university of klaipėda lithuanian institute of history roman širouchov ...

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a, Curonians never used to bury their dead together with horses
and spend less resource on ceremony with equestrian elements. The
status of horsemen is often related to a warrior in South Curonian
cemeteries, inlike Prussians, that used to bury their society members
,and not only warriors, with horses much more often. This is connected
to a rise in role of a horse in Prussian everyday and after-life.
b. Comparing Curonian collective cremations graves of several
individuals, erected in vast pits and probably at once, with Prussian
cremations of so-named “Achenplätze”, we came to conclusion, that
despite the difference in origin of their funeral rituals, cremation graves
with huge concentrations on certain plots of cemeteries appear on the
boarder of the 11 th -12 th centuries under similar social conditions – the
emergence of certain groups like warrior elite or some influential clans,
which carried out administrative functions in certain areas.
c. The first difficulty emerged comparing Prussian and
Curonian supposed women's cremation graves of the 11 th - beginning of
the 13 th centuries, is that such investigation and classifications was
never made for Prussians’ ones. Thus, after analysis of several hun-
dreds of burials from 5 Prussian cemeteries of the period there were
found at least 5 - 15% of graves that could belong to women. Compar-
ing this number with 20% on average of Curonians, we found out that
no single cremation grave with definite features of burial rite or set of
ornaments of Curonian type occurred in Prussian cemeteries.
- Irrespective of well-known V. Kulakov theory about the
Curonian colonisation of Northern Prussian to be in post-Viking Age,
there were not any certain cremation or inhumation grave of Curonian