Archaeological survey, rescue excavations and analysis of the Kuremäe burial complex

Abstract

In 2024, fieldwork was carried out in the village of Kuremäe in Ida-Viru County with the aim of determining the actual extent of the cemetery under temporary protection by means of landscape surveys, test pits, and archival materials. Rescue excavations were also carried out at burials that were destroyed in 2023 during the deepening of a central heating pipeline trench. It turned out that Kuremäe is not just a Late Iron Age and Medieval Votic burial mound cemetery, but a larger and longer-term burial complex, where both early burial mounds and later burials are present, and the latter may also have contained low burial mounds. A total of 45,600 m2 was surveyed with detectors, 27 test pits were dug, and two trenches were opened.