Klaipėdos universitetas

The set of Palaeolithic and Mesolithic artefacts from Aukštumala consists exclusively of flint manufactured items. This paper presents exhaustive data on studies of the flint artefacts, and on the reconstruction of their manufacture technique, based on observable characteristics of their manufacture. The functions of the artefacts found in the settlements were established at the Archaeological Material Research Laboratory at Klaipėda University, by means of an Olympus SZX16 microscope, and simultaneously their typology and the chronology of individual items were revised.

This article treats a wide-ranging scientific project ‘The Evolution of the Baltic Sea and the Stages of the Earliest Human Settlement in the Southeast Baltic’ that started in 2009. The main research methods consist of multidisciplinary investigations of key archaeological sites and former glacial water-pools and bogs. The final result of the project is expected to be a model of demographic processes that occurred in the southeast Baltic during the Late Glacial and Early Holocene set against environmental changes.

This article addresses the complicated issues of the primary population of the forest zone in Eastern Europe at the turn of the Pleistocene-Holocene and the forms of its occupation by humans.