REGIONS AND COMMUNICATION IN SOUTH-EAST ESTONIA AND NORTH LATVIA IN THE 3RD AND 4TH CENTURIES BASED ON LOCAL ORNAMENTS

Local ornaments of the 3rd and 4th century AD in south-east Estonia and north Latvia are inherent to the region and mostly found from there. In this paper, intraregional interaction, the main routes of communication, and whether different sub-regions were present is studied on the basis of the distribution of local ornaments. Methods from network science are adopted to achieve this. Based on the results of chi-squared similarity metric and degree centrality measure, sub-regions where different types of local ornaments were preferred stand out. This preference could suggest the expressions of some regional ideas. Items in local style could have, more or less intentionally, marked the similarities within the region, setting it apart from other regions. Central areas could have been the ones with higher degree centrality values, whereas these areas could be interpreted to form the main axis of communication which maintained similarities between those sites. The main interaction routes were water ways which connected distant areas and maintained unity within sub-regions. Being situated near bigger water routes is what determined the importance of areas. This study shows the patterns of interaction between, and the formation and expression of, culturally uniform sub-groups based on local ornaments of the 3rd and 4th centuries found from south-east Estonian and north Latvian stone cemeteries.