Amber wind and porpoise jaw: Resource use at Siliņupe (fourth mill. BC) on the Baltic’s Gulf of Riga Coast

Abstract

This article presents the first general treatment of the material from the 1954 and 1988–1989 excavations at the fourth millennium BC site of Siliņupe, examined within a broad framework of food and non-food resource use on the Baltic Sea’s Gulf of Riga coast, present-day Latvia. Located at the boundary of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial biotopes, the site offered a high abundance and diversity of wild food resources: marine and terrestrial mammals, birds, and fish. The aquatic environment of the gulf was enriched with nutrients from a wide drainage basin, ensuring very high biological productivity and a rich food chain, while also receiving marine water inflows that promoted the seasonal ingress of marine species. The spectrum of marine and freshwater resources would have permitted year-round habitation, while pottery vessels enabled food processing on a large scale, possibly for delayed consumption. Amber, collected from the beaches and made into jewelry on the site, circulated in an exchange network reaching far into the continental interior, where the major rivers flowing into the gulf served as traffic arteries. Conversely, flint brought from present-day southern Lithuania or Belarus provided the main lithic material for toolmaking.

Keywords:

• Baltic Sea
• Stone Age
• Latvia
• subsistence
• amber

Acknowledgements

We are most grateful to Baiba Dumpe, Normunds Grasis, and Alise Gunnarssone at the National History Museum of Latvia for facilitating our study of the collections, and to the five anonymous reviewers for their many insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no competing interests.

Additional information

Funding

The preparation of this article has been funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project “People in a dynamic landscape: tracing the biography of Latvia’s sandy coastal belt” (lzp-2018/1-0171).