Made by History

The opportunity for the last major excavation of the 2017 field season came, when I heard that Jan Fast was organizing an archaeological field school at a new Stone Age site in Kimitoön. As I was eager to excavate previously uncharted lands, I immediately decided to offer my help and before I noticed, I was on my way to the Archipelago Sea in the Southwest Finland. Extending the trench for new participants. The excavation lasted only for an extended weekend, but the results were at least as magnificent as in Estonia. The site was very rich in finds and revealed big pieces of pottery from Kiukainen culture - the last phase of Stone Age in the Southwest Finland. I had not excavated the period before and for some reason it immediately seemed very fascinating to me - so fascinating, that after the excavation I asked if I could clean the finds at the university in order to spend a bit more time observing the pottery! In between of all the digging and sieving, I also had some s

After my field season had had a good start at Tursiannotko, it seemed like a good point to continue a bit further with my newfound “field career” and I turned my attention towards our southern neighbors in Estonia, which, after two years of former university studies, felt like second home to me. However, I had never participated anything archaeology related there before, so it was finally time to break that barrier! Excavation trench 1 in process. This time I joined an excavation run by the University of Tartu in cooperation with Ango , an association of Finnish archaeology enthusiasts. The site in question was a Corded Ware dwelling site named as Kudruküla, which was located in the coastal town of Narva-Jõesuu. The area was rich in similar sites and had been researched multiple years by professor Aivar Kriiska from the University of Tartu and archaeologist Kerkko Nordqvist from the University of Oulu. They had been joined many years by volunteers from Ango, whose passion to

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