Qualla: Tursiannotko

Tursiannotko: Introduction

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Someone here buried roosters in clay pots. Archaeologists working a shallow hollow in Pirkkala, a few kilometres from the runway of Tampere's airport, have identified more than fifteen hundred bone fragments from the ground — mostly pig, the ordinary dinner of a Viking-age village. But scattered among the kitchen debris are deposits that look less like meals than like offerings, birds placed deliberately in vessels and covered over. Nobody knows what was being asked for.

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Tursiannotko: Why the Bones Survived

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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....

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Tursiannotko: One Room, Clay Floor

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Tursiannotko: From Hollow to Village

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Tursiannotko: The Birkarl Argument

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Tursiannotko: Digging Since 1999

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 sh...

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