Stone Age settlements at Šventoji

The ancient settlement of Šventoji is an archaeological site in western Lithuania, on the Baltic Sea coast, in the municipality of Palanga, between the former villages of Šventoji and Kunigiškiai. It was discovered in the mid-20th century after the marsh was drained.
Forty-two Stone Age settlements were found here, most of which belonged to the Narva culture (3rd millennium BCE), others to the Pamari culture (3rd–2nd millennia BCE) and both cultures. The Pamari culture usually forms the upper cultural layer.
The cultural layer was damaged during land reclamation and construction work. An area of approximately 13,600 m² was investigated between 1967 and 2008.
Narva culture finds: Many valuable finds have been discovered: fishing equipment (wooden buckets, oars, paddles, nets made of linden bark, bark floats), fish hooks, animal bones, hunting weapons (spears with flint and bone spearheads, bows, arrows with flint tips, less frequently with wooden tips), wooden household items (spoons, buckets, flint scrapers, knives, gramdukai), jewelry (amber pendants, brooches, beads, chains, as well as amulets made from animal teeth and horns), ritual axes (~2 m long pillar figures with a human head, 2 ritual sticks made from elk antlers, a ritual cup handle in the shape of a linga head). An amber workshop with raw materials and semi-finished products was discovered. It was used to make buckles and brooches for northerners living in what is now Estonia, Finland, and the Novgorod region. The people of the Narva culture drilled a hole in a piece of amber resin to make a pendant, and also made brooches, figurines, and amber tube beads, although it took a lot of effort to extract the tube shape from a piece of amber. At that time, multicolored amber was not valued, but single-colored, smooth, honey-colored amber was particularly popular. Ceramics with little ornamentation and abundant snail shells in the clay are characteristic. Dwellings were post-built, quadrangular, with a row of feet in the middle.
Finds from the coastal culture include flat-bottomed pottery decorated with cord, fir trees, and pressed impressions (pots, various cups, amphorae, elongated and round bowls), stone artefacts (axes, scrapers, knives, net weights, triangular and heart-shaped flint arrowheads), wooden tools (ladles, pestles), and jewellery (amber beads, chains, pendants, necklaces).
A little further away, a fish trap was found – a 32 m long enclosure made of two rows of pairs of stakes dug into the ground and surrounded by horizontal poles. Three human jawbones (attributed to the European anthropological race) were also found. A bronze sickle was found near the Šventoji River.
Between 1966 and 1972, the Šventoji settlement was investigated by archaeologists from the Institute of History, led by Rimutė Rimantienė. Excavations resumed in 1982. The finds are kept at the Palanga Amber Museum and the National Museum of Lithuania.