Friday, July 13, 2007

DAY 10, More history

DAY 10, Thursday July 12
Sammallahdenmäki http://www.nba.fi/en/sammallahdenmakieng
This Bronze Age burial site features more than 30 granite burial cairns, providing a unique insight into the funerary practices and social and religious structures of northern Europe more than three millennia ago. This site consists of 33 stone cairns, dating mainly from the Bronze Age (1500-500 B.C.). It is an extraordinary example of Finland's Bronze Age culture because it presents the ancient monuments in a well preserved natural environment. Two of the most spectacular cairns are the quadrangular "Chuch Floor" and the dike-like "Long Ruin of Huilu". In 2002, eight cairns were excavated, revealing burnt human bone. This indicates that the cairns contained cremation burials.
The stone cairns aren't the most impressive aspect of this WHS, it's the pristine nature that grabs you. The pure smell, the quietness, the wild mushrooms and foremost the moss that covers large parts of this area.
This is one of the smallest ones:
The site consists of a cluster of 33 stone cairns spread out over an area nearly one kilometre in length. West of the cairn area lies Lake Saarnijärvi. Now partly overgrown, the lake was an inlet of the Baltic Sea during the Bronze Age (1500–500 BC). The burial cairns of Sammallahdenmäki bear witness to the region’s rich Bronze Age culture and long history of settlement. The best-known individual monument in the cluster is the Kirkonlaattia (“Church Floor”), a nearly level, quadrangular stone structure with horizontal dimensions of some 16 x 19 metres and a height of 50 centimetres. Another unique grave structure at Sammallahdenmäki is the Huilun pitkä raunio (“the long cairn of Huilu”), a long, wall-like burial cairn surrounded by a stone wall. Other, less unique burial structures in the area include low cairns with concentric stone circles and the familiar type of round cairns. A typical feature of the Sammallahdenmäki cairns are the stone cists, boxlike structures formed by stone flags standing on edge and forming end and side walls or only one or the other. The cist may have originally contained a body in a wooden coffin, or the dead person may have been wrapped in animal skins. On the other hand, the cist may also have served as a receptacle for the ashes of a cremation burial. Remains of cists are still visible in some of the unexcavated cairns as well as in one cairn reconstructed after Högman’s investigations.
Sammallahdenmäki is an exceptionally valuable example of Finland’s Bronze Age culture because it presents the ancient monuments in a well-preserved natural milieu. The area contains nearly all known types of Bronze Age cairns known from Finland and the surroundings still have an air of the original archipelago landscape with its lichen-covered cliffs and gnarled, weather-beaten pines.

We spent over two hours here, climbing the rocks and taking different paths. We saw also oat fields and some raw lingonberries, no blueberries though. and huge anthills.

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