Jokiniemi 2015 day 15/22

Superb finds today, flint and slate tools and ornaments, lots and lots of magnificient neolithic pottery and a great meeting with representatives of Leica Geosystems in Finland. Thank you so much for Your help!

Some 20 people  participated in todays dig and despite a rather depressing weather forecast yesterday the weather turned out fantastic!!

 Excitement in the air :)

 Another beautiful perforated slate ornament!

Flint scraper.

Hundreds and hundreds of sherds of neolithic pottery.

Whetstone.

 Digger surrounded by plastic bags full of finds :)

 My power trio!

Leica Geosystems is sponsoring the Jokiniemi dig,we recieved  great GPS instruments from them  today!

Jokiniemi 2015 day 14/22

Another wonderful summers day with lots of participants and nice finds too :). Below are a few pictures from today and some pictures of the finds.

Community archaeology is the word.

Under 16 year olds can participate together with an adult.

A small nail shaped slate chisel.

 Analyzing finds.

 Neolithic pottery.

Back to back digging.

Cleaning up level 3.

Poetic Archaeology and Jokiniemi 2015 day 13/22

First of all I would like to say I´m sorry about the rather short entries here. The fact is that after some three years of lack of work I suddenly find myself in a completely different situation. Now I´m conducting a one month community archaeology dig on a neolithic site, while during evenings making sense of a rather large WW2 conflict archaeology project in Hanko S Finland.

Heer "Urlauber" about to embark on a Finnish train that will take them to Hanko Finland.

Until the end of december 2015 I will be working full time with my conflict archaeology project for "Poetic Archaeology" . The project is about documenting "Deutsches Lager Hanko", a large German WW2 transition camp in S Finland. The work is part of my doctoral dissertation on the German camp.

Cover of a German troop carrier log book from 1941-1942.

Our "Poetic" team including Jan Martti Kaila and Japo Knuuttila are at the same time embarking on a long and sad road trip, visiting different German WW2 camps in Europe in a couple of weeks. Iwill be posting photographs of their journey here as I get them. At the same time I´m researching the long lost sad stories of the "Urlauber" of the Eismeerfront.

Majdanek

At the same time the Jokiniemi dig is into it´s last week, the finds are accumulating rapidly and I have a gut feeling that something very big is coming up soon, maybe even tomorrow  :).

Community archaeology is for everyone regardless of age :)

As are the nice neolithic potsherds...

Bingo :)

Jokiniemi 2015 day 12/22

Another day to remember despite the occasional rainshowers. Flint artefacts, corded ware pottery, pitted ware pottery and of course comb ceramic pottery.

Flint scrapers.

Such wonderful diggers, highly motivated and skilled.

Perfect technique!

Measuring up... we are excavating in 50 cm squares.

The weather continues to be unstable with occasional rain showers. No worries though, with a team like this this must be the best excavation in my career. It´s time to enjoy and treasure every moment.

 Sea of "Lupinus polyphyllus"

Jokiniemi 2015. Top finds from the topsoil

A couple of neolithic slate chisel fragments from Jokiniemi (2015). Thanks M. Pitko for your valuable help last weekend :)

Fragmentary wood carving tools found 4-5.7.2015 by Mr M. Pitko.

Jokiniemi 2015 day 11/22

The party has begun. We have finally entered the undisturbed neolithic find layer and it shows. The finds are excellent in all aspects. Due to the low elevation we are finding interesting late neolithic stuff like this piece of asbestos tempered pottery!

Rimsherd of asbestos tempered neolithic ware with shallow cord-like impressions.

Most of the potsherds are very fragmented possibly due to "tramping", but possibly also because of older broken vessels being re-used as "chamotte" in the late neolithic. Today we found more fragments of flint arrowheads and one complete one! It´s a beauty!

Flint arrowhead from Jokiniemi, a true masterpiece. The arrowhead is only 2 cm:s long.

Today we had guests from the University of  Helsinki. The picture below is shown here by courtesy of Wesa Perttola dpt of archaeology. Thanks Wesa and especiaslly Suzie Thomas for the discussions :). More photos here 

https://www.facebook.com/JournalOfCommunityArchaeologyAndHeritage

High tech birds eye view of the excavation. Photo Wesa Perttola.

Lot´s of great finds, lots of great photos :)

 Exciting finds...

Make good  pictures :)

Jokiniemi 2015 day 10/22

The first really hot day brought more nice finds large Ka II potsherds, more spellbinding quartz crystals, a magnificient flint scraper made of very dark almost black flint. A selection of the finds from the first ten  days of the exhibition are now on display  at Heureka the Finnish Science Center.

Jokiniemi 2015 virtual tour by Mirador 360/P. Sairanen

Here!

https://round.me/tour/9231/view/

Jokiniemi day 9/22

This day was an important documentation day before venturing further down into the cultural layer so we took things a bit slower than usual.

 Archaeology student Olli Eranti cleaning level 2 for documentation.

 ... and preparing the map in the shade.

Level 2. of the excavation area is ready for documentation.

At noon the site was visited by some 20 youngsters from Heureka who took part in sieving and digging of the site. Such wonderful young energetic boys and girls!!

 Sieving the ploughsoil.

 Digging in.

Community archaeology at it´s absolute best without age limits :)

The finds were not as many as before today but still included a few flint scrapers and some 100 fragments of neolithic comb ceramic pottery.

Comb ceramic pottery.

Jokiniemi day 8/22

Fantastic day with great neolithic flint and pottery finds :).

 Flint arrowhead fragments (middle part missing).

Flint knife fragment.

Neolithic pottery.

The dig continued in excellent summer weather, seems like the heatwave is finally here :).

 The power trio, archaeology students Janne, Nelli an Olli :).

And we are only approaching layer 3.