Re: The Wends and the Venedi

This question of the Slavic, Baltic and Germanic relations is certainly
very interesting. And complex too. Archaeology of North-Eastern Europe
has suffered much in the times of the cold war, either because of
little interest, or because of misguided interest - as it was the case
with Davydovna Gurevich excavating East Prussia and then distorting her
data in favor of Soviet inspired pro-Slavic (pan-Balto-Slavic?)
propaganda.

The Baltic, Slavic and Germanic relations along the Eastern Baltic
coast are still disputed. Vistula is certainly a juncture point where
these three most frequently interacted. Considering the Veneti in those
areas as Baltic traders, the posibility of Baltic origin is often
ignored, possibly because of the scarce data available on
Baltic-Germanic relations in the area. With the appearance of Goths
near the Vistula, their origin, I believe, is sometimes attributed to
either Gothland (the island) or somewhere further, Sweden perhaps. It
is interesting that from the cultural aspect, the Gothland and the
Eastern Baltic coast can be linked. The burrial mound culture of
Gothland and the burrial mound culture of Samlandia (E. Prussia) with
their concentric stone circles are almost identical. It is still hard
to determine wherefrom this culture spread. The majority of these
monuments are found in Western Lithuania and in Courland(Lat.). It may
allude to some close Balto-Germanic cultural relations in regard to the
early Goths and Prussians and Couronians. You can even take into
account the linguistic closeness of Prussian to Gothic.But no certain
conclusions can be drawn from this yet, because geographical Prussia
has not yet been excavated by modern archaeologists thoroughly enough.

In fact the very chornology of the Eastern Baltic is lergely disputed.
There was a publication by Ochmansky, refering to the posibility of
"Vened" substrata in Lithuania, mainly by toponymic and hydronimic
data. Gimbutas has attributed the arrival of the Indo-Europeans in tha
area to the spread of the Kurgan culture, but there isn't as much
evidence for it as one would like. New interpretations propose that
the first migration waves included Indo-Europeans and that in fact that
the burrial-mound culture evolved from the Narva culture which was
spread across the coastal areas of Latvia and Estonia. Again, this does
not correlate with the findings in Prussia and Western Lithuania -
where the Zucewo (Haffkuesten Kultur) was dominant. With so many
uncertainties, the spread of the Indo-Europeans in the area cannot be
firmly determined. Once the traditional ideas about Baltic migrations
are disputed, the linguistic classification of East-Baltic as primary
and West Baltic as peripheral can become no longer valid. It is quite
possible that it was the Western Balts that were the first to firmly
establish themselves in the area. I won't go so deep as to discuss the
question of substrata (Fino-Ugric, Vened) influence among the Eastern
Balts which must be responsible for the presence of Illative and
Allative cases in those languages. In teh context of this discussion,
it is more worthy to note the situation with the Wetern Balts. Old
Prussian preserved many more archaic features than other Baltic
languages. In all cases up until the late middle ages it is the Western
Balts who seem the most firmly grounded, both materialistically and
culturally. As noted by letters of Theodoric, the Prussians had
established some form of trade with Europe in the 6th century. Perhaps
their contact with the Goths was never broken in the first place.
Taking note of the Roman loot found in Prussian burrial sites, it is
quite possible that they participated in the Gothic raids on the Roman
Empire.

I guess I have no conclusion. The question of Germanic-Baltic relations
prior to the 13th century crusades has not been analyzed by historians
well enough. Neither has the question of Vened presence amoung the
Balts been properly adressed by historians or otherwise. That is a big
gap, but seems interesting enough to be explored in the future. Please
excuse me for my superficial knowledge of the subject. Amoung the few
books that I have about Baltic archaeology, I find many contradictions
in the proposed hypotheses. I believe I simply wanted to bring to
attention another set of factors that may cross roads with the
questions pertaining to Venetic presence in Northern Europe and
Germanic-Slavic relations in the same area.


Martin