Lusatian circles on wetlands in NE Poland - results of geoarchaeological research

The main aim of the presentation is to present the results of the geoarchaeological research of a network of 27 new discover objects of the Lusatian ash-field community from NE Poland (Podlasie voivodeship) and man-environment interaction in this time span. The functioning of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age structures in the Biebrza and Narew river basins is a new issue, the knowledge of which is the result of only of the last few years of research. The breakthrough in archaeology brought about by the spread of laser scanning imaging made it possible to discover and inventory such structures.

This region dominated by groups of communities with a hunter-gatherer economy only at the turn of the Subboreal and Subatlantic becomes an oecumene of Lusatian culture. It seems that this community is the first a centre of coherent network of sites, which can be associated with a stable settlement network and intensive agricultural use of the environment. It is reflected in the valley bottom sediments. The network of these Prehistoric structures has relatively uniform location and structure, type of construction and dimensions. They are mainly located in the glacial basins or in the valleys of two main underfit rivers of the region - Biebrza and Narew on the erosional remnants inside or near the large peat bogs. Their construction have a circular arrangement with two areas a protective area consisting of a system of ditches and embankments and a central area consisting of a flat central square with only some archaeological traces of economical activity.

Determining the function of the objects in this network is extremely difficult. Some possible interpretation will be presented. Their structure does not indicate the defensive function of the objects, and their location near peat bogs may suggest their use as corals for grazing animals. There are many indications that we are dealing here rather with a kind of stable socio-administrative-religious centre concentrating dispersed in the microregion population of the Lusatian ash fields culture.