Wielbark culture
The Wielbark culture was named after the once-Prussian village, known in German as Willenberg, where a burial place with over 3,000 tombs, was discovered and partially recorded in 1873.
Before 1 AD, when the Roman Empire began to be more influential in northern Europe, there was relative consistency in burial practices between the Rhine and Vistula.
[11] This includes the creation of handmade bowl-shaped ceramics, the wearing by females of fibula brooches on each shoulder, the presence of Germanic longhouses, the practice of both cremation and inhumation, and the lack of weapons deposited in burials.
[6] During the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, the Wielbark culture expanded into the lakelands (Kashubian and Krajenskian lakes) and stretched southwards, into the region around Poznań.
[6] In the first half of the 3rd century AD, the Wielbark culture expanded southwards along the Vistula and Bug towards the upper Dniester.
[12] This expansion was swifter and on an even larger scale than previous ones, and represented a significant shift of Wielbark power towards the south.
The Gutones have traditionally been equated to the ancestors of the Goths from Scandza (Scandinavia) to Gothiscandza as related in Jordanes' account of their origin.
[21][7] Based upon the accounts of Jordanes and Tacitus, many historians and archaeologists believe that the culture was politically dominated by the ancestors of the Goths, Rugii and Gepids who are later described in Roman and Greek sources further south, living north of the imperial border on the Danube.
Barrow cemeteries on the Baltic Sea in Poland, which have raised stone circles, and solitary stelae next to them, reflect Scandinavian burial customs with a concentration in Gotland and Götaland.
[26] Odontological analysis revealed that the Central European populations from the Roman period and the Early Middle Ages were indistinguishable in terms of non-metrical dental traits, though this does not exclude the possibility of genetically different origins.
The mtDNA of the RoIA samples were found to be more closely related to Poles than any other modern population, while similarities with Balts and other West Slavs were also detected.
[1] Stolarek et al. (2018) examined the mtDNA of 60 individuals buried at the Wielbark cemetery of Kowalewko in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.
Notably, they displayed higher frequencies of U5b (a typically Western Hunter-Gatherer lineage) than preceding and succeeding populations in the area.
The individuals displayed even closer genetic links to Iron Age populations of southern Scandinavia than those of Kowalewko did.
[14] Zenczak et al. (2017) assigned Y-DNA haplogroups to 16 individuals buried at the Kowalewko archeological site associated with the Wielbark culture.
Such results show that the Wielbark culture was dominated by Y-hgs most frequently observed in ancient Northern European populations.
This observation agrees with the autosomal results, as the individuals analysed were shifted towards peoples inhabiting Northwestern Europe, so that much of their ancestry had a Scandinavian origin.
[31] A 2024 study published in Nature found that the population of the Wielbark culture derived 75% of their ancestry from a Scandinavian Early Iron Age-related source.
The earliest Scandinavian migrants found in the oldest Wielbark cemeteries were modelled as deriving 100% of their ancestry from Early Iron Age Scandinavia.The study found that the Wielbark culture population did not resemble the preceding Bronze Age populations of Poland at all, and must have been immigrants from the north.
