#tainiaro

Just south of the Arctic Circle, within the vast forests of northern Finland, lies a sandy field dotted with dozens of "unusual" pits.

Workers stumbled upon the site, known as Tainiaro, six decades ago, and since then, its origins have remained elusive.

But now, upon conducting a comprehensive analysis of the site, researchers have determined it is likely a sprawling hunter-gatherer cemetery dating back some 6,500 years, according to a study published on Dec. 1 in the journal Antiquity.

A mysterious ancient graveyard that has flummoxed Finnish archaeologists for decades could be one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries in northern Europe, a new study suggests. Located on the edge of the Arctic Circle in Tainiaro, a place of long and bitter winters, the site was first unearthed in 1959 and studied again in the late 1980s, but the findings of those excavations never saw the light of day. Thousands of artifacts were described, and archeologists later discovered the sandy soils were tinged with ash and streaked red with ochre. But no human remains have ever been found in the dozens of shallow pits at Tainiaro, leaving researchers to wonder what brought people to congregate on the forested shores of an almost-Arctic estuary. Now, a new analysis of the site, led by archaeologist Aki Hakonen of the University of Oulu in Finland, strengthens the idea that the site was used as a graveyard, with up to 200 possible burial pits dug some 6,500 years ago by Stone Age communities otherwise known for their nomadic forager lifestyle. "Even though no skeletal material has survived at Tainiaro," Hakonen and colleagues write in their paper, "Tainiaro should, in our opinion, be considered to be a cemetery site."