The second week (18. Aug. - 24. Aug.)

Finland has greeted me with very warm and nice weather when I arrived (I had like two jackets on on my arrival date, mainly because they did not fit anymore into the suitcase, not because I expected a harsh cold up here) and I sweated like nothing. However, the weather pretty soon changed from this nice and sunny feel to something more uncozy: The temperature was around maybe 14°C and the rain did not want to stop at all.
At my third day of excavation I looked out of the window and wrote a textmessage to Joonas "Good morning, uh ... are we out today?" I expected him to answer something like "Nah, not today", but the opposite was the case. He said: "Put your waterproof clothes on and come out." Well... I did not bring any waterproof clothes to Finland! So ... the start of the second week of excavation was actually not so pretty nice. But it got nicer with every day and the end of the week it was dry again. Hooray!
My highlight of the week was that I bought myself a pair of winterrubberboots for a huge amount of money. But that was totally worth it! 

Because not much else happened, except for the excavation, and I do not want to annoy my dear readers with details - not to mention the fact that I actually am not able to recall all details anymore - I will just copy another text I have already written back then. It compares German and Finnish archaeologists, based on my own observations.
(originally published on the 24. Aug. at 7:24 am)

The digging method
Well, I have to state beforehand that this excavation here was a research excavation. There's a difference between research excavations and rescue excavations:
The first are carried out by universities and they are rather slowly proceeding. There are a lot of students who may have never worked in an excavation before, so they're there to learn it. I've been to only two rescue excavations now, one in Germany and this one in Finland and I'm not sure yet if the comparison is legitime...
I've been spending much more time on the latter kind, the rescue excavations. These are carried out by the office of preservation of ancient monuments and they need to be done as quickly as possible. This is also where money is to be expected because usually there's someone behind (private person or more commonly an orginasation) who wants to build some buildings onto the land which holds ancient monuments. We have pretty well knowledge (in Germany) about where monuments are to be expected. Se before anything can be built, archaeologists have to be send there and rescue what is still there. You can imagine, there's a lot of pressure because these people want to build their buildings as soon as possible. There's a lot of holes to be dug, hard physical labour. But also fun.

So... In Germany, on all my rescue excavations and also on the one research excavation I had to dig holes into the ground, using a shovel and a spade mainly. In Finland it's funnily very different. :D The area is divided into 1 x 1 m squares and each student gets one or two of these squares. Then he/she sits there on the floor and scratches away a few centimetres of dirt using a little trowel. You can imagine, the progress here feels really slow for me. But it's really relaxing. <3

I have to add there's a pretty interesting tool the finnish people are using: It's like a combination of shovel and spade I haven't seen before in Germany. I'm pretty sure this comes in quite handy.

The students
In Germany, studying archaeology seems to be equally popular among boys and girls. Perhaps there are a few more male people, resulting in a relation of 60/40 or 70/30 (men/women).
Finnland is different! On this excavation there were only 4 boys and about 20 girls. It confused me pretty much once I recognised that and I started asking if it's normal that there are so few men. Everyone said "Yep, that's normal!". One girl stated, the relation may be something about 10/90 or 20/80 highest. Funny, for me.

The smoking
One thing which really disgusts me at german excavations is that almost everyone seems to be smoking. Maybe I was just a bit unlucky with my team in this matter (these are awesome people nevertheless! they're just having a bad habit).
In Finland, I've seen only one smoker on the excavation so far. And he seems to be so ashamed that he's hiding far away in the bushes to smoke his cigarette. :D

The footwear
In Germany it is obligatory to wear safety boots with steel bars, since the spades have to be really sharp in order to cut the earth easily and tidily.
Finns however wear normal rubber boots on their excavations. :D Without steel caps. Okay, it's comprehendable if you read my complaints about the wet finnish weather carefully. Still it feels weird for me.
In summer, when the weather is nice, I've even seen a picture where finnish archaeologists wear sandals. Or walk around barefooted. That's not allowed in Germany.

I think these are all observations I can think of right now. I may add more if more comes to my mind.