Made by History

After the good experiences from the week before, I wanted to gain at least one more experience on the field before the incoming winter would ruin the possibilities for many months to come. Thus, after I heard that Jan would still have one more excavation before winter, I signed up without thinking twice. This time the excavation was in Hanko – a city that would become a very familiar place for the years to come. My first ring find. Photo: Jan Fast As I have explained before , the research of Cape Tulliniemi in Hanko is a part of the doctoral dissertation of archaeologist Jan Fast, who has researched there a large German WW2 transition camp for multiple years. It was my first visit to the area, so I was given a short excursion around the central area, including slowly decaying barracks that still remained somewhat standing after the war. In Tulliniemi, we were joined by a group of archaeology and history enthusiasts, who were already very familiar with the area. With them, ...

My path in archaeology might not have been a very long one, but it has definitely been eventful and memorable. In this series of posts, I will introduce my journey on the field from the very first excavation until the start of this blog almost a year ago. Early Comb Ceramic potsherd. It was October 2016, when I noticed that archaeologist Jan Fast was organizing an excavation in Raasepori with local archaeology enthusiasts. I had barely studied a month of archaeology but I was already eager to try my hands on the field, so I immediately contacted him to ask if there happened to be an extra free seat in the car – and luckily for me, there was! A few days later our car turned onto a dirt road towards a site that’s called Långåmossarna . The site had seen multiple years of excavations in the past, mainly at an Early Comb Ceramic dwelling site by an old sandpit. However, earlier that year, Jan and his team had discovered another area with finds including potsherds attribut...

With the first archaeological survey conducted in Cape Tulliniemi earlier this month, our "Hanko 1941" project team started discussions over systemic surveys around the whole Hanko peninsula. While Hanko has rich history from earlier time periods too, it was in our interests to map and document these slowly decaying sites from the World War II, as they are often overlooked by traditional archaeology and thus are only rarely protected or preserved. After they ultimately disappear, as many already have, we can do nothing but regret the missed possibilities, so it's better to start as early as possible! Collapsed dugout near the front-lines of Hanko. As everyone, who has read about the Finnish history knows, there would be multiple possibilities for conflict archaeology within our borders. What makes Hanko unique though, is it's special role, geographically limited research area and changing inhabitants. Our interest in Hanko starts from the year 1940, when Hanko ...

Soviet dugout on Tulliniemi beach in August 1942. While the preparations for this summer's excavations are currently ongoing, there is still time for other projects and now that the snow has mostly disappeared, it's time to get the field surveys going! This year we started with the southern coast of Cape Tulliniemi - an area that has previously staid closed from us due to the regulations of the Freeport of Finland. This time the gates were kindly opened for us and we got to walk on the beaches that had not seen visitors for decades. As you might have read from my previous posts , Tulliniemi is an area that has seen a plenty of history. There has been lively maritime activities around the nearby waters for centuries and while Tulliniemi coast has sometimes provided cover for boats, it has also seen a plenty of corpses washing to the grounds from shipwrecks. There has been a plenty of stories about bones of unfortunate sailors being found on the beaches! While we kep...

Today I arrived once again to the city of Pori, which was once my home base for conducting archaeological surveys all around Satakunta. While the province is full of fascinating sites from early Mesolithic period to more contemporary industrial history, there was one particular site that caught my attention and has kept me busy over the long winter – that is Pori Airpot. Warning sign for the airport area in Finnish and German. Taken in 1944. The construction of Pori Airport was completed in autumn 1939 and due to the imminent start of the Winter War, its operations were soon taken over by the Finnish Air Force. While Finns already sought to expand the airport and its defenses, the more significant fortification program got started in July 1941, when the airport operations were handed over to the German allies. The airport soon became an important depot, from where the Germans dispatched aircraft to the north and carried out major overhauls. After Finland negotiated a sep...

Last test pit of 2018 in progress . After a long winter, there comes a moment, when all archaeologists in Finland start feeling a sudden itch in their body. They find themselves looking into the weather forecast more closely and keep constantly peaking outside to check if the snow was still there. Some might even start storing empty banana boxes, which they couldn't just pass by at a local market. Even though my pile of boxes is still fairly moderate, I'm also starting to feel that the field season is upon us and it's time to prepare trowels for the summer! While I'm preparing for the new projects to come, and for a return to certain familiar sites, I will share my thoughts along the journey. There is a lot to do this spring and I'm happy to soon announce certain upcoming projects that I've been working on over the winter. So stay tuned and get ready for yet another field season - this one will be even better than ever before!

After a long field season, the snow eventually falls and it's time to return from the field. This doesn't mean that all the work would be over though - on the contrary, it only marks the beginning of the more time consuming part of the research. There are multiple steps of work that follows excavations and I don't even try to cover all of it. Instead, in the following posts, I'll give a few examples on the tasks I've been working with recently. To start with the most obvious, one of the most exciting steps after returning from the field is to dive into all the finds gathered over the days or weeks of hard labor. As there rarely is enough time to see every find on the field, it's always interesting to see the big picture when returning to the finds afterward. As each find is typically packed separately, there often is a mountain of paper bags to dig through. After they are organized based on the location and layer of the finds within the excavation t...