The Iron Age hill-fort
ENAncient settlements are important sources for interdisciplinary studies of the material culture of past human communities and societies. Interdisciplinary investigations of these sites may help to answer numerous questions about the social structures, economy, everyday life and living conditions of ancient populations. In Lithuania, only a few Iron-Age settlements have been excavated thoroughly. This is mainly caused by the fact that most of these settlements have been destroyed by ploughing, especially the so-called open-type settlements that in many cases have only been partially preserved. In hill-forts and adjacent foot settlements, which emerged next to hill-forts since the Roman Iron Age, the cultural layers have been preserved in better conditions. Moreover, the attention of Lithuanian Iron-Age archaeology has been repeatedly focused on the material from burial monuments. Therefore not only cultural-ethnic-social, but also technological-economic-production issues of individual epochs of the Iron Age are covered by using predominantly material from Iron-Age cemeteries. Iron-Age hill-fort settlements are among those archaeological monuments in Lithuania that have been excavated the least. Archaeological excavations have been conducted in 81 of more than 350 foot settlements; however, the investigated area is usually very small. Therefore the character of these archaeological sites remains unexplored to the present day. The state of research concerning the settlement structure as well as the types of buildings of Iron-Age settlements is not much better.The lack of scientiic archaeological data from Iron-Age settlements and aspiration to start uesing modern methods and technologies in settlement archaeology were reasons why the Institute of Baltic Sea Region History and Archaeology of Klaipėda University in cooperation with the Roman-Germanic Commission of the German Archaeological Institute initialed small-scale archaeological and geomagnetic investigations at the complex of Opstainis-Vilkyškiai Iron-Age hill-fort and settlement in 2008.The purpose of this article is to present preliminary results of the on-going research and to summarize the data of archaeological and geomagnetic surveys.
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