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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This paper describes traces of human activities in the lower reaches of the River Jägala (North Estonia) from the Mesolithic till the Middle Ages. Attention is paid to the conditions essential to life and how people adjusted to them in the Prehistoric period and the Middle Ages. Also, the topic of the ritual landscape is discussed and the possible religious and ritual significance of the landscape analysed. This paper also tries to find an answer to the question whether people in Prehistoric times were only guided by economic considerations, or if there were also other aspects that attracted them near the banks of the River Jägala.
Das kurische Territorium und die einzelne Territorien kurischer Landschaften genauer zu bestimmen ist es möglich anhand der archäologischen und historischen Informationen.
Among the barrows attributed to the local Slavic population in the area of the left bank of the Upper Oka and right bank of the Upper Desna are barrows where the burial rites differ from the local inhabitants’. Different types of burials, a man’s burial with weapon and a horse, a horse’s burial, a horse’s burial with a man’s or animal’s cremation, a man’s burial with weapons, a man’s burial with a bird’s burial, a man’s burial under a rectangular stone barrow, were typical burial customs of Baltic and Finno-Ugric inhabitants in the 11th to 13th centuries AD.
The article is devoted to the economic structure of chiefdoms’ socio-political organisation, and the role of the economy in constructing and maintaining social and power relations in Latvia in the middle and late Iron Age.
The open ritual area is one type of pagan cult site. In this article are presented the results of an analysis of wooden pole frames and constructions from six open ritual areas in the northern Sambian peninsula. Their chronogical time covers the third to the 13th centuries AD. Open ritual areas coexisted with fireplaces and pits. In the early phase pole constructions are characterised by a rectangular shape, and subsequently a roundish shape. Analogies with open ritual areas are known in Poland, Denmark and Germany.