Ancient Karelia: Archaeological Studies / Muinais-Karjala: Arkeologisia tutkimuksia

Translation Jüri Kokkonen. The roots of this study go back to 1984, when I was permitted - as the first Western researcher since the Russian revolution - to participate in archaeological excavations at Staraja Ladoga, the Aldeigjuborg of the sagas. Permission to travel to the site, which at the time was in an area closed to foreigners, was due to the tenacity of Dr. A. N. Kirpičnikov, at the time head of the Fenno-Slav sector of the Institute of Archaeology of the Leningrad Department of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (from 1993 the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg). Dr. Kirpičnikov spared no efforts in drawing up applications to the Soviet authorities. The territory between Staraja Ladoga and the Finnish border, the areas of Karelia ceded to the Soviet Union in the Second World War, became more and more fascinating to me. Soviet archaeologists had carried out fieldwork there for years, gathering a considerable corpus of material in the process. But there were no Finnish researchers specializing in Karelian archaeology. My licentiate thesis presented at the University of Helsinki was on a completely different theme, Iron Age buildings and structures, and I had to begin my studies in Karelian archaeology from scratch. I decided to venture into this field. My research was made possible by an appointment to a temporary position as junior researcher with the Academy of Finland beginning in 1988. My project also received separate funding. The first years were taken up by basic-level research, and the Academy granted me two extra terms, of which the last one ended on 31 July 1993. The Finnish-Soviet Committee for Cooperation in the Sciences and Technology (later Science and Technology Commission) approved the Karelian Iron Age research project as one of its official joint study projects. The main archaeological excavations of this project were carried out in 1989-1990 at the Old Fortress of Käkisalmi and in 1991 at the Suotniemi site, in the Käkisalmi rural commune. A. I. Saksa was responsible for the scientific direction of the fieldwork together with myself. Small excavations were carried out at the Old Fortress of Käkisalmi also in later fieldwork seasons. Between 1988 and 1993 I made a total of 13 field and congress trips to the former Soviet Union (amounting to some 200 days). Over half of this time was spent in fieldwork in Karelia (excavation and survey), and some 40 days were spent in working in the archives of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Petrozavodsk. My visits also permitted me to study the collections at Staraja Ladoga, Novgorod and Syktyvkar. Establishing the precise locations of antiquities and sites is one of the main goals of fieldwork. Accordingly, I visited some 120 sites in Karelia, documenting their present state with photographs. The results are presented in this publication.