Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)
Kapitoniškių pilkapynas
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Overview
About this site
Overview
Kapitoniškių pilkapynas, also known as Milžinkapiai, was a barrow cemetery in what is now Kaišiadorys District Municipality, Lithuania, about 2 km south-east of Rumšiškės, beside Kapitoniškiai forest on the right bank of the Nemunas. It was flooded in 1959 by the Kaunas Reservoir (Kauno marios).
Archaeologists found two groups of barrows there in 1953. Forty-six barrows were excavated in 1953-1954, and the graves contained cremations and horse burials with grave goods dating from the ninth to the twelfth century.
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Article
Kapitoniškių pilkapynas
DescriptionSources for this section
- Wikipedia (Lithuanian): Kapitoniškių pilkapynasCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (Lithuanian): Kapitoniškių pilkapynasCC BY-SA 4.0
The cemetery comprised two groups of barrows. The northern group had 20 barrows and the southern group 29. The mounds measured 6-12 m in diameter and stood up to 1.2 m high. They were built of sand and were surrounded by ditches.
In 1953-1954 the Institute of History excavated 46 barrows under the direction of Adolfas Tautavičius.
ExcavationsSources for this section
- Wikipedia (Lithuanian): Kapitoniškių pilkapynasCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (Lithuanian): Kapitoniškių pilkapynasCC BY-SA 4.0
In 1953-1954 the Institute of History excavated 46 barrows under the direction of Adolfas Tautavičius. In the southern group, cremation graves lay in the mounds and on the ground beneath them. In the northern group, the pits under the mounds held unburnt horse burials, while the mounds themselves contained cremations.
FindsSources for this section
- Wikipedia (Lithuanian): Kapitoniškių pilkapynasCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (Lithuanian): Kapitoniškių pilkapynasCC BY-SA 4.0
The grave goods date from the ninth to the twelfth century. They include iron awls, knives, clay spindle whorls, twisted bronze neck-rings with flattened, hooked ends, and massive band bracelets of triangular section with widening ends. The horse graves contained iron sickles, bits and bronze bells. The finds are kept in the National Museum of Lithuania.
ContextSources for this section
- Wikipedia (Lithuanian): Kapitoniškių pilkapynasCC BY-SA 4.0
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia (Lithuanian): Kapitoniškių pilkapynasCC BY-SA 4.0
Along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic, burial mounds mark the territories of the Baltic peoples. In Lithuanian they are called pilkapiai. Monuments of this kind are barrow cemeteries and not megaliths, and their tradition is rooted in the West Baltic barrow culture of the early Iron Age.
Tradition and region
About this kind of monument
Baltic barrow cemeteries
Along the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic, burial mounds mark the territories of the Baltic peoples. In Lithuanian they are called pilkapiai, and the Atlas's Lithuanian and Belarusian records are mostly cemeteries of small mounds recorded in national registers. They are barrow cemeteries and not megaliths.
The deepest root of the tradition is the West Baltic barrow culture of the early Iron Age, from which most of the Western Baltic culture arose. That culture, of the Bronze Age and Iron Age along the southern coast of the Baltic, was ethnically Baltic and shared similar monuments and funeral rites; its tribes included the Old Prussians, Galindians, Yotvingians and Skalvians. Further north, the Curonians, a medieval Baltic tribe of the fifth to sixteenth centuries CE, lived on the coast of what are now western Latvia and Lithuania, and their neighbours the Samogitians lived inland to the east. Mounds of the broader barrow tradition, the kurgans, had spread into eastern and northern Europe as early as the third millennium BCE.
Because a cemetery is made up of many small mounds, it records an ordinary community and not a single ruler. Many of these mounds have not been excavated, so the Atlas gives them a broad range and does not claim a date.
When visiting, look for a group of small round mounds under trees or on a river terrace, and note how the mounds are laid out along the terrace or ridge.
Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Western Baltic culture, Wikipedia: Curonians, Wikipedia: Samogitians, Wikipedia: Kurgan, Wikipedia: Tumulus · CC BY-SA 4.0
From the article
Dated moments in the story
- 1953
1953–1954 m. istorijos institutas ištyrė (tyrimų vadovas Adolfas Tautavičius) 46 pilkapius.
Source
See it in 3D
An interpretive reconstruction of the monument, standing on the real ground at its exact point, under the sun for that place and season. Drag to look around it.
The reconstruction is ours, not a survey: it shows what a monument of this type looks like, at the size the record gives for this one.
Where it stands
Lithuania
The pin marks the monument itself — its exact point.
- Coordinates
- 54°50′00″ N, 24°12′00″ EFor a GPS or map app: 54.83333, 24.20000
Access is as our sources describe it; we have not visited the site to check.
Nearby
The closest sites in the Atlas, by straight line.
Maisiejūnų pilkapiai- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Migonių pilkapynas
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Migliniškių pilkapynas
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Skarulių pilkapiai
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Rusių Rago pilkapynas
Čiobiškio pilkapynas- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Alinkos pilkapynas
- Megalithic mound (tumulus with integral stones)Dailidžių-Ardiškio pilkapynai
Sources
Every record behind this page, with the link it came from.
1 source behind this page
- 01Wikidata Q12659556wikidata.org
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Around this place
The ten nearest sites, by compass
Credit
Text, licence and sources
Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Kapitoniškių pilkapynas" (Lithuanian), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; authors are listed in the page history. Reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikipedia · Edit history and authors