[2] Before the discovery of a human skull in 1964, the site was used primarily for quarrying gravel.

[1] The cemetery contains 330 recorded burials,[1] with roughly equal numbers of male and females.

[3] A smaller number of male and female graves contain hunting and fishing equipment, including harpoons, spears, arrowheads and fish-hooks.

[3] The earliest burials are dated to the Middle Mesolithic, 8th millennium BCE, but they continue throughout the Stone Age, extending over at least four millennia.

[3] In 2017, researchers successfully extracted the ancient DNA from the petrous bone of six adult individuals buried at Zvejnieki.

DNA analysis showed that Burial 121, which was previously thought to be female, was actually male, and that Burials 221 and 137, which were previously thought to male, were actually female.

DNA analysis shows that the people from Zvejnieki appear to have maintained genetic continuity from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic and likely adopted Neolithic practices through cultural diffusion, as the populations showed little genetic affinity for the Anatolian farmers that migrated to large parts of Europe during the Neolithic.

However, a late Neolithic individual from Zvejnieki, Burial 137, appears to show some genetic affinity for the Caucasus hunter-gathers typified by an ancient DNA sample from Satsurblia Cave.

[4] In 2018, Mathieson et al. published an analysis of a large number of individuals buried at the Zvejnieki burial ground from ca.

The most typical way of burying their dead was in an oval shaped pit with grey fill.

[1] There were instances of darker soil from previous graves and burials that cut into other ones.

They were then covered with a darker, older soil which would have been from an ancestors’ grave nearby, roughly 20 to 100 meters away.

The darker soil may have been an indication of higher status or a way to show the grave should no longer be disturbed.

[7] The collection she was buried with makes her one of the richest amber graves in the Baltic area.

His bones had limited movement, and are compressed.1 Around his cranium, they found a large presence of ochre which they believe could be from a clay mask that was painted.

[6] This burial only yielded a forearm and hand, and so no age or gender has been determined.

This double burial was a primary deposit, and there were no artifacts found with them in the grave.

[6] This individual has no confirmed sex or age, but from their fully erupted third molars we know that it is an adult.