OULU, FINLAND—According to a statement released by Antiquity, an excavation conducted at Vaakunakylä, a neighborhood in west-central Finland established by German troops during World War II, unearthed items left by Finns who moved into the site in the late 1940s. The working-class settlement, which had been labeled as a “bad” neighborhood, was demolished against the wishes of its residents in the late 1980s. Oula Seitsonen of the University of Oulu and his colleagues determined that the original military barracks had been refurbished as family housing. One of the buildings was even repurposed as a sauna, he said. Pieces of several porcelain sets, suggesting that the post-war residents had a higher standard of living than previously thought, were found in rubbish pits. Toys, children’s medication, and pacifiers also point to a good quality of life, Seitsonen explained. Finally, the researchers conducted interviews with former residents of Vaakunakylä, who remembered the community in a generally positive light. “Both the finds and the collected oral histories give a different and more nuanced picture of the Vaakunakylä community than the popular image of the area as a restless and criminal slum-like shantytown,” Seitsonen said. “We hope that this can have a healing aspect when the pent-up feelings are brought to the surface and discussed in public,” he concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Antiquity. To read about plantings in a medieval garden in southwest Finland, go to "The Archaeology of Gardens: Medical Gardens."
Demolished 20th-Century Neighborhood Investigated in Finland
News March 6, 2024
Recommended Articles
Digs & Discoveries March/April 2016
A Viral Fingerprint
Letter from Alaska July/August 2021
The Cold Winds of War
A little-known World War II campaign in the Aleutian Islands left behind an undisturbed battlefield strewn with weapons and materiel
Digs & Discoveries November/December 2020
Honoring the Dead
Letter from Normandy July/August 2020
The Legacy of the Longest Day
More than 75 years after D-Day, the Allied invasion’s impact on the French landscape is still not fully understood
-
Features November/December 2023
Assyrian Women of Letters
4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets illuminate the personal lives of Mesopotamian businesswomen
(Attraction Art/Adobe Stock) -
Letter from El Salvador November/December 2023
Uneasy Allies
Archaeologists discover a long-forgotten capital where Indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists arrived at a fraught coexistence
-
Artifacts November/December 2023
Sculpture of a Fist
(Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Bridgeman Art Library) -
Digs & Discoveries November/December 2023
The Benin Bronzes’ Secret Ingredient