Klaipėdos universitetas

The article presents the results of investigations at Kvietiniai archaeological site. Large-scale excavations carried out as part of the implementation of an infrastructure development project have provided very important new data on prehistoric settlement in western Lithuania. The excavations revealed a multi-period archaeological site that contains traces of activity spanning from the Mesolithic to the Early Iron Age. Significant data have been obtained on Bronze Age pottery which is almost unknown to date. The Bronze Age is represented at Kvietiniai by a number of previously unknown or undescribed pottery types. The typology of this pottery is still somewhat problematic, due to the small quantity of it and the lack of similar finds from other sites, as well as the absence of material suitable for secure dating. We managed to define in detail and date one of them: the most abundantly found Kvietiniai-Tojāti Ware, dated to ca 1300–1100 cal BC. In addition, excavations at Kvietiniai have provided important data on the beginnings of agriculture. The earliest cereal grains in the east Baltic to date, i.e. barley, dated to ca 1400–1200 cal BC, were found here. The low amount of cereals and other data indicate just the beginning of agriculture rather than its developed stage. Meaningful data were also collected from discovered graves from the middle of the 1st millennium BC. Traces of rituals previously unnoticed anywhere in this culture, such as putting into graves pottery sherds left by the site’s earlier inhabitants, were found at Kvietiniai as well.

This paper presents new bioarchaeological data obtained during the re-analysis of human skeletal materials from the Early–Middle Neolithic Kretuonas 1 graves, excavated in 1980. The re-analysis of 6 inhumation burials revealed the earliest-known cases from Lithuanian archaeological material to show signs of perimortem cut-marks left on human bones. An evaluation of the first cases of perimortem human bone cut-marks in the broader European archaeological context allowed us to argue that different burial practices existed in Early–Middle Neolithic communities in the present territory of Lithuania. What is more, we argue that different people received different mortuary practices, and that their cadavers were handled in distinct ways.