Tammela mummies wear bright clothes — graves yield 1800s textiles for Forssa museum

Archaeologist Kati Salo has delivered a research report on 82 mummies found last summer in a stone crypt beside Tammela church in Finland’s Kanta-Häme region to the Finnish Heritage Agency.

The mummies, dating to the 1800s, were exhumed from a sealed burial chamber and are now being studied in Finland, Switzerland and Lithuania. Early results indicate more than half died in childhood or were still skeletally immature.

Decorative textiles recovered from the children’s coffins may help reconstruct lost 19th-century Finnish textile patterns, including those once produced in nearby Forssa. Forssa’s early textile industry was largely destroyed by a factory fire in the 1870s, leaving few surviving samples.

Samples of hair are being analyzed at the University of Helsinki, dental calculus in Switzerland and insect remains at Vilnius University in Lithuania. Once the studies conclude, the textile fragments will be accessioned into the collections of the Forssa Museum.

Museum director Kati Kivimäki said the textiles will deepen understanding of local textile history and may help identify the individuals, their social backgrounds and places of origin. She added that the finds could form the core of a future exhibition rather than remain as isolated samples.

The graves reveal contemporary attitudes toward death: children’s coffins were adorned with flowers, cushions and coverlets, while adults were typically buried in plain black coffins. All faces had been covered with cloth.