Mystery of frozen cemetery full of empty graves is finally solved

It’s a Scandi drama fit for TV – the Arctic graveyard with no bodies.

That is the real-life scenario in Tainiaro, an area in Finland that could be home to one of the largest Stone Age cemeteries in Europe, except for the fact no remains have ever been found in the hundreds of burial plots.

It is a mystery that has left archaeologists baffled for decades.

The site, which sits near the edge of the Arctic Circle, was first discovered in 1959 when local workers dug up stone artefacts. Further work was carried out in the 1980s, but no findings have ever been published to determine what exactly lies beneath the thin, freezing soil.

Now, a team led by archaeologist Dr Aki Hakonen from the University of Oulu in Finland, argues that Tainiaro was once a huge graveyard – and they think they know where the bodies went.

First, the team compared existing and newly excavated trenches with other known Stone Age burial sites in Finland, finding the shape, size and contents to be similar to hundreds of other graves.

They identified around 200 possible pits in total, none visible from the surface. The most common were those around two metres long and up to a metre wide with rounded corners.

Most of the pits showed evidence of burning, and small streaks of red ochre – a natural pigment commonly found in Stone Age graves, although the reason for its use remains unknown. It could have been to mark the graves themselves, or used to dye the clothes or hair of those being buried. 

And although no human bones have survived in the pits, thousands of stone artefacts, pieces of pottery and occasional burnt animal bones have been found across the site.

However, one possible explanation for the empty graves is the region’s particularly acidic soils, meaning the remains could have decomposed completely in the 7,000 years since they are believed to have been buried.

‘There are next to no limestone deposits in Finland and most of Northern Fennoscandia,’ said Dr Hakonen, speaking to Metro.co.uk. ‘Thus, the soil tends to be very acidic. In a thousand years or so organic material including bones and wood decompose so badly that they lose all structure and often become only gooey mass.

‘In two thousand years they become mere shadows in the soil, visible as slightly darker patterns.

‘In six and a half thousand years, as seems to be the case with Tainiaro, there is practically nothing left of bodies.’

However, like any good Scandi detective, Dr Hakonen is not giving up.

‘From other Stone Age hunter-gatherer cemetery sites further south where actual skeletons and other organic materials survive better – especially Latvia, southern Sweden, northwest Russia – we know that organics [in the burial pit] often comprise a lot of what was put in the graves, including carved and decorated wooden and bone artefacts.

‘At Tainiaro these, if there were such, are gone. Long gone, along with any bodies. Only the outlines of the pits and anything mineralised in the soil has survived.

‘Thankfully we have some stone artefacts buried in the pits as well as small blots of red ochre, and traces of soot, charcoal, and reddened sand from fire. We suspect that some of these pits were prepared for use by fire, perhaps to warm them or ritually clean them for the placement of a body.’

Next, Dr Hakonen and the team will aim to investigate more graves, using the latest technology.

‘There is much more work to be done to get a thorough sense of what kinds of artefacts were placed in these pits,’ he said.

‘New excavations would reveal a lot more than the previous ones, as new methods have recently revealed microscopic fossilised traces of animal hairs and feathers from other badly degraded Stone Age burials. It seems likely that such burial pits were sometimes lined with furs, animal skins and even bird wings.’

And while the initial findings are still unverified, the idea that such a huge cemetery existed so far north has wide-reaching implications for our understanding of ancient civilisations.

Southern Lapland was inhabited at the time by the Early Comb Ware ceramic culture, a hunter-gatherer society, whose true identity is still being discovered. 

The team argues that Tainiaro was not just a cemetery – the numerous traces of fire and the crafting of distinctive stone objects also suggests habitation at the site.

‘The research on Tainiaro shows that apparently large cemeteries also existed near the Arctic Circle,’ said Dr Hakonen. ‘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.’

The study is published in the journal Antiquity.

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