Revision of the materials from the Riigiküla I Stone Age settlement site (Estonia)

The Riigikla I settlement site in northeast Estonia, which was found and excavated at the beginning of 1950s, is an important source of information about the life and households of the Stone Age population in the Eastern Baltic and one of the few settlement sites in Estonia that includes the remains of dwellings. Besides two pit-houses, a few fireplaces, two entire human skeletons and the disarticulated bones of at least three more individuals, as well as a rich inventory comprised of pottery fragments, tools and waste from the production of quartz, bone, antler, flint, etc., were discovered here. At first, the site was interpreted as a single long-term dwelling site. Nevertheless, the discovery of new data at other sites in the region, as well as a partial re-analysis of the pottery and new AMS dates obtained from the human bones, indicated the necessity to revise all the materials. The preliminary results of this work are presented in our paper. It was established that at least four buildings correlated to Narva and Comb Ware cultures existed on the settlement site, indicating that, at least partially, they existed at different times. Find materials in the occupation layer are obviously mixed vertically because of the existence of multi-temporal settlement sites in this area, but they are also clearly correlated to objects horizontally. For a while, this place was apparently visited by the representatives of the Corded Ware culture (judging by the few fragments of pottery). And in the middle of the Bronze Age, people buried their dead here.