Finnish archaeology has a chronic frustration: the soil eats organic material. Acidic podzols dissolve bone within a few centuries, which is why so much of the country's Iron Age is known through iron, bronze and burnt clay rather than through what people ate or made from antler.

Tursiannotko is the exception. Its soil chemistry preserved bone exceptionally well, and by 2017 excavators had identified 1,560 fragments — an unusual haul by Finnish standards. Pig dominates the assemblage, which alone tells you something about how these households fed themselves. Beyond food waste there are worked objects: bone arrowheads, bone spoons, the small durable tools of a settled community that made what it needed from what it slaughtered.

Between three and five buildings have been traced so far, spanning the late Iron Age through to the thirteenth century. Only one has been excavated completely — a single-roomed log cabin whose builders laid a clay floor before raising the walls. Radiocarbon dating puts it in the 800s or 900s, the early to middle Viking Age.

Inside that cabin sat a stone foundation that appears to be the base of a stove. If the identification holds, it is the oldest dated stove yet found in Finland, and researchers have raised the possibility that it heated a sauna — which would make this the earliest physical trace yet excavated of the country's defining domestic ritual. A second cabin, only partly dug, dates to the eleventh or twelfth century, the tail of the Viking Age running into the crusade period. Scattered individual objects reach back as early as the fifth century, though nothing structural supports habitation that early.

Tursiannotko did not end when the Viking Age did. Through the medieval centuries the settlement kept growing until it had become Pirkkalankylä, the village of Pirkkala, and the first surviving written mention of that village dates from 1442 — six hundred years after somebody laid the clay floor in the log cabin.

The name matters more than it looks. Greater Pirkkala parish once covered over half of what is now the Pirkanmaa region, and the region itself was named after this parish when it was drawn up in the 1950s. In 1922 the old parish split in two; the northern half became Nokia in 1938, and the southern half kept the Pirkkala name after an appeal to President Kyösti Kallio in 1939. The hollow in the ground came first; the parish and then the region took their names downstream of it.

There is an old and unresolved dispute attached to that name. From the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, a loose association of men known as the birkarls controlled trade across Lappmarken and collected tribute from Sámi communities in the Torne, Lule and Pite river valleys — perhaps fifty men in total in the early 1500s, holding rights that were never granted in writing but were tolerated in practice. The Sámi paid, meanwhile, to Swedes, Norwegians and Russians in turn, a burden laid on people who had no say in any of it. Gustav Vasa stripped the birkarls of their Sámi taxation rights in 1553.

Late sixteenth-century sources connect the birkarls to Greater Pirkkala, and men from this region do appear as witnesses in a border document of 1374. Whether the birkarls actually came from here, or whether the resemblance between 'birkarl' and 'Pirkkala' is an accident of philology — the word probably derives from an old Scandinavian root for trade — has been argued over for generations. Tursiannotko sits at the centre of the question without settling it.

Excavation began in 1999 and has continued in campaigns ever since, with major seasons in 2012 and 2013 and a run of publications from Tampere's museums and the Vapriikki museum centre through 2017 and 2018. Sami Raninen and Ilari Aalto are among the researchers whose work has shaped what is now understood about the place.

What surrounds it now is thoroughly modern. Pirkkala is the fastest-growing municipality in Pirkanmaa, roughly 21,000 people packed into 104 square kilometres, the most densely settled municipality in Finland that still declines to call itself a town. Aircraft on final approach to Tampere–Pirkkala pass close overhead. Somewhere beneath, a stove foundation waits for the argument about it to conclude.