Das Archäologische Areal von Batakiai in Litauen: Burgwall, Vorburg und Gräberfeld
ENThe Batakiai cemetery was discovered accidentally shortly before 4 October 1944, when German soldiers defending Batakiai were digging trenches on the raised right bank of the Ūkis streamlet. Trenches were dug in several places, including at the site of the Batakiai hillfort. Hermann Arnold (1912–2005), who served as a medical officer in the Second World War, recorded the discovery of two graves in a drawing and gave a detailed description of the position of the skeletons, the location of the grave goods and the grave goods themselves, as well as drawing up a schematic map and indicating that the graves were 200 metres southwest of the hillfort on the raised headland of the hill, on the right bank of the Ancˇia river at the confluence of the Ūkis streamlet. Arnold removed the grave goods from the graves, one of which was male and the other female, and informed the archaeologist Wolfgang La Baume (1885–1971) in Königsberg about the burial site and the artefacts. However, in the chaos of the war, knowledge of the Batakiai finds was soon lost again. Subsequent scholars searched for information on the sites, finds, and archaeological documentation of the Klaipe˙da region and the neighbouring territories – all scattered during the war – in various institutions, including the La Baume Archive of 42 files stored at the Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung in Marburg, Germany. La Baume pointed out that very few items from the area attributable to the Skalvians and dating from the 7th to 9th century AD were preserved in Königsberg.Subsequent letters written by La Baume from Marburg to Friedrich Sprater (1884–1952) and Karlwerner Kaiser (1911–1994) in Speyer dealt with the significance of the finds, their attribution to a particular Baltic tribe, and the conditions surrounding their transfer to the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. Presently, all the surviving finds of the Batakiai cemetery and other archival material, including copies from the Herder Institute, are kept at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. Regrettably, not all the finds excavated in 1944 survived World War II. In October 2019, a survey was made about 200 metres west of the hillfort following Arnold’s wartime description. The survey was conducted as part of the collaborative project between the Germanisches Nationalmuseum and the Commission for the Research of Collections of Archaeological Finds and Documents from Northeast Central Europe (KAFU) and was based on the archival material on the Batakiai finds. 76 special finds (jewellery, sword fragments, and other objects), dating from the 9th to the 14th century AD, were collected. An eye brooch dating from the second half of the 1st century AD was recovered in the site area as metal scrap. Individual scorched bones, melted artefacts, and cremation grave 1 from within the Batakiai cemetery provided evidence that inhumation was replaced by cremation in Samogitia, as was the case in the rest of Lithuania. Although the boundaries of the settlement and the cemetery remain unclear, and the exact location of the graves excavated in 1944 could not be determined, there is no doubt that from the 13th to 14th century AD, Samogitians were burying their tribespeople by the method of cremation. The found remains must have belonged to the inhabitants of the castle of Aukaimis (Otekaym, Oukaym), recorded in written sources. [From the publication]
