Three weeks in Hanko went past faster than I expected, but luckily the finds continued numerous during the last week and the new crew made exciting discoveries each day. For this last week, we concentrated our efforts on e xcavating a sizable trash dump within the Ukrainian prison camp, uncovering layers rich in a variety of finds - porcelain, coins, buttons, combs and a lot more. Meanwhile I led a small task force to finish the excavations at the German Red Cross (DRK) trench, which required still a fair bit of work even after three weeks of excavations. "The Graveyard of Bottles" So far all the trenches we've opened have been a bit different in the type of finds, but with these two trenches the difference was even more clear. While the finds of the Ukrainian prison camp included a lot of personal items, such as a mess tin with its owner's initials carved on it and even a SA Sports Badge, the finds from the DRK trench were very different in style. During the...

Trenches had lots of fragments of books, tobacco packages and official documents. Yet another week in Hanko is coming to an end and another group of helpful volunteers has left the site for their homes. This time we opened two completely new trenches while the work at the German Red Cross site continued. If you're interested in seeing photos of the many finds made during the week, check out Jan Fast's blog starting from this post . My duties were similar than on the week before and the trenches kept me busy, as the find were numerous and we had much more participants than on the first week. The finds were also quite different in style and it was a pleasant surprise to uncover multiple pieces of German writings as well as fairly well preserved textiles. At the same time, the tin cans that we had gathered hundreds during the first week were now almost non-existent. Metal detector showed it prowess again during the week, as it gave as a clearer picture on the concentr...