 Hello everybody, my name is Annie Kassirkin and I want to change the point of view now completely because up until now we have seen towns or urban places only from either the inside or from the bird perspective and we were talking about the development of the town itself or like the process of the urbanization but I want to go outside of that now and I want to see the village like from the town like from the village perspective. So let's see if this works. Yeah I want to introduce myself. I work in Schleswig in the northern part of Germany and I belong to the project Continuity of Research and Research of Continuity, Basic Research and Settlement Archaeology of the Iron Age in the Baltic region. This project has the so short to say has the aim to restore the lost knowledge about Prussian archaeology up until the second world war. My subproject is a little bit different from that but I will introduce you now to the subject project. It is a PhD project and it's still ongoing so I will not present about some results that are some final results it's more like interim results. So before I come to the settlement I would like to start with a graveyard. The area I'm talking about is the Sambian Peninsula and it's situated on the south-eastern coast of the Baltic Sea and it is nowadays Russian territory so the place has two names in the literature. The German name from East Prussian time is Viskiauten and the actual name is Mochovoye and the graveyard itself has the old name Kaup. So the coastline of the Sambian Peninsula is probably the world's largest amber deposit so this will become a potent later. The graveyard is the forest that you can see in the red circle and it was found more than 150 years ago and it was clear very fast that this is an exceptional graveyard because we have many burial mounds like about 500 of them and they're unusual in this landscape at all. We have here a Prussian culture and a downed burial mounds so this was already something unusual but we have also flat graves a few hundred of them in between these burial mounds and we also have a mixed ritual between inhumation graves and cremation graves so something quite exceptional for the region. Very fast it became clear that there is also a great number of grave goods that are also strange for the Prussian culture and it was found that they have a Scandinavian character so some of them have analogies on the island of Gotland and the middle Sweden part. I will not go into the detail of all the research of that was made on the graveyard I just want to mention that some of the finds were stored in the Königsberg castle which was destroyed in the Second World War and up until that point there was no real settlement found although it was always talked about that there should have been a settlement belonging to this graveyard of course and also when there have been buried so many Scandinavians probably they should have lived somewhere and in the German time up until the Second World War there was often used terms like a colony or very military terms because they found so many men like the ratio between men and women was two to one and they also found so many weapons so they were talking about warriors and so on. Today we're not using all these military terms anymore we're more talking about traders that were armed and we also still have many terms in the literature when we talk about the ski out and like early town or port of trade and another detail that I also want to mention just by the way is that we have a huge number of hillforts in that region in all East pressure we have a lot of hillforts but there's a big concentration on the Sambian Peninsula like for every other archaeological item or monument as well it all is very concentrated and dance on this Sambian Peninsula. In the early 2000s from 2005 until 2011 there was a new research done by Timo Ibsen who's so present today hello and he was searching for the settlement so he was not the first one who was doing this but there was very scarce hints to a settlement that might have been found so he took a sketch that he found in the archive by Max Ebert where he said that he found the settlement in the south of the graveyard so what Timo Ibsen was doing he first of all made a huge geophysical survey sadly it was not possible in the south of the graveyard you can see the graveyard in green on that slide because there are modern structures but all around the graveyard he could access the territory and the geophysical survey gave an overview where might be some structures or some places possible for settlement but the picture is also not easy to read because there's a lot of modern west like iron objects for example and they disturbed the the geomagnetical picture heavily and also there in the in the deeper ground there's like stones and they also give some anomalies so they were also done some drillings for the reconstruction of the coastline or the wetlands at least so a great a great depart in the east of the graveyard might have been a coastline and the Viking Age and for that might have been a good accent access to the Korean lagoon which is also accessible from the Baltic Sea and this might have been a good landing site so then they have been in huge excavations and there was kind of many spots where they have been settlement and most of them have been in the north and in the east of this graveyard this is a picture by Timo Ibsen and this represents the different phases of the settlement so first picture is mostly about the settlements or traces of settlements in the Neolithic time so we also have one very huge mound burial mound in the graveyard from the Neolithic time so this corresponds then in the second picture we see some traces of the Bronze Age mostly until the up until the migration period and the most dense activity what has been seen in the same time as the usage of the graveyard so from the ninth till the eleventh century and further the picture of the archaeological objects is not so easy to read because there was a heavy plowing situation already in up until the German time but also in the Soviet time there has been really deep plowing activities and also the German drainage system was destroyed so we have a lot of items in the plowing horizon and maybe we have only some deeper going archaeological objects like pits but we have beautiful wells and good visible fireplaces the house structures are quite small so we talk about small houses that are not in a dense structure and we cannot say that there was some some town like situation or organized town structure but we have an interesting amount of findings we have more than 300 000 objects and they can be dated mostly between the 7th and the 13th century and we also have some clear parallelities to the graveyard carved for example just just a few examples the black and white pictures are pictures of findings from the graveyard and colorful pictures are from the settlement I will not go into detail I just want to mention this sword pommel which is showing not only military aspects but also a statue symbol because there is silver inlay we have an interesting shift in the animal bounds from using more like pork and gold by the Prussian culture going into more usage of cattle later on and we have fish bones that indicates fishing in the Baltic Sea, Corinea lagoon and in the freshwater lakes around but we have interesting findings when we talk about trade so we have a number of weights or items that are secondarily used as weights like the endings of Horseshoe fibulas we have Byzantinic coins we have Arabian dear home that this one is cut so we clearly talk about the region of silver economy not of coin economy so there is a deep impact from distance relations trade relations as I mentioned we are in a region where is a great number of natural amber so we also find the semi of final produced amber beads or final produced amber beads but we also have like another imports like corneal or jet stone or glass beads just to mention a few of them we have production of metal production like these crucibles we have a molding form this is an interesting exemplary because this is made of bronze so it's not possible to cast bronze in a bronze molding form so you would use that for tin or for creating a wax model for further going to to process to make lost wax lost forms with this wax model there are examples of items that could be produced by this all right I will hurry up there's examples that could be produced by this molding form with from coming from Birka or all around but we don't have one fitting from Piskjotinica we have also preservation of organic material and here's an example analogy from Novgorod like this birch bark box I won't go into detail now so what we have is in the this graveyard is not standing alone in this vicinity so there is a huge amount of another graveyards all around from the Prussian time earlier time so it's clear that the Scandinavian settlers that arrived were not coming into into empty space they came into a functioning Prussian culture already and they just integrated so we have a network of small settlements working parallel to each other having connection to each other and we have indications by these items of trade that there should have been a large-scale trading activity but we don't have this marketplace yet and this is strange so there is new findings from all around the area so this is not a single case there is a huge huge trade happening in all the some beyond peninsula but we just didn't catch the trading port so just to sum up very fast we have this exceptional graveyard we have a network of small structures of settlements we have a very good statistical place situation for such a trading place we have all the necessary imports and exports for having such a trading place we have amber as a resource that could be traded but we don't have any written sources we don't have a fortification like a rampart we don't have a dense town like structure we don't have a marketplace or black earth or a landing site and my question is now this will go on in my research like can we can we just catch this trading point from from an outer view from an outer perspective like can we distinguish is it an early town or urban place or a port of trade what exactly is it and if you have some ideas some indicators of the existence of such a place or if you just would like to share your thoughts with you you're very welcome to contact me thank you