of his work. In 1884, Fiodor Pokrovskij (1855–1903) was appointed director of the Museum of Antiquities in Vilnius. He revived the study of archaeology at the museum, excavated burial mounds in eastern Lithuania, and published reports of these excavations. He questioned and interviewed local people about archaeological sites and finds and collected and published all of this information in archaeological maps (Pokrovskij 1893, 1899). In 1893, the Ninth Congress of Russian Archaeology was held in Vilnius, and this meeting presented the achievements of archaeology to the local people and encouraged their further support of it.

At beginning of twentieth century, the Russian Imperial Archaeological Commission in Saint Petersburg began to take some interest in, and control of, archaeological excavations in Lithuania. It issued permits and demanded reports and information concerning finds. Large excavations were begun and photographed. The commission sent archaeologists to investigate burial mounds and hill-forts, and it supported the work of interested amateurs. One of these was Ludwik Krzywicki (1859–1941), who, during his summer vacations between 1900 and 1913, surveyed and excavated hill-forts and published information concerning their artifacts. From 1911 to 1914, the local archaeological commission in Vilnius registered artifacts from a medieval–new age town, and this information was published in Russian, Polish, and Lithuanian. At the end of nineteenth and during the early years of the twentieth century, private archaeological collections and amateur excavations to enrich them became popular. World War I terminated the work of non-Lithuanian archaeologists and was responsible for the destruction of the majority of extant archaeological collections.

First Lithuanian Republic (1918–1940)

The main feature of the history of archaeology during the period of the first republic was the creation of a national school of archaeology. In 1919, the State Archaeological Commission was established to protect sites of cultural significance, but the initial activities of the commission were not productive because of conflict over different methods of conservation and protection.

In fact, archaeology in Lithuania was primarily the work of individuals. In the 1920s, the Russian aleksander spicyn (spitsyn) (1858– 1931) was invited to write the first general work about the antiquities of Lithuania using prewar data (Spicyn 1925), which had been already divided into different archaeological cultures. At the same time, Colonel Petras Tarasenka (1892–1962) collected information about different archaeological sites and finds, and between 1926 and 1928 he published three books about archaeological knowledge and the protection of archaeological heritage. His most important contribution in these books was the first comprehensive archaeological map of Lithuania (Tarasenka 1928). In 1930–1934, General Vladas Nagevičius (1881–1954) excavated the hill-forts of Apuolė and Impiltis in western Lithuania, and with the support of specialists from different sciences, he used aerial photography and film-making and completed many different analyses of the material found. The 1920s also saw the foundation of many regional museums in Lithuania to house collections of finds from destroyed archaeological sites.

In 1934, the State Archaeological Commission was reorganized, and the protection and registration of archaeological sites was improved, with guards placed at various sites to stop their destruction by plough. In 1936, the new museum of Vytautas Great was established in Kaunas. It strove to create separate laws of cultural values to protect and rescue sites from destruction by excavation. The head of prehistory department in this museum, Jonas Puzinas (1905–1978), became the first professional Lithuanian archaeologist. Having taken an archaeology degree in Germany, Puzinas divided all the archaeological material in the museum into the common Baltic periods and chronological order. In 1938, the museum opened a new archaeological exhibition, the study of which was published (Puzinas 1938) and became the first scientific manual of Lithuanian archaeology. Puzinas trained a new generation of Lithuanian archaeologists. In 1939, the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius, which had been occupied