Rīga Old Town is the oldest part of the capital of Latvia. The first systematic excavations of Rīga Old Town were carried out after World War II, when some remains of old town dwellings were discovered in the so-called Bishops Albert Square on the bank of the river Rīdzene, a tributary of the river Daugava. The excavations were done by archaeologists of the Museum of History of Rīga and Navigation and of the Institute of History of Latvia under the guidance of Andris Caune. Archaeologists discovered and reconstructed the first village of the local people—the Livs—and specified the border of their first cemetery, from the end of the twelfth century. Reconstructions of some dwellings were shown, based on the discovered remains of wooden and stone buildings of the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Clay and stone stoves, warm-air stoves, and tile stoves had been arranged inside the houses. Simpler timber houses and iron and bronze processing places, dated by C-14 to a.d. 1100–1210 were excavated. These buildings were built shortly before the Duomo was constructed in a.d. 1211. Four towers and a defense wall of Rīga Old Town were investigated, as well underground passages from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a.d. Special attention was paid to the river Rīdzene embankment, where remains of an old ship were found in the 1930s. During the 1970s and 1980s dwellings of Rīga Old Town were a special subject of Andris Caune’s investigations. In the 1990s protection works—excavations in the area of the foundation and cellar of the House of Black-heads, the oldest public building remaining from the fourteenth century—were continued by archaeologists under the guidance of A. Caune. Now the building is entirely reconstructed. Another project—the excavation of the cemetery of monks in the Duomo garden (thirteenth–eighteenth centuries a.d.)—was led by Andris Celmiņš. More than 800 graves were discovered.

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Reconstruction of the ninth-century A.D. fortress in Ārauši

(Archaeological Society of Northern Germany)