Lipiţa culture

Located on the Upper and Middle Dniester, Upper Prut, in the Carpathians and Subcarpathians of today’s Bukovina, Pokuttya, Galicia, Transcarpathia and Maramureş, Lipiţa is the material culture of the Dacian tribe of Costoboci and lasted from the middle of the 1st century BC to the beginning of the 3rd century AD. It took its name from the Ukrainian village of Verkhnya Lypytsya (ukr. Верхня Липиця), Rohatyn Raion, Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast.

Lipiţa people was cremating its deceased, like other pagan Dacians and Thracians. The rests were buried in plane or tumular tombs. Only children were inhumed; they couldn’t get through a passage ritual, due of their age, so couldn’t be burnt. These burial customs lasted from the late La Tène and were best preserved in the Upper Tisa basin, this region being an important Dacian perpetuation centre.

Roman influences are visible in the material culture. Germanic people from the Przeworsk culture, but also Celts and Sarmatians, came in contact with the Lipiţa people. It seems that no Early Slavs got to this zone, yet (the first Slavic tribes came in the today’s Moldova and Bukovina as late as the 5th and 6th centuries AD).

In 170-174, Costoboci made a robbery foray far from their territory, in the Balkans, South of Danube. When coming back home they were defeated by the Vandal tribe of the Hasdingi, which were defeated then by the Lacringi (disputed ancestry, maybe German).

In the first decades of the 3rd century, Lipiţa culture of the Costoboci restricts its territory and gives birth to a new archeological culture, of the Carpathian Tumuli. A part of the Costoboci of the Subcarpathians withdraw south in the mountains, a small part migrates in today’s Moldova, at the Carpi, another Dacian tribe. Anyway, some remain in the northern area of the Lipiţa culture, despite of the pressure of the newly arrived East Germanic tribes.

The biggest part of the territory of Lipiţa and Carpathian Tumuli archaeological cultures is inhabited now by the Hutsuls, both in Ukraine and Romania.