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New research at a site in Finnish Lapland, c.80km south of the Arctic Circle, suggests that it could represent one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries discovered so far in northern Europe.
Tainiaro, in northern Finland, was originally excavated in the 1980s and 1990s. These initial investigations uncovered thousands of artefacts, mostly lithics but also some pottery and burnt animal bone, as well as dozens of pits, dated to the 5th millennium BC. However, the results of this research were never published, and the site’s potential significance remained unrecognised for several decades. In 2018, archaeologists from the University of Oulu embarked on new research at Tainiaro, analysing the archival evidence as well as returning to the site for new fieldwork including ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey and small, targeted excavations. The results indicate that the site could be significantly larger than previously thought.
A number of the pits uncovered by the early excavations were identified as possible graves because of their shape; however, no surviving human skeletons or organic grave goods were found due to the acidity of the local soil. The new study therefore focused on the morphology of the pits themselves, comparing them with hundreds of graves from other sites across northern Europe. The results of this comparison suggest that around 44 of the pits excavated at Tainiaro can be interpreted as burials. As only around a tenth of the site has been excavated so far, the total number could be at least 115-200 possible graves.
The researchers have explored other interpretations of the pits, including that they were hearths, as evidence of burning has been found in some. However, the pits at Tainiaro lack the thick layers of charcoal, burnt sand, and rocks found in confirmed hearths from other contemporary sites, and many have no clear evidence of burning at all, leading the team to feel that the burials hypothesis is much more persuasive. It is worth noting that this does not rule out the possibility that Tainiaro could have been a habitation site as well, as many Mesolithic societies are believed to have buried their dead in the same spaces as they carried out their day-to-day activities. This interpretation is supported by both the traces of fire and evidence for the production of stone objects at Tainiaro.
Although the identification of the pits as graves currently cannot be verified because of the absence of surviving human remains, even the possibility of a cemetery of this size at this northerly latitude is exciting, and challenges us to reframe how we think about the hunter-gatherer-fisher communities who inhabited this area near the Arctic Circle in the Mesolithic. It is hoped that future research will be able to shed more light on prehistoric activity at Tainiaro, as well as wider occupation of the region. The results of the latest study have been published in Antiquity (https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.160).
Text: Amy Brunskill / Images: Tuija Laurén; Aki Hakonen
