religion

During the Early Iron Age (500 B.C.-400 A.D.), people sacrificed mainly by placing the offerings in the water of bogs or lakes. To sacrifice in wetlands is a tradition which goes back to the Neolithic...

The medieval people in Europe were Christian. They considered life as an earthly passage with death the gate which led to heaven. Real life started in heaven. To reach this...

Romans were very open minded about their religion. They worshipped a wide variety of divine entities. A household could give praise to an ancestor for protection and prosperity, whilst...

On base of archaeological finds only, it is hard to reconstruct the religious beliefs of the past. Many aspects of it, like stories, songs and most rituals do not leave any traces in the soil that we can recover today...

The Romans had a calendar which consisted of 10 months, starting on March 1st and ending with December. In between was an unnamed winter period. The priests’ task was to determine the start of every new year...

Whether the Middle Ages were an easy time with lots of holidays? People were attached a lot to religious habits and there were numerous holidays when a certain saint was worshipped. Sunday was a day of rest as well and a day of veneration since Constantine the Great set up the 7 days system in the year 321...

If at all, Romans were buried outside the city-gates, probably for hygienic purposes. Travellers on the main roads leading to the city were greeted by a long queue of tombstones. The inscription on Roman graves sometimes even welcomed visitors coming to the city.

Two methods were used to make fire. One was by striking a special piece of iron (strike-a-light) on a piece of flint. The other method is by friction of wood on wood. The strike-a-light was most common. Sometimes people used the back of a knife to strike sparks. Friction of wood on wood (“the old-fashioned way”) was used at religious occasions...

The stake did not serve as place to burn witches, but the people at the end of the Bronze Age were generally cremated, ashes were collected in an urn.

The inhabitants of the lake fortress were buried in the flat cemetery on a hill on the north-eastern shore of Lake Āraiši near the Liepiņas farm. As part of the archaeological research on the Āraiši area, 168 female, male and children’s graves were...