Talk:Vanaja (Finland)

Reconstruction or actual name?

Anonymous user, thanks for your contributions. Some comments.

Vanaja as a name is not a reconstruction. It appears as the original name for the community around the Häme Castle and the lake (Vanajavesi, roughly translating as Lake of Vanaja) next to it throughout the time there have been documents about the area, and is still in usage today, however far less than in older times. It can be assumed that the Iron Age settlement in the middle of all that bore the same name, especially since a Russian document uses a very similar sounding name for the central settlement, "a town" as they put it. But there is no doubt in that the central area of Tavastia was called Vanaja. --Drieakko 17:07, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, yes, as a regional name "Vanaja" is obviously ancient and authentic. But the association between the said name and the Iron Age settlement site described in this article (whose proto-urban character is not generally believed in anymore) seems to be purely speculative. After all, it was just one of the villages or hamlets in Vanaja.--217.112.242.181 06:40, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Have they found comparable settlements in Tavastia so far? --Drieakko 13:51, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, Tavastia is full of Iron Age settlement sites. The problem is that we do not really know how much the Varikonniemi site differs from the average settlements. It may have been a relatively ordinary village, which was over-interpreted as a "town" because the site had a lot structures and layers of post-medieval date.--217.112.242.181 14:23, 26 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, this is fully possible. Without the comfortably fitting Novgorod chronicle mentioning the "town" of Vanai, this chapter might already have been closed. Hopefully they get to continue the excavations some time soon.

Hoax?

Could it be that the article is a hoax? There are no reliable sources. I have found no data about the site on Google Books, which contains many books about the Vikings. Furthermore, the Cambridge Medieval History estimates the size of Birka at 14 hectares. All this makes me wonder... --Ghirla ^-трёп- 17:58, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Article is not a hoax. Finland was not a Viking land, and Finland is usually omitted from Viking articles. Recent Nordic publications about the Scandinavian Iron Age have started to include Vanaja as a contemporary commercial center, though. Excavations were undertaken in the late 1980s by Hans-Peter Schultz, and the results have been properly published in detail. However, like stated in the article, the nature of the site has been contested, and hopefully gets resolved when there eventually surfaces enough funding to finalize the excavations. About the size of Birka, Cambridge seems to have included the large cemetaries outside the city. --Drieakko 19:04, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Added reference to the publication going through the excavation results in detail. The articles are some 60 pages and written in German. --Drieakko 19:27, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

in a former island ..

This is a persistent error in most sources. The church has actually never been on an island. The water level around the cape has not been high enough to make it an island, not even before 1860, when water level in the nearby Vanaja-lake was 2 meters higher than to-day (At that time the water level in the basin was permanently sunk). I have checked over 20 old maps between the years 1600 and 1860. There is no indication whatsoever in any of them that the church had been surrounded by water.

As for the first Swedish mention of the name Vanö (in 1329), in that period the water level in the nearby Vanaja-lake was at least half a meter lower than in 1859 (due to post-glacial-age land rising which slowly elevates the NE-end of the big lake basin pushing the water towards the SE-end, i.e at Vanaja).

Before the present water course regulation started in 1955, spring floods were frequent and high. In some years before 1860 water did rise high enough to surround the site of the church making it a temporary ' island'. Alcofribas 20:40, 21 February 2007 (UTC)