Napoleon said to his companions at the foot of the great pyramid in Egypt in 1798: Ten centuries look down upon you. To the people of Pärnu, one might say: Forty to fifty centuries look upon you – not from the heights of the pyramids, but from the sandy gravel at the bottom of the Pärnu River.
– Finnish historian Kaarle August Soikkeli (1871-1932)
In the gravel-poor area around Pärnu, the main deposit for construction gravel was at Sindi-Lodja, where it was extracted from the bottom of both the Pärnu and Reiu rivers. For thousands of years, sand and gravel carried downstream by the river’s currents accumulated here, in the bend of the Pärnu River where it gently veers to the right before flowing into the bay, settling on the riverbed and forming layers of sand and gravel several metres thick atop a clay base.
Gravel extraction became an important source of livelihood for the locals. This work was done both in winter (on the ice) and in summer (from special boats). Metal scoops were used to extract the gravel, operated by a winch system with pulleys. At least three men were needed for the job: one (usually the owner of the boat) to handle and direct the scoop, and two to operate the winches. In a typical working day, a team could haul around two boatloads of material from the riverbed.
Experienced workers were familiar with the flow patterns and riverbed profile and understood where to extract each type of material: coarser gravel was collected upstream, near Sindi Manor, and smaller gravel from around the mouth of the Reiu River; while finer sand suitable for construction was taken from the Pärnu River between Waldhof and Niidu Forest, where the current had carried this lighter material the farthest.
The gravel dredged from the riverbed was not actually of the best quality, as it contained too much organic matter. For the concrete needed to build the Sindi-Lodja bridge, gravel had to be brought by rail from the Tori-Selja quarries. However, the gravel scooped from the riverbed was perfectly suitable for other purposes, such as surfacing the streets of Pärnu (as a base layer).
The first Stone Age artefacts were found in the riverbed material in 1901 by Eduard Glück (1866-1918), the director of the Pärnu City abattoir and an amateur archaeologist. A few years later, when the mouth of the Reiu River was being dredged to improve access to the harbour of the Sindi steam sawmill, local archaeology enthusiasts were able to observe the material being excavated from the riverbed more closely. A large number of bone and stone artefacts were found, mixed with crude animal bones, flint fragments and pieces of pottery. As a result of the collection efforts of the members of the Pärnu Antiquities Society, by the second decade of the 20th century Pärnu boasted the most representative collection of Stone Age artefacts in Estonia (over 1800 finds), which later became part of the Pärnu Museum collection.
The large number and variety of finds suggested that people had lived on the banks of these rivers as far back as the Stone Age. This prompted both local amateurs and, later, archaeologists from the University of Tartu to carry out excavations along the banks around the mouth of the Reiu River, attempting to uncover the archaeological cultural layer associated with these finds. However, aside from isolated finds, no settlement sites were identified at the time.
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