Lietuva valstybės priešaušriu

ENThe book is dedicated to the approaching millennium jubilee in the commemoration of the name of Lithuania. Its main objective is to outline the road of Lithuanian ethnos and socium that brought Lithuania to the threshold of statehood. While searching for the roots of that phenomenon, primarily, the archaeological sources were used for reference, major attention being focused on the New Iron Age (A.D. 9th-12th centuries), also by attracting the data of the earlier and later periods. In solving certain questions the impressive archaeological sources, hill-forts, had to be inevitably touched upon, especially when elucidating the issue of socium. In addition, some starting points have been sought for in the written historical sources and linguistic research. The first and the main part of the sources is constituted of the burial monument s that are discussed in separate chapters of Part II of the book. The first chapter deals with the barrows in Eastern Lithuania; the second chapter is devoted to the fiat burial grounds of Central Lithuania; the third chapter to the burial grounds in Central Northern Lithuania; the fourth chapter describes the burial grounds in Central Lithuania; and the fifth chapter focuses on the Lithuanian seacoast burial grounds. Such distribution is based on the differences in burial customs in separate areas of Lithuania. This is of special importance in studying the ethnic processes that cover Part III of the book. In solving ethnic issues the primary attention was focused on the ancient times, on the Indo-European epoch, searching here for the Baltic roots. On the basis of the spreading of the Baltic placenames and archaeological cultures the formation period of the Balts - the end of the Third Millennium and the beginning of the Second Millennium B.C. - was defined.Their ancestral homeland used to be situated between the Vistula in the West and the Dnieper in the East. In the opinion of the linguists, in the middle of the First Millennium B.C. the disintegration of the Baltic parent language was started. The Western1 and Eastern Balts were distinguished. In tht course of the historical development , the divide between the Western and Eastern Balts ran through the present-day territory of Lithuania. The culture of the Western Balts in the First Millennium B.C. was most of all characterized by the barrows encircled by rings of stone and cremation graves inside them. The unique traits of this very distinctive barrow culture, attributed to the Western Balts, are also found in the first centuries A.D. The work traces the main find sites of the said culture, which show the then existing approximate boundaries: in the north - Skuodas district, in the northeast - part of the Siauliai district, in the east - Kelme district, and in the south - Šilale district. Thus, the territory inhabited by the Western Balts would be the Minija, Venta, Dubysa (left-side), and the Upper Jura areas. The territory of the Western Balts in the southwestern part is more hardly traceable due to a smali number of investigated monuments of the period. However, the data available [...]. [From the publication]