Ancient Europe, Northeast Europe, Lithuania (Founded: 1253): Introduction, A Note on Dating, A Note on Tables

12 Lithuania (Founded: 1253)

Introduction

During the Ice Age, glaciers made Lithuania uninhabitable until around 13,000 BC. As retreating ice made the region more habitable, hunter-gatherers trailing the edge of the ice sheet entered Lithuania from the south (Poland) and the southwest (northern Germany), following cold-hardy game – specifically reindeer herds – across the subarctic plains. Their presence is evidenced by temporary camps containing stone tools, hide scrapers, and distinctive tanged flint arrowheads.

A Note on Dating    

Due to retreating ice sheets and shifting Baltic Sea levels, materials from active riverine environments and sandy matrices are frequently vertically mixed over thousands of years. Dating of artefacts in prehistory within the region relies on matching local finds with known warming and cooling stages in Europe. For the Late Palaeolithic, the warming Bølling (12,700-12,000 BC) and the freezing Older Dryas (12,000-11,800 BC) are associated with very early hunter-gatherer groups, which may have included the Hamburgian culture; the warming Allerød (11,800-10,900 BC) is linked to the Federmesser and Bromme/Lyngby cultures; and the freezing Younger Dryas (10,900-9700 BC) is shared by the Ahrensburgian and Swiderian cultures.

A Note on Tables

For the tables for Lithuania only: asterisks (*) flag multi-layered sites occupied repeatedly across different prehistoric eras. Numbers and letters added to site names (e.g. 1, 8, 1B) identify the catalogued finds within those larger boundaries.