Economy of the Communities of the “Forest” Neolithic in the South-Eastern Baltic

Abstract

About six and a half thousand years ago the peoples of local Mesolithic cultures began to master pottery production in the territory of the South-Eastern Baltic. However, the economy and technology of making tools had not changed since the Mesolithic and the Upper Paleolithic. Such cultures are the representatives of the ‘Forest’ Neolithic. One of them is the Zedmar culture that was the leading one of the early Neolithic in the region which bordered on both Western cultures with a producing economy and Eastern cultures with an appropriating economy. This neighborhood affected primarily the economy of the culture in question. The aim of the study is to identify the characteristic features of the economy of the Zedmar culture communities as representatives of the ‘Forest’ Neolithic. For this purpose, the artifacts from excavations on the sites of this culture carried out by German, Soviet, modern Russian and Polish researchers were examined, and in 2009 the author participated in survey work carried out on the sites of Zedmar A and D. Theoretical and practical studies showed the decisive importance of two factors for the development of specific features of Zedmar culture economy: namely, the natural one—in the formation of a complex-adapting economy with a large number of Mesolithic features, and the cultural one—in the presence of underdeveloped agriculture and cattle breeding. There is also a hypothesis about the presence of a specific type of gathering in the territory of the South-Eastern Baltic.