History of Paleopathology in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia

Abstract
This chapter discusses the history of paleopathology in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. The early development of paleopathology in these countries should be considered in the context of slightly different histories of science, including bioarchaeology, within each country. In Lithuania, for example, influenced by European traditions, J. Tałko-Hryncewicz, a Lithuanian-born Polish anthropologist, started assembling crania collections prior to World War I. Although the main goal of his studies was to examine parallels between “racial” and ethnic history, he also described trepanned skulls from Vilnius and its surroundings. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, approximately 15,000 skeletons dated from the Mesolithic to Early Modern period had been cataloged and deposited in the Faculty of Medicine at Vilnius University in Lithuania. In Latvia and Estonia, the process was less formal, as skeletal materials were usually the responsibility of the archaeologists who conducted excavations and therefore are stored in various locations, including museums, national institutes of history, and universities.