Archaeologia Baltica

Items with the ox-head are a very interesting archaeological phenomenon in the Baltic Sea area in the Roman Period. The earliest category of these finds is drinking horn fittings, which appeared in the Early Roman Period on Jutland and the Danish islands. At the beginning of the Late Roman Period, in the territory of the West Balts in Masuria, brooches with the ox-head occurred. According to the scientific tradition, they are interpreted as the effect of influences from the western zone of the shore of the Baltic Sea. Nowadays, when new finds of items with the ox-head (drinking horn fittings, brooches) are found in Przeworsk culture, it is necessary to analyse this thesis again.

A shield boss and a shield grip with silver decoration were recently found in the Przeworsk culture cemetery at Czersk in the Piaseczno district in central Poland. The shield boss, type J.7, has three times three bronze thimble-headed rivets, covered with silver. The bronze shield grip has silvered rivet plates with thimble-headed rivets, decorative filigree studs, and openwork decoration. The technique that was used to produce this specimen is not clear, despite metallographic analysis. The shield has analogies in Scandinavia (Hunn, Radved, Brostorp) and the northern Elbian circle (Hamfelde). It was probably a parade shield, an international sign of the warrior elite in the Early Roman Period in the barbaricum.

At the Early Roman Iron Age graveyard of Hagenow, Mecklenburg, five or six generations of an elite manifest rank and status through the burial custom, among other things using weapons and components of military equipment. The wealth and quality of the grave goods obvious based on the participation in Germanic retinues and also in Roman services.

Graves of two warriors equipped with rich sets of weapons, emerge on the Celtic territories from the early La Tène period till the end of phase D2. Graves with double sets of weapons (one and two-edged swords) placed in metal vessels are known from the apparently Germanic cultures of northern Europe. Celtic graves are evident burials of two (or more) persons, warriors of similar status expressed by analogous weaponry. “Germanic” Oksywie Culture, and Scandinavian finds are burials of individual persons, notable warriors, who were given special sets of weapons to show their social position. A similar situation observed at an archaeological level could have had different grounds and meant different phenomena.

A characteristic of the Bronze Age in the area of present-day Latvia was a fairly wide range of bronze, stone and bone weapons. The possibility of military clashes, too, is indicated by the building of fortified residential sites, hill-forts. A whole corpus of evidence testifies to the new way of life adopted by the elite of Bronze Age society, where the ideology of warfare also played a certain role.