Pulli settlement

Pulli settlement, located on the right bank of the Pärnu River, is the oldest known human settlement in Estonia. It is located near the present-day village of Pulli, two kilometers from the town of Sindi, which is 14 kilometers from Pärnu. According to radiocarbon dating, Pulli was settled around 11,000 years ago, at the beginning of the 9th millennium BC. A dog tooth found at the Pulli settlement is the first evidence for the existence of the domesticated dog in the territory of Estonia.^[1]

In all, 1,175 items used by people of the Mesolithic period were excavated at the Pulli settlement, among them tools mostly made of flint, especially arrowheads. A few items made of bone were found too, such as fishhooks and accessories made of animal claws.

In the Baltic area, the best sources of flint were on the south and southeast of the Baltic, in present-day Latvia and Lithuania and in Belarus. There are few natural sources of flint in the territory of Estonia. However, black flint of high quality from southern Lithuania and Belarus is identical with examples found at the Pulli settlement.

The people who lived at Pulli probably moved there from the south after the ice had melted, moving along the Daugava river in Latvia, then along the Latvian-Estonian coast of the Baltic Sea, and finally to the mouth of the Pärnu river. In 9000 BC, the Pulli settlement was located exactly where the Pärnu river then flowed into the Baltic sea; today it is about 14-16 kilometers upstream from the sea.

Through almost the entire Stone Age, the Estonian area is clearly discernible as an original technocomplex, in which quartz dominates as the material for small tools produced by a splitting technique. The only exception is the Pulli site with its extensive use of imported flint.

The Pulli settlement was discovered in 1967 during excavation of sand from the right bank of the Pärnu river. Archaeological excavations were carried out in 1968-73 and 1975-76 by the Estonian archaeologist L. Jaanits.

Three reliable carbon-14 dates come from the oldest known settlement site of Pulli, from the beginning of the Mesolithic: 9620±120 (Hel-2206A), 9600±120 (TA-245) and 9575±115 (TA-176) 14C years (Raukas et al. 1995:121). These belong, with a probability of 95.4%, to the period 9300–8600 cal. BC, which makes the average 8950 cal BC — considering the probability of 68.2%, an even 9000 years cal BC. The Mesolithic archaeological complex in the Eastern Baltic bears the common name of the Kunda culture.