Archaeologists 'Surprised' by 6,500-Year-Old Stone Age Site Near Arctic

Researchers have investigated a mysterious prehistoric site in the far north of Europe, shedding new light on what they believe is a large Stone Age cemetery.

The site, known as Tainiaro, is situated in the Finnish region of Lapland around 50 miles south of the Arctic Circle. This is an "improbable" location for a large hunter-gatherer cemetery from this period, according to a study published in the journal Antiquity that provides the first comprehensive overview of the site.

In the study, a team of researchers proposed that the site was most likely—although not certainly—a large Stone Age cemetery dating to around 6,500 years ago. If this hypothesis turns out to be correct, it would be among the largest such sites discovered to date from this period in northern Europe. In addition, it would represent the northernmost large cemetery of this date.

Many questions about Tainiaro remain unanswered. But the fact that a large cemetery seems to have existed near the Arctic Circle is surprising and challenges previously held impressions of far northern Europe, hinting that large-scale, complex societies may have existed in the region, despite the harsh environmental conditions.

"I think the real implication is to our cultural compass," Aki Hakonen, an archaeologist with the University of Oulu in Finland and an author of the study, told Newsweek. "We expect to find less interesting stuff going on the farther north we go. But the north is a magical place, and it holds many surprises—Tainiaro being just one of them."

"If archaeology reorients itself to consider the north not as a periphery but as a core place of importance in its own right, we would gain access to a much more thorough understanding of humanity's past," he said.

The first evidence of the Tainiaro site—located in the vast forests of northern Finland—emerged in 1959 when local workers extracting sand came across a collection of stone artifacts, which they subsequently reported to the authorities.

The first excavations at the site, conducted by the Finnish Heritage Agency, did not take place until 1984. Subsequent digs occurred throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. However, these excavations only investigated a small portion of the site, while a lack of resources meant the analysis of the findings was never completed nor fully described in published scientific articles. This largely prevented the potential significance of the site from gaining wider recognition.

"The site was basically buried in the archives," Hakonen said. "There are several mentions of it and its 30-40 burials in mostly Finnish language archaeology books and papers, but these were always side-notes."

Despite the absence of any human remains at Tainiaro, the previous excavations led to researchers tentatively interpreting around 40 ancient pits in the ground as graves, causing confusion within Finnish archaeology. The main hypothesis was that Tainiaro represented a Stone Age burial site. But could this be true?

"What you need to know is that the soil in Finland is so acidic that nothing organic survives more than a millennium, and we're talking more than six millennia here. So the outlines of pits and their inner traces are all that local archaeologists have to go by. But there was not even a map of the place," Hakonen said.

For the latest study, Hakonen and colleagues reviewed the available evidence and the validity of the cemetery hypothesis. They also conducted new fieldwork, including test excavations, providing a comprehensive picture of the site.

The researchers interpreted as many as 44 of the pits excavated at Tainiaro as burials, given that they are consistent in form with those found at other known Stone Age graves from other parts of northern Europe. This supports the interpretation of the site as a cemetery from this period, the authors said.

But since only one-fifth of the area has been excavated, they estimated that the total number of graves could be as large as 200. The total number of individuals buried could be even higher if there were multiple people laid to rest in one burial.

"Once we digitized all the field drawings and produced a complete mapping of the excavated areas, it became clear that there has to be way more than the roughly 40 burials," Hakonen said.

When the researchers looked into other Stone Age cemeteries where skeletons have survived, scrutinizing the documentation of almost 900 of them, they noticed that the grave outlines are often very indistinct. Sometimes, especially with child or animal burials, it is difficult to determine that they were burials if not for the skeletons themselves.

"In the documentations from Tainiaro, there were around 60 additional traces in the soil that could mark either child or animal burials or somehow irregular adult graves. Our estimate is that the total number of people buried at Tainiaro is 120 to 300. This doesn't fit the overall picture at all since excluding Tainiaro the total number of Stone Age burials discovered in Finland is 210," Hakonen said.

The researchers were surprised by the size of the potential cemetery, given that previously it was thought such large burial grounds from this period only existed further south.

"The research on Tainiaro shows that apparently large cemeteries also existed near the Arctic Circle. In the future, all research on this era in the north needs to be re-evaluated to some extent because these societies may not have been as small as previously thought," Hakonen said in a press release.

The region around Tainiaro was inhabited at the time by the Early Comb Ware ceramic culture, a hunter-gatherer-fisher people whose true identity is still being uncovered. Tainiaro does not only appear to have just been a cemetery. Numerous traces of fire and the crafting of distinctive stone objects also suggest there was habitation at the site.

While future research still needs to verify the cemetery hypothesis, the latest research raises questions about why such a site exists so high up on the map and whether there are similar cemeteries yet to be discovered in the region.