Archaeologia Baltica

Factors which suppress or interfere with the deciphering of aerial photography whilst searching for traces of ancient habitations are called noises. The main kinds of noises currently identified in Lithuania are land improvement or land reclamation, woods, urbanisation and reservoirs. Altogether, they make a fair level of noise, thus the search for traces of habitations based solely on aerial photography in Lithuania is not possible.

In this review of pollen data from the South Swedish uplands, evidence is presented of colonisation and strong agricultural expansion during the 11th to 13th centuries, followed by farm abandonment and land use change during the 14th to 15th centuries. The latter is associated with the Black Death and the late medieval crisis. Pollen data show that abandonment in the uplands resulted in the regrowth of woodland, but also in land use change from cereal growing to grazing. Similar cycles of agricultural expansion and decline are identified also from earlier periods during the Iron Age, which highlights the sensitive character of upland agriculture and settlement.

Viljandi (Fellin), a small town in medieval Livonia, was founded in the second quarter of the 13th century, soon after the Estonian Crusades. The Estonians’ prehistoric hill-fort was replaced by a castle of the Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order, the prehistoric settlement was abandoned, and the location for the new town was chosen on the site of a former field more suitable for fortification. In this paper, zooarchaeological material from three sites, the prehistoric settlement, the Order’s castle and the early medieval town, will be discussed. Despite the presumed changes in Estonian society associated with the Crusades, the analyses reveal no profound differences in meat consumption in the transitional period from prehistory to the middle Ages.

In the eighteenth century, the Abbé Lebeuf was a reknowned historian, a folklorist, a musicologist, and an archaeologist. He published several books and many articles in the Mercure de France. He was still famous in the 19th century but is now almost forgotten. His work contains a great many notes, reflections and other pieces of information of interest to those studying astronomy in culture. I present here a short selection of such fragments.

The supernova explosions of 1006 AD and 1054 AD are, probably, the astronomical events most carefully studied through the analysis of historical sources. But contradictions are still present in several sources concerning SN 1054 and the historical records are not consistent with the astronomical data. This short analysis aims to highlight all these aspects.