Baltic Paganism, Osteology, and New Examinations of Zooarchaeological Evidence

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Baltic Sea communities faced intense pressures from the 12th to 13th century AD, including colonization, forced conversions, and environmental change. The social resiliency of these communities in response to this crucial inflection point remains controversial. Did the external pressures catalyse the formation of a regional pan-Baltic identity? Or did splintered, hyper-local responses intensify differences between communities? The clearest measure of these seismic social shifts is how religious and mortuary behaviour changed in response, as communities create and negotiate a shared identity through the performance of ritual. The BONEZ project integrates multi-proxy osteological methods to investigate funerary and non-funerary ritual deposition of animals at five cemetery sites in Poland, Lithuania, and Kaliningrad before, during, and after colonization (1st to 13th AD). By combining long-established osteological methods with cutting-edge, high-resolution histological, isotope, and proteomic analyses, BONEZ reconstructs where, how, why, and with whom animals were treated and deposited in pre-Christian cemeteries. BONEZ will be the first study to unite the study of Baltic ritual activity with broader academic discussions of pre-Christian religion through rigorous scientific analysis of underutilized bone assemblages. This research has the potential to transform our perception of shifting tribal affinities using changes in ritual practice as an index of social resiliency. The first-of-its-kind integration of these methodologies as well as the regional and temporal scale of the analysis make BONEZ highly innovative and a key case study in the comparative osteology of complex skeletal assemblages. This research will have significant legacy benefits for the broader anthropological community as a state-of-the-art methodological blueprint for multi-proxy research on complex ritual deposits as an index of social resiliency transferable to any geographic or temporal context.