A survey of the history of the peoples of the eastern Baltic littoral could start with the first mention of them in written sources, which would permit subsequent events to be described according to a recognized chronology. To begin much earlier requires that in this chapter we use a different time scale from that common among historians, reckoning the passage of time in tens and hundreds of thousands of years. The decision to start earlier was in part based on the desirability of underlining that the Baltic region was not empty space at the time major civilizations appeared, flowered, and declined in the Near East and in the Mediterranean basin; and in part to establish that human movement was from the beginning an integral part of long-term Baltic history. In the centuries when they began to appear by name in written historical sources – roughly starting in the first century ad – the peoples of the littoral were only the latest of hundreds of generations of migrants, some of whom left behind identifiable fragments of material culture while others disappeared leaving barely a trace.

All these comings and goings no doubt had turning points of various kinds about which we are unlikely ever to know very much. The one that was crucial for connecting the continuous human history of the Baltic littoral to the history of the rest of the European continent, however, came when writers in the existing civilizations began to assign names to the littoral peoples, imprecise and largely uninformative though these names were.