Feldluftpark Pori – The Project Advances

As some of my readers might remember, last year I launched a new conflict archaeology project for the research of the WWII Luftwaffe airport and aviation equipment depot in Pori. The project, now called Feldluftpark Pori, has advanced nicely over the winter months and in the following post, I want to share a few of these advances with you.

Festive mood both for the troops of Feldluftpark Pori and archaeologists researching their heritage.

At the initial phase, I spent a great deal of time with maps archived to the Finnish Air Force Museum in Jyväskylä. Using a GIS program, I created a projection of around 300 constructions built by Germans and Finns during the war, including aircraft shelters, hangars, barracks and even an aircraft gun harmonization range. This projection did not only give an idea of the Luftwaffe depot as whole, but it could also be used for example to observe annual changes to the depot or to showcase only certain types of buildings, such as barracks, to observe them separately from other construction.

Using coordinates extracted from this projection, I spent a few days on the field, locating remains of aforementioned sites. While a majority of the depot had fallen under modern land-use after the war and only a fraction of the constructions remained decaying in the woods, there was still a plenty of hope for untouched material remains underground.

Dontoklar toothpaste from the visiting Germans.
Luckily, my hopes were soon rewarded, as the initial metal detector survey proved that there were still a plenty of German garbage pits around the woods. However, there were also a plenty of modern trash surrounding them, adding some extra difficulty to the research.

After the initial preparations and field survey were done, I felt comfortable enough to seek financial support for the project. Together with Satakunta Museum, we filed in applications and were grateful to receive positive responses.

Thanks to Mullankaivajat grant by the Finnish Cultural Foundation, which I was already familiar from a while back, we are now able to arrange an archaeological field school to a group of local high school students, who will get the first taste of the research area later this year. They will be soon followed by a group of adults through another field school organized through Pori adult education center.

However, before we get into digging, I will continue extensive archival research, thanks to the benevolent support of Svenska Kulturfonden i Björneborg. Material from archives and from the fieldwork will be used to a scientific publication and an exhibition opened in the Satakunta Museum in March 2022. But there's still a plenty of work to be done before that!

While I will continue posting about the project and my personal experiences through this blog, the project now has a new website as well, on which I will publish new research results along the way. There will be also a plenty of opportunities for anyone interested in taking part of the research, so hopefully I'll see many of you on the field or in the seminar halls!
Location: Pori, Suomi

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