Archaeologia Baltica

Estonian and Latvian small bone spades are discussed. The majority of spades are found in hill-forts and settlement sites from the 11th to the 13th centuries. The tools and technique of manufacture are investigated.

Curonian women’s bead sets with bronze spacer plates or pectoral ornaments, headbands, headdresses made of cloth, caps adorned with metal spirals and unaccountable ware from the Viking Age and early medieval times in a lot of cases are not correctly interpreted. Some of the Curonian ornaments investigated in this article have good parallels in Livonian, Gotlandic and Scandinavian material and material from Finland. At the same time, bead sets with spacer plates both in Gotland and in Curonia were an outcome of the rivalry between Western Europe and the Byzantine Empire in designing symbols of power and prestige.

This article introduces rosette-headed pins found at Pavirvytė cemetery (in the Akmenė district) in the rich female grave 138. Rosette-headed pins were quite well known in Semigallia. However, most of the ornaments in this grave are more typical of Curonian culture than of the Semigallians. Some decorative elements or ideas probably penetrated from Curonia to Semigallia at the end of the 11th century.

Im Jahre 200 1 wurden in die Kulturchichten der wikingerzeitlichen Siedlung Korallen-Berg (Kurische Nehrung, Kaliningrader Gebiet) der Funde mit Runen entdekt (eine bronzene Plattenfibel und ein Fragment der Knochenplatte). Ein Anhänger mit einem runenartigen Zeichen befindet sich im Besitz des Museus in Zelenogradsk.

Finds of footwear in the excavations in Town Hall Square and Vene, Vaimu, Sauna and Roosikrantsi streets reflect the medieval footwear fashion of Tallinn as well as of the whole of northern and Central Europe. Strap shoes, low laced shoes and high laced shoes might be considered as fashion footwear. The respective chronologies of northern Europe demonstrate the existence of thong, strap and low laced shoes and high laced shoes through many centuries, but the peaks of use – the period of the fashion – of these types do not exceed 70 to 80 years. Since Tallinn belonged to the Hanseatic League, the cultural phenomena occurring here were probably the same in Central and northern Europe.

Spurs are among the primary attributes of riders. Baltic spurs are distinctive, affected by their long development from the beginning of the first millennium to the late Middle Ages. Their genesis is linked to the local tradition of employment and the mismatch with typological frameworks of spurs discovered in other sites. Therefore, while analysing spurs discovered in the Žąsinas cemetery, a typological system had to be shaped, which could be applied to characterise all spurs of the above period discovered in Lithuania and the entire Baltic area.

Unique findings, wells with wooden constructions and buckets made of lime bark in them, were detected recently in the Lieporiai 1 settlement near Šiauliai (in northern Lithuania). These objects were parts of an iron smelting site dated to the fourth to eighth centuries. Reconstructions of the well and the technique of producing lime bark buckets were made by B. Salatkienė and A. Šapaitė. A detailed description of the artefacts and their environment constitutes the first part of this paper, and the technique of reconstruction and producing lime bark buckets forms the second.

The article examines trading conditions in medieval Klaipėda (Memel) and reports the results of the latest dendrochronological dating of oak found in the Old Town.