The key objective of Project Ostbalticum is to reconstruct and make more widely available museum collections from the countries of the Baltic Sea region damaged, lost and scattered as a result of World War II. An area of special interest is the eastern zone of this region: territory of today’s Lithuania and Latvia, Kaliningrad Oblast and north-eastern Poland.
The fragmented and scattered elements of several collections are at present in keeping of museums in a number of European states. For their proper scientific description there is need for international cooperation of an interdisciplinary team of specialists formed of archaeologists, numismaticians, historians, conservators and representatives of a range of other disciplines.
One of the key assumptions of the project is the postulate to create wider access to unknown or previously inaccessible sources. Most of these are archaeological museum collections but it is not an exaggeration to treat them as universal sources of knowledge. Consequently, the proper way to implementing the project would be with a series of publications in book form summing up individual stages. These publications will be issued under the collective name of Aestiorum Hereditas. The name of this series is a direct reference to the legacy of the Aestii – as the prehistoric inhabitants of the region were described by the authors of antiquity. Each publication within the series Aestiorum Hereditas is developed in three languages, contains a multi-aspect analysis of its subject matter and, where possible, includes a CD with a full set of materials to complement the selected of illustrations presented in the written text.
