Other events in Baltic States

Ship burial has been discovered in Salme village, Estonia, this year and, as specialists forecast, it could appear a pre-viking era battleground burial, LETA/ERR reports.

If archeologists' guess appears to be real, it turns out to be a unique finding on the European scale. So far, 16 skeletons of men killed in battle have been discovered on the site.

As specialists say, a fierce struggle took place some 1,250 years ago near a place where Salme village is located now, on the island of Saaremaa

Jüri Peets, the Professor of Archaeology at Tallinn University, says: "Our estimate is 30 casualties, plus the same amount of injured. The skeletons bear sword marks. This shows the battle took place on land – you can't reach the enemy with a sword from a boat. There were also arrowheads found in the skeletons and in a shield."

Such a mass grave of warriors from that period has never before been discovered anywhere in Europe. Foreign warriors were buried on Estonian land with their belongings. For example, the findings included a gilded bronze sword handle. The archaeologists plan to extract a tooth from one of the skulls and submit it to a DNA-analysis to find out where the unwelcome visitors might have arrived from.

The estimated length of the ship is 18 meters and the width 3.5 meters. The excavations will continue next year by the village schoolhouse, where the bow of the ship is expected to be.

In 2008, a smaller ship with an estimated length of 10 meters was discovered during excavations in Salme.