Teaching the Next Generation

Last year the Finnish Cultural Foundation announced a new Mullankaivajat ("soil diggers") grant, which was applicable for archaeological projects organized in cooperation with schools around Finland. It aimed to bring archaeological research closer to the life of the local children and make them more aware of the history that surrounds them. The grant has already led to multiple excavations around the country and it's no surprise that our trial excavation team got involved with a project as well - this time in Kontiolahti.


In Kontiolahti, we joined a project organized in cooperation with the National Museum of Finland and the Association of Cultural Heritage Education in Finland. Before our arrival the project team had already visited the local school and told the children of various age about the site they were about to research - the house of the local smith Tobias Takkunen from the 19th century.

Children came to the site in small groups and took part in four workshops that introduced them to different sides of archaeology - prospection, measurements, photography and of course the digging itself. I organized the workshop for prospection and my task was to teach the kids to use metal detectors. After a brief introduction, kids got to try out the machine themselves and make some actual discoveries. While most of the finds were somewhat modern nails and other building materials, each find was taken carefully into a separate bag and proper coordinates were taken to showcase the needed precision when using such machines.

Workshops were a great success and the children were excited about a chance to find out what was hidden beneath the ground. Even if some of the youngest students looked at the detector with a shy face at the beginning, when the machine started to beep, everyone got as close as possible to see what was about to be discovered.

After the workshops were over, it was our time to leave, but the kids would still get to see the finds again, as it was their task to clean and measure everything they had found. Who knows, maybe some even get a spark to seek a career as an archaeologist themselves and even if they didn't, I bet many will look at their surroundings with completely new perspective from now on!

Short video of the workshops.

Location: Kontiolahti, Suomi

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