After the majority of the excavation finds were shipped to the Nordic countries, the SJE collection began to face logistical difficulties: Split between the four countries and further between different institutions and people, it became geographically fragmented and partly forgotten amidst administrative confusion.
This talk presents the work of Juuli Ahola and Oula Seitsonen, who had both began tracing the journeys of the SJE finds and in 2023 formed the Finnish Nubia Collections Project to collaborate with museum officials to clean, pack, move, catalogue and digitize the SJE finds held in Finland in order to officially accession them into the Finnish Heritage Agency’s collections and bring the SJE collection back to the attention of archaeologists, historians and museum professionals.
In addition to tracing the logistical movements of the finds from an old horse carriage storage to the stable building of the Finnish President Urho Kekkonen’s childhood home, this talk includes snippets of SJE history uncovered during archival work as well as a brief assessment of the archaeological material in regards potential future work.
Juuli Ahola has since 2024 been a Doctoral Candidate in Near Eastern Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bern, in the SNSF-funded project “Understanding Socio-Economic Complexity in Eastern Mediterranean Protohistory (CYPEC)”. In 2023, she was a Project Researcher in the Finnish SJE Nubia Collection Project. Her part of the project concerned the moving, digitizing and studying of the collection of ceramics from the Scandinavian Joint-Expedition to Sudanese Nubia 1961-1964, now stored in Vantaa, Finland.