Made by History

As mentioned before, a typical job for the trial excavation team is to conduct small-scale trial excavations in areas that have potential archaeological heritage but are falling under land use. Based on trial excavations, building projects can be halted until further research is conducted or, if possible, a potential area for the construction is found from an area that wouldn't disturb the archaeological heritage. This time our work sent us to further north and after hours of driving, we ended up in the city of Tornio right by the Swedish border. In Tornio, our mission was to dig test pits and trenches around an empty lot, that would soon fall under further land use. As it’s typical to change the soil for the entire lot when building residential buildings within cities, the whole lot had to be checked for archaeological heritage. This time we couldn’t just find the most suitable place for the building, but rather had to find out if further excavations were needed and if so, to...

Three weeks in Keitele are finally over and the excavations were conducted successfully to the end. While our days in the trenches remained scorching hot due to the unusually long heatwave, the nearby lake provided some comfort and the multitude of finds kept our spirits high! Even though the finds are still waiting to be examined and the report to be written, I can share some initial thoughts of the excavations at this site that proved to be a Mesolithic paradise to any Stone Age archaeologist. Fire place from the first week getting slowly uncovered. As we had opened three trenches on the first week, we continued the work on all three areas, while also opening some smaller test trenches to see the extent of the archaeological potential. Photo: Sara Perälä The site continued to be rich in finds, although the variety of them was as narrow as expected from a Mesolithic site in Finland. Basically, almost all finds could be divided into two categories - animal bones and quar...