Lietuvos istorijos institutas

Heraldry and its research have deep traditions in Europe. In Lithuania, interest in this field is a more recent phenomenon. The late beginning of heraldry research was partly influenced by the loss of Lithuania’s independence. At present, researchers’ attention is focused mainly on the periods of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, also looking at Lithuanian heraldry of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, and conducting thorough research into the coats of arms of the state, its cities, and towns. Research on the heraldry of the nobility, such as the heraldry of the political elite in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – the families of Goštautas, Pacas, Radvila, Sapiega, and others – is also conducted. The heraldry of the noblewomen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania has received less attention. This article focuses on the heraldry of the noblewomen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It also aims to discuss the significance of the coat of arms in the noblewoman’s life in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during that period and to introduce the traditions of heraldry, the formation and use of noblewomen’s coats of arms in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Analysis of the heraldic sources related to noblewomen revealed that the coats of arms of the noblewomen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania appeared in seals, literature, portraits, tombstones, etc. The coats of arms were often oval or traditional shield-shaped. Also, very often the noblewomen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania used shields with a crest. In various cases, compared to men’s coats of arms, women’s coats of arms are more decorative, embellished with plant and floral motifs. Over the course of time, the noblewomen’s coats of arms became a unique means of representation and an important part of identity.

The Sub-Neolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher (HGF) groups and Corded Ware (CW) agro-pastoral group interactions within the Lithuanian portion of the Neman Basin around ~3000 BC did not follow the same patterns of agriculturalisation seen elsewhere in Europe during Neolithization. The variation of interaction in this agricultural frontier zone provides valuable insight into the way information exchange between groups drives the exchange of intercultural information and how information exchange between groups ultimately the adaptive morphogenesis of culture. This article’s primary author has already studied this outlier behaviour and the Unified Agricultural Frontier Model (UAFM) was proposed in volume 45 of this journal (Troskosky et al. 2019). The article presented in this volume is a companion piece to the 2019 publication which further explains and tests the mechanics underlying the UAFM. The UAFM applies self-organised criticality (SOC) to the hypothesis that marked cultural shifts are most likely to occur in response to increased levels of stress affect within a society. Stress affect is defined as the dissonance between encultured expectations of reality and phenomenologically lived reality within a population. To test this hypothesis, The Arithmetic Logarithm Illustrating Cultural Exchange (ALICE) model was developed; it provides confirmation that information exchange drives the behaviour of the UAFM across frontier zones. This model provides strong computational confirmation that information drives the behaviour of the UAFM across frontier zones. Theoretically, ALICE supports a general model for information flow between different cultures, facilitating corresponding cultural changes across any frontier. It models how increased levels of stress affect within interacting groups can lead to shifts of societal behaviour marked by a pattern of periods of equilibrium alternating