Brushed Pottery culture

The Brushed Pottery culture is an archaeological culture of the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age in what is now eastern Lithuania, Belarus and south-eastern Latvia. It lasted, broadly, from around 1000 BCE or a little earlier until the early centuries CE. Known for its hillforts and for the brushed surfaces of its pots, it is widely regarded as the material trace of ancestral Baltic tribes.

Archaeologists named the culture after its most common find: flat-bottomed pots whose outer walls were roughened with brush-like strokes. The marks are thought to have been made with bundles of straw or grass while the clay was still soft. As with other archaeological cultures, the label groups sites by shared material remains; it says nothing directly about what the people called themselves.

The oldest settlements counted as Early Brushed Pottery are dated to about 1300–1100 BCE and lie along the Neris and Šventoji rivers in Lithuania. The culture followed the Neolithic Narva culture in the region. The traditional view held that Narva was transformed by Indo-European influence arriving with the Corded Ware culture. That picture has been questioned: some scholars now separate a Corded Ware-influenced Western Baltic culture to the west from a distinct Brushed Pottery culture further east.

The best-known monuments of the culture are its hillforts, first built around 1000 BCE. They were fortified settlements of rectangular houses built on wooden posts, each thought to have housed perhaps 80 to 120 people. Some 110 Brushed Pottery hillforts have been identified in eastern Lithuania alone. Among the most thoroughly studied are Nevieriškė, Narkūnai and Sokiškiai.

The culture appears to have been conservative, changing little over many centuries and taking up new techniques, such as bronze and later iron working, from its neighbours. Excavated hillforts have produced many stone axes and the bones of sheep, pigs and cattle alongside those of wild animals, which suggests a mixed economy of herding, hunting and gathering, with farming playing a smaller part. Clay casting moulds at some sites point to intensive metalworking, yet bone was still widely used for tools in place of metal, a habit that may go back to the Narva culture, which relied heavily on bone.

One puzzle is that no graves belonging to the culture have been found. Archaeologists have suggested several explanations, including cremation that left little trace, or less usual customs such as placing the dead in water or in trees. None has been confirmed.

The culture faded between the 3rd and 5th centuries CE. The archaeologist Aleksiejus Luchtanas dates its end to the 3rd century, after influence from the Western Baltic culture, when it was replaced by the East Lithuanian Kurgan culture and the Bantserovo–Tushemlya culture. The Brushed Pottery people are generally linked with the early Balts and the Proto-Baltic language. In a 1963 reconstruction of Early Iron Age groups, the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas treated the Brushed Pottery group as ancestral to the Lithuanians, Selonians, Latgalians and Semigallians.

Our maps label this area "Brushed Pottery culture" from 500 BCE to 100 CE (the 500, 400, 323, 300, 200, 100 and 1 BCE maps and the 100 CE map), mostly in today's Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia; the outline is approximate. The Milograd culture lies to the south on the same maps.