Iron Age Balkans

Let's challenge old paradigms and experiment new ones together!
The two main shifts that European (and world) archaeology has experienced and that have challenged traditional paradigms of interpretation – the emergence of processual versus traditional archaeology starting from late 1960s, and the emergence of post-processual archaeology from the early 1980s – have not had much impact on research in Balkan Late Prehistory. That put much of Balkan archaeology firmly in the traditionalist camp and traditional explications of archaeological patterns accordingly endured. This is reflected in the persistence of the cultural-historical paradigm in the study of material culture, with a strong focus on typological sequences and relative chronologies to explain ethnogenies. If we consider, for example, widespread models explaining changes in material culture, they are mostly understood as a result of migration. This paradigm has never really been challenged and thus migrations continue to be regarded as destructive events, materialized by a new set of material culture (i.e. pottery) brought by migrants that replaces the one belonging to an autochthonous population. The Yugoslav wars and the economic downfall that followed the collapse of communist regimes in the Balkans in the 1990s have further impoverished the debate on these issues. Recently, the so-called 3rd scientific revolution (Kristiansen 2014) has introduced a large array of new methods and techniques to Balkan Prehistory that are being increasingly applied and becoming a new standard in the discipline. That approach alone is nevertheless insufficient to fill the void left by the standstill of theoretical debate.
This session aims to fill this gap by inviting scholars working on Balkan Late Prehistory (Neolithic to Iron Age) to challenge with novel theoretical approaches and methods the entrenched paradigms that are still widespread in archaeological interpretations, and to use Balkan archaeology with its rich source material as a laboratory for new models, paradigms, and approaches.