Kystfort

Abstract
In the later part of the Second World War, German troops were respon-sible for a front of nearly a thousand kilometers in Lapland, Northern Finland. TheGermans built close to 100 prisoner of war and labor camps in the area, and impris-oned some 30,000 Russian soldiers there. Since Lapland’s infrastructure was verypoor, the prisoners were used as a workforce for tasks such as building and improv-ing roads and bridges. The prison camps and military bases, as well as their archives,were almost completely destroyed during the German retreat from Finland, in1944–1945, in the Lapland War between the Finns and the Germans. In this chapterwe report on preliminary fieldwork at the German base of Peltojoki, and we discusshow archaeology can contribute to the study and understanding of military sitesfrom the recent past.