Antiquities of the Vidivarii

Abstract

No attempts have been previously made to discover the antiquities of the Vidivarii. Their discovery is the purpose of this article. The relevance of this work is that the discovery of these antiquities will be the key to understanding the history of the southeastern Baltic on the threshold of the Middle Ages. The methodology for searching for correspondence between historical and archeological data has been developed in European archeology in identifying the regions of the Germanic tribes of the era of Roman influence. The research method was search for correspondence between the features of the archaeological material and the data of a written source that tells about the Vidivarii. First of all, it is necessary to consider the funerary monuments of the “island” of Gepedoyos and its environs in the first half of the 5th century AD. They are represented mainly by urnless cremations (fragments of calcined bones are scattered in the remains of a funeral pyre) under stonework. Artifacts that can be associated with the activity of the Vidivarii are massive hryvnias mainly with receding, expanding ends, coin and clothing hoards of the first half of the 5th century AD, three-beam brooches and plate clasps, biconical bowls and circular ceramics, knife-daggers. We draw a conclusion that the zone of settlement of German soldiers was initially located on the “island of Gepedoyos”, which is evidenced by the location of a large number of coin and clothing treasures on this hill. Archaeological material shows the connections of the Vidivarii both with the west of the Baltic and with the Middle Danube. There is an evidence of the origin of the Vidivarii from the array of Germanic tribes on the western coast of the Baltic and the way in which groups of Germanic warriors in the era of Attila fell to the ground in the delta of the river Vistula. Traces of activity of the Vidivarii in the archaeological material of the coast of the Vistula/Kaliningrad Bay are represented by finds of Late Roman multiplis, solidi, and gold hryvnias of the R300 type. The process of participation of the Vidivarii (in the form of a kind of catalyst) in the formation of Prussian archaeological culture at its early stage is represented by animalheaded brooches, clasps with a star-shaped stem, and other items characteristic of the late 5th-6th centuries only for the Witland region. Thus, discrete archaeological materials have been identified that are confidently associated with the Vidivarii.