Lietuvos istorijos institutas

The article is devoted to a discussion of the results of research conducted in implementing the ‘Archaeolandscape’ project in the Jakšiškis microregion. The research was conducted in the vicinity of one of the largest Lithuanian barrow group, the Jakšiškis and Knitiškiai barrow cemeteries. The most important objective during the project was the search for the settlements of the communities that left them and a series of related questions: what size was the settlement, how intense was its life, what was the nature of the activities in it, and what was its relationship with the nearby sites. An attempt was made to answer these questions using tradition archaeological methods and the spot test.

The number of inhabitants and the population density were one of the deciding factors in the development of past societies. But this topic has received little attention from Lithuanian Iron Age investigators, and the rare attempts to address it mostly use the constant presented by H. Łowmiański of 3 people/km2. This article attempts, using palaeodemographic methods to analyse the barrow material, to calculate the number of inhabitants in the Žeimena basin and the part of the microregion to the N of its widening lake area. The first 5 km buffer zone (buffer zone I; 365.5 km2) should be considered as having a barrow cemetery density closer to the average for East Lithuania; the second, which occupies only the left bank of the Žeimena (buffer zone II; 198.5 km2), is an example of exceptional density. When evaluating the number of people buried in the microregion’s barrow cemeteries, the possible large-scale destruction of barrows in the past, the number of burials in a barrow, and the number of individuals in a burial need to be taken into consideration. The probability of error is increased by an imprecise barrow chronology and it is therefore possible to present only fairly broad and somewhat unexpected population density ranges in a historiographical context: in buffer zone I – 0.3–0.6 persons/ km2, in buffer zone II – 0.6–1.1 persons/ km2.

The worlds of the living and the dead are connected to one another in people’s worldviews and their physical setting in the landscape is a material expression of this relationship. In Lithuanian Iron Age (Roman period–Viking Age) archaeology, burial sites have been rarely approached from this perspective, except for some stereotypical remarks, e.g. it has been argued that water is a boundary between the spaces of the living and the dead. The paper analyses the spatial relationship between the East Lithuanian hillforts and barrow cemeteries and discusses how it reflects the local communities’ perceptions of their communication with their dead. The study is based on five spatial perspectives: distance, direction, location in the terrain in respect to bodies of water, communicative relationship, and visual contact. It concludes that no effort was made to isolate the burial areas from those for the living, i.e. the living maintained spatial bonds with their dead and shared one landscape.