LAIDOJIMAS PILKAPIUOSE KRIKŠČIONIŠKOJOJE LIETUVOJE
BURIAL IN BARROWS IN CHRISTIAN LITHUANIA

Summary/Abstract: Burials dug into Roman period – Viking age barrows can be distinguished in the context of the cemeteries from Lithuania’s Late Medieval – Early Modern period (late 14th–18th centuries). So far, at least 400 late burials have been found in 26 Lithuanian barrow cemeteries while only fragmentary information is available about another 25 such barrow cemeteries. The earliest historical period burials in old barrows should be dated to the late 14th–15th centuries, but this burial practice began to occur on a mass scale in the 16th–17th centuries. The main incidence range of this custom is Samogitia and North Lithuania. In respect to their construction, orientation, and grave good assemblages, these burials do not differ in any way from the context of the historical period cemeteries. The return of burials to old barrow cemeteries should be connected with the Christianisation of Lithuania. On the one hand, up until the 16th century the evangelisation of Lithuania’s rural population was not intensive and therefore burial in a churchyard and Christian rites were not well established. On the other hand, the compressed church network during the Reformation and especially the CounterReformation, the increased pressure from the Church to observe Christian burial rites and pay the exorbitant fees for them, and the lack of Christianity’s authority could have provoked the population’s hostility, forcing people to look for more remote locations for cemeteries, locations some communities found in old pagan barrow cemeteries.

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