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river names can be identified; there
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are many groups in eastern Lithuania and Latvia as well. For the Early Iron Age
and for the first centuries A.D. fortified hill-top villages are the basic sources of
information. In contrast to the earlier periods and to the area of the western Balts,
cemeteries are as yet hardly known here. We are thus better informed about the
pattern of settlement and economy than about the burial rites, cults, social
stratification, and representative artifacts.
Villages were fortified with ramparts and ditches, and occupied an area of
some 30 40 × 40 60 m. or more, on which about ten houses were built. The
ramparts, 1 2 m. high, were built of stone, earth, or clay. Very often ramparts were
of baked clay, and these were interwoven and solidly covered with timber. These
were the most durable and still exist. Some of the recently discovered ramparts
have  mysterious openings, which are the subject of many legends. The ditches
outside the ramparts sometimes reach 3 7 m. in depth and 10 15 m. or more in
width. In plan the village was of various shapes: oval, elliptical, triangular, or even
rectangular, depending on the natural shape of the river bank or the promontory
into the lake. Before the houses were built the area was leveled, the lower parts
being raised. Ramparts were normally on the inland side which, if not fortified,
was accessible to enemies and wild animals. Sometimes ramparts encircled the
whole village or protected it from several sides.
Frequently, hill-forts have yielded cultural layers of many periods; some of
them were used for millennia. Their character and defence structures changed very
slowly. In 1957 a whole village of ten houses dated to the third century B.C. came
to light as a result of excavations by T. N. Nikol skaja at the hill-fort of Nikolo-
Lenivets on the bank of the River Ugra, tributary of the Oka.9 Aboveground,
timber houses stood in two rows very close to each other, oriented NE SW.
Between the two rows was a street about 3 m. in width. Houses were
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rectangular and of about the same size, either 9 × 3 m. or 6 × 3 m., and most of
them had hearths inside. Those without hearths presumably were for housing
livestock, and for barns. The living-quarters were divided into two or three
compartments, each probably occupied by a family. Houses were built of vertical
timber posts placed in the corners and at the middle of each wall; the space
between the posts was filled in with horizontal logs or interwoven twigs, after
which the walls were thickly daubed with clay. The roofs were pitched, and
supported by strong posts in the middle of the house. Floors were tamped with
clay, and open hearths were somewhat below floor level and surrounded by a clay
wall.
Iron sickles and grain impressions on pottery found in many villages indicate
that agriculture was universal. The people maintained their farms and kept their
animals in small areas beyond the villages, which occasionally were enclosed with
ramparts as in the hill-fort of Svinukhovo. Grain was kept in
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round pits, about 1 m. in diameter. In most of the hill-fort sites over 70 per cent of
the animal bones were those of domesticated, and less than 30 per cent those of
wild animals. A particular abundance of horse bones, in some cases more than half
of all the bones found, may indicate that the horse was used for food. Domestic
animals constituted the basic food supply, although wild animals were hunted both
for fur and for food. In some sites bones of furred animals such as the fox, hare,
squirrel, marten, and beaver predominate; in others, those of bear, roe-deer, and
wolf. Fishing was an important subsidiary activity. The presence of small net-
sinkers shows that floating nets and seines were used in addition to iron or bone
hooks and bone harpoons.
A bronze industry is attested by stone moulds and crucibles. Bracelets, pins,
and ornamental plates of bronze or copper were made locally. Hill-forts dated to
the period between the fourth
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and second centuries B.C. have yielded a large number of spiral-headed bronze
pins and pins with leaf-shaped, fret-worked heads. Below the leaf were one or two
loops apparently for the attachment of chains. Convex plates with several holes
were used for attaching to the dress or to belts. Bracelets were embellished with a
curving design in relief. The majority of the finds in hill-forts, however, are of
bone and ceramic. Bone was used for harpoons, arrowheads, awls, needles,
perforators, handles for knives and rods, buttons, children s toys, and disc-shaped
whorls; clay, for net-sinkers, variously shaped whorls, horse figurines, toys, and
pottery. Pots were thin-walled, made of grey clay tempered with gravel or sand.
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That iron smelting was done in the villages is shown by iron knives,
fishhooks, and sickles, some in unfinished shape or broken, and iron slag and clay
ovens. Iron ore was obtained from the local swamps, meadows, lakes, and lake
shores which abound in the forested areas of eastern Europe. The ore had to be dug
out in the summer, and in the autumn and winter it was washed, dried, heated and
reduced to small pieces. After that, the ore was placed in small clay ovens in layers
alternating with charcoal, for smelting. Starting somewhere in the middle of the
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first millennium B.C., iron production gradually increased, but not before the first
centuries A.D. did it replace the tools and weapons of stone and bone.
The changeless life of the, eastern Baltic tribes in the Dnieper basin was
disturbed in the second century B.C. by the appearance of the Zarubincy, assumed
to be Slavs (the name  Zarubincy coming from the cemetery of Zarubinec south
of Kiev on the River Dnieper, excavated in 1899).10 They invaded the lands
possessed by the Milograd people along the River Pripet
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and up the Dnieper and its tributaries, and the southern territories inhabited by the
Plain Pottery people. The Zarubincy were a peasant folk on a cultural level similar
to that of the eastern Balts, but their archaeological remains contrast in every detail
with those of the older population. Their settlements were larger and they lived in
semi-subterranean huts as opposed to the small villages and aboveground houses of
the Milograd and Plain-Pottery people. Their urn-fields are in contrast to the
inhumation and cremation graves in pits or in barrows of the Milograd people. The
Zarubinec urns and other pots were burnished, had a more or less angular profile,
frequently possessed handles, and were decorated with a ridge applied around the
neck. Their prototypes are found in the Vysockoe and Chernoleska culture of the
western Ukraine (Podolia and southern Volynia) dating from the seventh fifth
centuries B.C., and its inheritors during the succeeding centuries. The most
frequent finds in graves were fibulae, derivatives from the Middle and Late La
Tène types of central Europe.
The intrusion of the Zarubincy must be interpreted as the first Slavic
expansion northward from the lands lying in the immediate neighborhood. Their
movements may have been prompted by the expansion of the western Baltic tribe,
the Pot-covered Urn-Grave people, in the fourth third centuries B.C., and the
subsequent Celtic expansion to eastern Europe. The Milograd culture persisted
alongside the Zarubinec throughout all the centuries of the occupation, from the
second century B.C. to the second century A.D. A certain revival is discernible
around the third fourth centuries A.D., when Milograd sites appeared again on the
Dnieper as far as Kiev in the south. Dating from around the third century A.D.,
finds of the Zarubinec type disappear and by the fourth fifth centuries are replaced
by another Slavic branch, pushing up the Dnieper from the south.
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Chapter V
The  Golden Age
The period from the second to the fifth century A.D. is the  golden age of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]