Petras Tarasenka (born Pyotr Tarasov; December 1892 – 17 May 1962) was a Lithuanian military officer and a prominent archeologist and writer.

He was born into a family of Orthodox Old Believers, as the eldest son of peasants in Karališkiai [lt], a small village in the present-day Anykščiai District Municipality.

Tarasenka's father engaged in business within the Alanta vodka monopoly which earned the family money and could afford the children's education.

In 1915, he was mobilized into the Russian Imperial Army due to the start of the First World War, during which he completed NCO courses in Georgia.

The Soviet and Nazi occupations forced him to look for work in state institutions as he also lost his military pension, and as such, from 1941 to 1944 he was head of the Archeology Department in charge of protecting monuments, as well as the director of the Kaunas War Museum from 1944 to 1946.

Tarasenka wrote textbooks on Lithuanian archaeological and historical monuments, as well as published about 100 articles about mounds, holy places, and combat.

In the post-war years, his books Užburti Lobiai (1956), Didžiųjų Tyrulių Paaslaptys (1956), Pabėgimas (1957), Rambyno Burtininkas (1958) became particularly popular, from which knowledge about the honorable past of Lithuania was consumed by the youth of the time.