14 which persists to the present day. The vegetation was as varied as the climate in the transitional zone between central and northern Europe. There is a great variety of forests, deciduous and coniferous. At present, pine and spruce predominate, but earlier, in the Sub-Boreal period and before many regions were cleared and turned into arable land, forests consisted mainly of leaf-bearing trees — oaks, linden, maple, elm, poplar, horn-beam, aspen, birch, ash, hazel, willow. Forest fauna was rich and not quite nordic. Hares, squirrels, badgers, martens, beavers, lynx, boars, wolves, bears, aurochs, bison, wild horses, and elks lived on into the Sub-Atlantic. Only the wild horse disappeared during the Late Iron Age. Aurochs persisted in early historic times, and bison were to be found in the large expanses of virgin forests of present-day northern Poland and southern Lithuania up to the eighteenth century. Forests were full of large grouse and partridges, and in the warm season wild ducks and geese flocked to the swampy regions. All these animals and birds in addition to fish, mushrooms, nuts, honey, and berries formed a great part of the food supply of the farmer living on the high banks of rivers and around lakes near the forests. The scenery in these lands is most beautiful in late spring and early summer, when the ears form on the fresh green shoots of the rye, flax blossoms in a soft blue, and the morning lark trills above field and meadow. At this season too is heard the song of the nightingale, the call of the cuckoo, and the music of many other birds and insects. Storks with their nests atop farmers’ houses are also inseparable from the landscape. In some remote villages, in the middle of the network of lakes and at the edges of large forests, far from the trade routes and towns, lived people who up to quite recently were not much concerned about the outer world. So completely absorbed were they by the life-bringing natural forces, the rotation of the year’s seasons, and by their work in the fields, that their way of life,

15 their language, beliefs, and customs remained little changed down the ages. Seen from a distance, their low houses with thatched roofs look like mushrooms harmonizing with the landscape; but one has only to visit the homesteads themselves to see how much love and care was invested in the decoration of doors, window shutters, corner projections, porches, gables, colonnades in front of storehouses, dower chests, spindle wheels, washing-beetles, and other furnishings. Houses were surrounded by a variety of flowers and large trees, usually linden, maple, elm or oak. For about 190 days of the year cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, collected from the whole village, were kept in pastures and guarded by an old shepherd, who made music on a buck’s horn, and shepherd children, who played flutes and quaint wooden pipes; horses were pastured overnight. In the fields, around fires, as well as by the mother’s spindle wheel and loom during long winter evenings, folk-songs and tales flourished and were transmitted from generation to generation. Collective field labours were followed by songs, sung in rotation by several voices, and with refrains which harmonized with the rhythm of harvesting, and flax and hemp plucking and drying. From lullabies and wedding songs to songs of lamentation during wakes, man’s life was inseparable from daina, “the song” (in the folkloristic archives of Lithuania and Latvia there are about 500,000 collected songs, leading us to wonder how many more may have disappeared in past ages and with the lost Baltic territories). The Balts sang ceaselessly, as though singing were as necessary and as easy as breathing. And their songs for all occasions reflect these people’s feeling of kinship with mother earth and her many creatures, and appreciation of her manifold gifts. One could supplement enormously the evidence of prehistoric monuments by using the folklore and ethnographic material preserved in the most archaic villages, where passing ages have not changed the mode of life from that of prehistoric

16 times. However, the scope of the present book requires us to focus our attention on actual archaeological finds. I shall, nevertheless, in speaking of origin, distribution, and religion, make some use of the linguistic and folkloristic data. The Baltic area is exceptional among the lands inhabited by people of Indo-European origin in that the language and folklore have survived in a remarkably pure state, and ancient cultural traits have not been adulterated or destroyed by the many expansions and migrations of prehistoric and early historic periods, as was the case in most areas of central, western, and southern Europe. The main objects of our attention will be hill-forts and cemeteries, the basic monuments of Baltic prehistory. The many hill, forts jutting out on river banks and lake shores have given the Baltic regions the richly deserved name, “the land of hill-forts.” They are either sites of communal villages dating from the Chalcolithic, Bronze and Early Iron Ages, or castle-hills, the acropolises of the later Iron Age. However, archaeological finds that have accumulated in the course of the last hundred years come not so much from hill forts, as from barrow and flat-grave cemeteries. While the systematically excavated hilltop villages or hill-forts do not total more than a hundred, the cemeteries number many more than a thousand. First signs of interest in archaeological finds in the Baltic lands date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The period of romanticism and growing nationalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century greatly increased the search for national antiquities; historians, poets, and writers kept their own private collections. Organized archaeological research owes its inception to a number of historic and antiquarian societies and committees founded in the thirties and forties of the nineteenth century: “Gesellschaft für Geschichte and Altertumskunde” founded in 1834 in Riga, “Gelehrte estnische Gesellschaft” in 1838 in Tartu (Dorpat), and “Altertums-gesellschaft Prussia” in 1844 in Königsberg. Eustach

17 Tyszkiewicz, who for many years collected archaeological materials and made a series of excavations in Lithuania and Byelo-Russia, published in 1842 a book entitled A Glimpse of the Sources of Lithuanian Archaeology. He was well acquainted with the Scandinavian archaeological literature and classified his materials according to Scandinavian standards. In 1855, as a result of his initiative, an “archaeological Commission” and a museum were established in Vilnius. In the nineteenth as well as in the twentieth century until the beginning of World War II, archaeological work in East Prussia was in the hands of the “Prussia Museum” in Königsberg. It carried out numerous excavations in Samland and elsewhere in East Prussia, and housed the accumulated antiquities of the ancient Prussians. In the Museum’s periodical, Sitzungsberichte, current between 1875 and 1940, almost all excavation reports were published. The beginnings of systematic archaeological work, of classifications and excavations at the end of the nineteenth century are inseparable from the names of the notable archaeologists, O. Tischler and A. Bezzenberger. The greater part of Lithuania and Latvia being a province of Imperial Russia, the archaeological work carried out there by Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles was in large part dependent on general trends in archaeological research in Russia. The “Imperial Archaeological Commission of Peterburg,” founded in 1859, was a central organization supervising archaeological activities in the whole of Russia including the Baltic provinces. The “Archaeological Society,” founded in 1864 in Moscow, organized Russian Archaeological Congresses in various parts of the country. In 1893, the congress took place in Vilnius, and in 1896 in Riga, focusing attention on antiquities of the Baltic area. After the congress in Riga, a museum was founded there; later, its collections, in independent Latvia, were given over to the State Historic Museum of Riga. Although the attention of Russian

18 archaeologists was in the main focused on southern Russia, particularly on Scythian antiquities, the rich Baltic Iron Age cemeteries and hill-forts were a great attraction. Since the seventies of the last century, the Baltic Iron Age has aroused international interest. In 1876, O. Montelius read a paper on the Iron Age in the Baltic provinces, Russia and Poland, at the Congress of Anthropology and Archaeology in Budapest; and in 1877, C. Grewingk, professor of geology in the University of Tartu, presented a lecture on the same subject in the Fourth Russian Archaeological Congress in Kazan. Other studies by Grewingk, on the pagan graves in Lithuania, Latvia and Byelo-Russia (1870), and on the archaeology of the Baltic area and Russia (1874), have had a lasting influence on later archaeological research. Though much important archaeological work was carried out in the Baltic countries and Russia before the first World War, the sources on which this monograph is based come mainly from excavations made between World Wars I and II. During this period, while in Russia the revolution resulted in the liquidation of almost an entire generation of able archaeologists, in East Prussia, Lithuania and Latvia large-scale excavations were begun. Finds from hundreds of cemeteries filled the museums, particularly the State Historical Museum in Riga and the Cultural Museum of Vytautas the Great (present Historical Museum) in Kaunas, as well as the “Prussia Museum,” the Danzig and many other provincial museums. This period, too, saw the publication of numerous basic books for the archaeology of the East Baltic area. Byelo-Russia and western Greater Russia were for several decades completely neglected until archaeological work was resumed after World War II, and now hill forts are being explored there with remarkable speed. In the Baltic countries, after the interruption caused by incorporation into the Soviet Union and the loss of key figures in archaeological research, the work is again going forward with a new

19 generation of prehistorians. In East Prussia, the situation has changed drastically: the old “Prussia Museum” no longer exists, its treasures having perished during the war, and only its archives having been transferred to the University of Göttingen in Germany. Northeastern East Prussia, now the Kaliningrad area, is attracting some attention from Soviet archaeologists, while southern and western East Prussia, or Masuria, is being increasingly excavated by Polish prehistorians. Notable results have been achieved during recent decades in the ancient Baltic Sudovian lands in present northern Poland where numerous excavations have been carried out by the Warsaw and Bialystok archaeological museums, headed by J. Antoniewicz. This book is a first attempt to survey the entire prehistoric period from the beginning of the second millennium B.C. — when a branch of the Indo-European-speaking peoples settled and gradually developed its individual cultural features in the area from Pomerania in northern Poland in the west to central Russia in the east — to the thirteenth century A.D., the beginning of history, marked by two major events: the conquest of the ancient Prussians by the Teutonic Order, and the birth of the Lithuanian state. The Baltic culture was not an isolated island in prehistoric and early historic Europe. In genesis and development it is inseparable from the other Indo-European groups. Thus, through the amber trade it was linked with the cultures of central and southern Europe from the time of the Bronze Age; its western branch was closely related with the central European Únětice-Tumulus-Urnfield and the Germanic or “Northern Area” cultures. It was not untouched or uninfluenced by the Hallstatt culture, by the westward advance of the Scythians in the eighth and the sixth-fifth centuries B.C., by the eastward flow of the Celts in the third century B.C., and by the movements of Goths from across the Baltic Sea to Pomerania in the first century B.C. and a few centuries later to south

20 Russia. Its eastern branch was in contact with the Finno-Ugrians in present eastern and northern Russia, with Cimmerians and Scythians north of the Black Sea, and with Slavs, the southern neighbours of the Baits, living north of the Carpathians, throughout the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. Between the second and fifth centuries A.D., due to intensive amber trade with the provinces of the Roman Empire, material standards of the Baltic culture rose tremendously. The East Baltic area became a strong cultural centre, and its influences extended to all of northeastern Europe. This was the Baltic culture’s “golden age,” terminated by the eastern Slav expansion to the Baltic lands in present western Russia — starting at the end of the fourth or during the fifth century A.D. and continuing to the twelfth century and later — and by the ensuing wars of the coastal Baltic tribes with the Scandinavian Vikings in the seventh century. Before the dawn of history the numerous Baltic tribes, ruled by powerful chieftains and landlords, lived through a second “golden age,” assuming a central position in commercial activities between western Europe, Scandinavia, Kievan Rus’ and Byzantium. Lack of general information about their prehistory has in countless instances resulted in the Baltic lands being considered as Germanic and Slavic. Archaeological and linguistic sources tell a different story, however, and they are quite sufficient now to fit a missing link in the mosaics of European ancient history.