Today’s post is not about a place or a person, but about an object of material culture from Finland. Some years ago I met, and became friends with, a Finnish textile historian. She invited my daughter and I to visit her in Helsinki and so we did in 2013. One of the trips we took while there was to a remote inland island where my friend’s family owned land.
We approached the island in a small outboard motorboat, carrying our gear and even our water. There were several small buildings – a main cabin with kitchen, a small sleeping cabin, an outhouse (with a peek-a-boo view of the lake!), and another building that contained a bunk room on one side and a Finnish sauna on the other (shown above).
We spent several days exploring – harvesting wild mushrooms, canoeing, hiking, and of course daily respite in the sauna followed by swimming in the very cold lake. My daughter, who was eleven at the time, loved diving down to the bottom of the lake and one time appeared with an object she discovered there – a stone encased in a birch bark purse. What was this?
We soon learned that a common practice in inland lakes was to tie weights (or sinkers) like these onto the ends of fishing nets to get them to drop into deeper waters. And, the practice dates to the stone age. Sinkers could be made solely of rocks with a hole pierced in one end, of rocks with the birch bark folded over and tied or in puches like this, or even some in a wheel-shape with the rock and bark in the center. While we still don’t know the age of this particular weight, it was an exciting find nonetheless that taught us about an aspect of fishing and Finnish culture we knew nothing about.
historicaresearch.com 