Klaipėdos universitetas

The article is devoted to examine the importance of horse image in the poetic texts of various genre Lithuanian folk songs from different local ethnic regions. We find different meanings of the biological horse here, such as riding-horse, working horse, mare and jade here as the representatives in the special social context here. The general conclusion is made about horse as very important symbolic object with wide and deep its meanings in the poetic texts of Lithuanian folk songs.

The paper analyses a horses’ behaviour in Lithuanian narrative folklore texts: a horse’s reaction towards unusual environment, a horse as a predictor and a horse as a sign of wealth. Horse’s connection with burial and wealth – keeping beliefs as well as relationship with the beyond is emphasized too.

Apart from being a status marker with strong ritual connotations it is suggested that the horse in prehistory is a liminal agent between sea and land. As gender he represents land. The ship is as female as the sea. But the gender is contextual and culture specific. The connections of the horse with the ship are attributed to the opposition between the two elements. Since this opposition belongs to maritime cultures in the North the structural “cosmology” in question may have filtered over also to inland agrarian conditions. Symbols are polysemic and may even have represented different things to different social classes, like in recent times.

As refers to the first article (the one concerning the Przeworsk Culture), the abstract is as follows: The author tries to reconstruct the role of the horse in the Przeworsk Culture basing on the extremely rare horse graves, remains of horses’ bones in human graves (generally edible parts of skeletons), unique images of horsemen and horses of clay vessels (urns) and pieces of horse harness as well as spurs found in weapon graves. Results of archaeological researches are also taken into consideration.

The paper presents the problem of archaeological, archaeozoological and anthropological interpretations of horse burials from the Roman Period cemeteries from the Bogaczewo Culture (Masurian Lakeland) territory. It is presented on the basis of the multidisciplinary research of the cemetery in Paprotki Kolonia located in the heart of Bogaczewo Culture territory.

Single and double-horse burials of second century AD from Samland and Natangen (Kaliningrad region, Russia) are described. All horses were in the good riding age. They bear constitutional similarities with horses from later burials in Germany, Latvia, Lithuania and Scandinavia. Despite their small size, horses were used as riding and most likely were buried with proprietors as afterlife mediators or servants.

This article presents an overview of the representations of the horse and horseman in Corded Ware Culture studies. A survey of the literature is proposed, discussing assumptions of the role of the horse in the communities of this culture.

In this article, we discuss the phenomenon of crescent-shaped pendants dating back to the Late Roman Iron Age and Early Migration Period (3rd – 6th centuries AD). Placed on horse’s foreheads, these crescent-shaped pendants evidently embodied a mythological link between the moon and the horse. The same link is clearly reflected in linguistic data and folklore right up until the 20th century. We draw special attention to a horse with a white mark on its forehead called laukas (adj.), laukis (noun) in Lithuanian, which derives from the I-E root *louk- ‘shining, bright’, as also does the Latin luna (< *louksnā). Considering the data as a whole, we propose an unexpected link between the Baltic and Roman traditions.