The Roman Period Cemeteries with Stone Circles on the Southern Baltic Coastland

Abstract #: 1862

TRACES OF A MIGRATION FROM SCANDINAVIA? THE ROMAN PERIOD CEMETERIES WITH STONE CIRCLES ON THE SOUTHERN BALTIC COASTLAND

Adam Cieslinski1 1 University of Warsaw / Faculty of Archaeology

One of the most interesting features of the Wielbark culture, the most important archaeological unit in northern Poland in the early Roman Period, is a relatively small group of cemeteries with stone circles. In historical times, these sites were being destroyed on a large scale to obtain stone for construction purposes. Until today, only a few surely confirmed sites of this type have survived in Pomerania, of which only a few have been excavated. The tradition of building stone circles was unfamiliar to the communities living in the areas between the Oder and the Vistula before the Roman Period. Moreover, all cemeteries with stone circles seem to have been established in previously unsettled territories, unlike most of the Wielbark culture cemeteries from the early phase, which had apparently been used without interruption from the Pre-Roman Period. For this reason, it is believed that stone circles were built by the communities that had come from Scandinavia, where structures of this type date back to the Bronze Age. Stone circles are quite commonly associated with the migration of the Germanic tribe of Goths, described in written sources. According to an account by Jordanes from the first half of the 6th century, which he based on Cassiodorus (Getica IV, 25 ,26), the Goths came from the island of Scandza, i.e., from Scandinavia. In the specialist literature, the thesis of the Scandinavian origin of the Goths was either accepted, very often without critical analysis, or completely rejected - in this second case Jordanes’s tradition was regarded as a topos. The paper will present the state of research and discussion on the genesis and interpretation of stone circles in Poland, with particular emphasis on the possibility of linking this phenomenon with the information about the migrating Goths found in written sources.

Keywords stone circles, migrations, Roman Period, Wielbark culture, Pomerania, Scandinavia

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