Pages: 205-230

The study examines the sites of the 9th—11th centuries located in the north-eastern part of the Carpatho-Nistrian lands, which are represented by round-shaped fortified settlements built a fundamentis, “long houses”, iron melting furnaces (about 70), craft workshops for manufacturing tools and weapons of iron or for manufacturing silver products, hoards with tools and weapons, battle axes and swords, miniature iron or bronze axes, hoards of silver items with Islamic and Byzantine coins, balance scales and iron weights in bronze foil, silver ingots, Scandinavian pendants with animalistic patterns, including ones of the “Gnezdovo” type, amber beads and blue, gold or silver barrel-shaped glass beads, burial mounds with cremations and so on.
The appearance of round-shaped fortified settlements between the Dniester and the Răut and in Bukovina was associated with the penetration of the Vikings into the region, who followed the old route from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, along the Vistula and the Dniester, to the Balkans, to Byzantium, to Constantinople or to Baghdad. The fortified settlements served as intermediate military camps, gradually becoming military-administrative, craft and trade centers, in the creation of which the local Romanized population also took part. The fortified settlements were destroyed by nomad raids at the end of the 11th century.

Keywords: Carpathians-Dniester region, Early Middle Ages, Vikings, Eastern Romance people, social-economic and politic relations, trade routs, round-shaped fortified settlements, “long houses”, cremation burial mounds, battle axes

Information about author:

Ion Tentiuc (Kishinev, Moldova). Doctor of History. National Museum of History of Moldova. 31 August St., 121a, Chişinău, MD-2012, Moldova
E-mail: [email protected]