ABSTRACT
At the turn of the thirteenth century, the region referred to as Prussia, covering an area of around 42,000km 2 , was inhabited by a series of tribes with a pronounced militaristic culture (Okulicz-Kozaryn, 1997, p. 287). Many had violently resisted attempts to introduce Christianity for several centuries, maintaining a belief system expressed in material practices that were broadly shared by pre-Christian societies across the Baltic region. Missionary activity, gradual colonisation from neighbouring Slavic regions and occasional, unsuccessful military incursions by Polish kings and princes were eventually supplemented by a series of crusades which resulted in the conquest of Prussian tribal territories and the creation of a Christian state. For archaeologists, this episode marks the transition between prehistory and the Middle Ages, although the period between the seventh and thirteenth centuries is typically referred to as ‘early-medieval’ in Polish scholarship, and represents a time of crucial cultural transformations in neighbouring regions such as Poland and Pomerania, associated with the introduction of Christianity and the emergence of the Polish state (Buko, 2005; for a different perspective see Urbańczyk, 2000).
