Made by History

After finishing up with my "grand tour" around Satakunta, it was again time to return to the WWII German transition camp in Cape Tulliniemi, Hanko. While the site was already familiar to me from a few field seasons in the past, this time the season was a bit more special, as it was the last excavations at Tulliniemi for the time being. After these three weeks, the work will be finally moved indoors for archaeologist Jan Fast to use in his dissertation. But there's still a plenty of time to make more discoveries! Edelweiss pin of Gebirgsjäger. Outline of the filled Soviet trench. The focus of the first week was on a trash dump on the northern coast of Tulliniemi, where you can still see many remains of the battlements dug by Soviets in 1941. Some trenches were later used by Germans as trash dumps, and one of such sites was chosen for our excavation. While we have excavated numerous trash dumps before, this one was interesting especially as an archaeologi...

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 ...

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 so...

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...