Made by History

When visiting Satakunta for a bit longer time, there’s one figure that can’t be avoided – Lalli. This character from stories and legends has influenced names of sports teams, buildings, natural sites and even a newspaper – his axe is even featured on the coat of arms of Köyliö. With a superstar of this caliber around, one should not miss his story and rather follow the events of the Legend of Saint Henry. Approaching Kirkkokari Island on boat. The tale of St. Henry and Lalli originates from a Catholic legend and a Finnish poem, which differ a bit from each other. But to summarize it briefly, St. Henry was an English clergyman, who served in the Kingdom of Sweden in the 12th century and was sent to Finland to organize church affairs. One day in the middle of the winter, he visited a certain manor while on his journeys alone. After leaving, Lalli, the owner of the manor arrived and was lied by his wife that the bishop had taken food, cake and beer without permission. Enr...

For the past month and a half, I've been working for Satakunta Museum, which is already familiar to me from the last summer . While last year my work included sorting out the archaeological collections and visiting new sites reported by locals, this time my work was solely on the field, as I was to document known heritage sites all around the province. After hundreds of kilometers on the road and many days in the bushes, I'm finally done with the field work and can share the results with everyone interested. The closest burial cairn from my house in Pori - less than 30 minutes on foot! To offer a little background to my work, let's state that there's a new initiative by the National Heritage Agency to list the most prominent archaeological sites around the country. These sites could be considered as prime examples of their category (eg. cairns, dwelling sites or trapping pits). While this doesn't mean that the other archaeological sites would be of less va...

Before finishing the series of my past adventures on the field, I will share one more experience, which followed the other aforementioned excavations of the 2017 field season. Before limiting the rest of the autumn for shorter excavations, I still had time for one more field trip and I spent it no further than in Italy. It was my first time in the country and the first time to research classical civilizations. However, this time there were no trowels and shovels, as our main instrument was a ground-penetrating radar. Carlos working while I'm resting under the only tree on the field. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is one of the main geophysical methods used in archaeology to discover buried structures. The device emits electromagnetic energy into the ground and tracks signals reflected from buried objects and boundaries between materials of different permittivities. While the data can be already monitored on the field, it can also be further processed afterwards and turned ...