Soil is the memories of the earth, the history of the landscape, a place where all the living and dying happens, it is constantly changing, moving and decomposing along with the passed time. Soil is the cultural heritage, the stories of the landscape. My field trip to the Stone Age excavation site in Espoo with archaeologist Jan Fast has been documented as follows:
On the way driving to Korkoontie in Espoo, Jan shared with me many stories related to the Finnish landscape and its Stone Age history. These stories clash with the modern view that we appreciated through the window while passing by. I told him that I felt like I was travelling back in time.
The excavation site that we were heading can date back to the Stone Age that happened approximately 4,000 years ago from today; it was a place where people lived their life on the beach. Jan explained to me that the Finnish landscape has been rising very fast in the past and is still rising now. The road where we were and most of the surrounding landscape was previously part of the sea. Imaging now we were driving on the past seabed.
The beach has become a mild slope surrounded by road, modern buildings and the railway. We arrived at the site and met up with Janne Soisalo, the leading archaeologist of the excavation site. Janne showed us the findings of the site, they were fragments of pottery, stone, fireplace, unearth sand layer and clay layer. I saw how the layers of the earth had been carefully opened by the shovel and tool.
Jan and Janne helped me to identify the Stone Age soil and the archaeology team helped me to collect soil samples. My first soil sample from the excavation site was the Stone Age beach sand and the second sample was collected from the natural clay layer. I gathered the samples with my bare hands, while touching the clay soil, I thought of the pottery fragment that Janne had shown me before, and I wondered whether the Stone Age people had also gathered their material from the same clay I am now collecting, and whether they had used it for making artefacts.
I stood on the slope and watched the modern residential area. The sun was shining through the slope, warming up the excavation site. Maybe this is why the Stone Age people choose this location to settle and live their lives, because of the Sun, Jan said. I closed my eyes and imagined how that might have been like. (Extract from working diary, 23 October 2019)
Fast’s words had reminded me of this note from the book The Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet:
As humans reshape the landscape, we forget what was there before… Admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements often entail forgetting many others. Forgetting, in itself, remakes landscapes, as we privilege some assemblages over others. Yet ghosts remind us. Ghosts point to our forgetting, showing us how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces. (Tsing et al., 2017, p. 19)
The sun from that moment, the slope of today and the sand from the past have become the ghosts that to remind us about the tracks and traces of memories, of times, and of the landscape that someone had dwelled in the past. The soils that I gathered from the site have somehow attached the spoke of time.
*Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt. 2017. Arts Of Living On A Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.