European Journal of Archaeology

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Pots, Slavs and `Imagined Communities': Slavic Archaeologies and the

History of the Early Slavs
Florin Curta
European Journal of Archaeology 2001 4: 367
DOI: 10.1177/146195710100400301

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 P OTS,SLAVS AND `IMAGINED
COMMUNITIES': SLAVIC ARCHAEOLOGIES
AND THE HISTORY OF THE EARLY SLAVS

Florin Curta
University of Florida, USA

Abstract: Despite recent emphasis on the impact of nationalism on archaeology, the discussion has
centered more on the ideological framework of the culture-historical school of archaeology, particu-
larly on the concept of archaeological culture. Comparatively little attention has been paid to how
archaeologists contributed to the construction of the national past. This article examines Slavic
archaeology, a discipline crisscrossing national divisions of archaeological schools, within the
broader context of the `politics of culture' which characterizes all nation-states, as `imagined com-
munities' (Anderson 1991). Indeed, the current academic discourse about the early Slavs in Ukraine,
Russia, and Romania appears as strikingly tied to political, rather than intellectual, considerations.
In eastern Europe, the concept of archaeological culture is still de®ned in monothetic terms on the
basis of the presence or absence of a list of traits or types derived from typical sites or intuitively
considered to be representative cultural attributes. Archaeologists thus regarded archaeological
cultures as actors on the historical stage, playing the role individuals or groups have in documentary
history. Archaeological cultures became ethnic groups, and were used to legitimize claims of modern
nation-states to territory and in¯uence.

Keywords: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, `imagined communities', nationalism, Poland, Romania, Slavic

archaeology, Soviet Union, Yugoslavia

I NTRODUCTION
Despite so much recent emphasis on the impact of nationalism on archaeology, the
discussion has centered upon either the `politics of archaeology' (Plumet 1984; Kohl
and Fawcett 1995) or the ideological framework of culture history (Brachmann 1979;
Shennan 1989; Hides 1996). The current focus is more on the history of archaeo-
logical thought and less on the contribution of archaeology to the construction of
the national past. Most case studies are restricted to individual countries and the
speci®c application of a general approach based on diffusion and migration. The
assumption is that, from Nazi Germany to post-war Korea, archaeologists have
tried to write (pre)histories of speci®c groups in similar ways (Veit 1989; Nelson
1995). Commonality of methods and techniques is often viewed as suf®cient
evidence for identical goals. As a consequence, macro-regional studies lump very

European Journal of Archaeology Vol. 4(3): 367±384

Copyright & 2001 Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) and
the European Association of Archaeologists [1461±9571(200112)4:3;367±384;018046]

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368 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 4(3)

different uses of archaeology under supposedly common denominators, such as

`Balkan archaeology' (Kaiser 1995:108±109). In fact, the study of archaeologies,
rather than of archaeology, can show that, far from copying from each other, archae-
ologists manipulated such concepts as migration, diffusion, and culture to reach very
different, often con¯icting conclusions. Focusing on Slavic archaeologies, this paper
will attempt to establish criteria for distinguishing readings of the past, which were
appropriated by identity politics.

P OTS AND SLAVS

The rise of Slavic archaeology is often associated with the name of Lubor Niederle
(1865±1944), who believed that the nature of the original homeland of the Slavs
in Polesie (Ukraine) forced them into a poor level of civilization, and that, like the
ancient Germans and Celts, the Slavs were enfants de la nature. Only the contact
with the more advanced Roman civilization made it possible for the Slavs to give
up their original culture based entirely on wood and to start producing their own
pottery (Niederle 1923:49; 1925:513; 1926:1±2, 5). Niederle's emphasis on material
culture pointed to a new direction in the development of Slavic studies. Inspired
by him, Vykentyi V. Khvoika (1850±1924) ascribed the fourth-century-AD
Chernyakhov culture to the Slavs (Khvoika 1901, 1913:43±47; see also Lebedev
1992:260±262; Shnirel'man 1996:225; Baran et al. 1990:33). Similarly, the Russian
archaeologist Aleksei A. Spicyn (1928) ®rst attributed to the Antes hoards of silver
and bronze from Ukraine. But the foundations of a mature Slavic archaeology
were primarily the work of Czech archaeologists. It was a new type of pottery
that caused the greatest shifts of emphasis in the early years of the twentieth century
(SklenaÂrÏ 1983:95, 125). Ivan Borkovsky (1940) called it the `Prague type' ± a national,
exclusively Slavic, kind of pottery. He de®ned this as a hand-made, mica-tempered
pottery with no decoration. The Prague type was the earliest Slavic pottery, the
forms and rims of which slowly changed under Roman in¯uence. In his book,
Borkovsky boldly argued that the earliest Slavic pottery derived from local Iron
Age traditions. Although he laid more emphasis on culture than on race,
BorkovskyÂ's book coincided with the ®rst failure of the Nazis to pigeonhole the
Czechs as racially inferior. Despite his caution and use of a rather technical vocabu-
lary, BorkovskyÂ's work was denounced as anti-German and immediately withdrawn
from bookshops (Preidel 1954:57; Mastny 1971:130±131; SklenaÂrÏ 1983:162±163;
Chropovsky 1989:23).

S LAVIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN THE S OVIET U NION

The association between Slavic archaeology and Nazi ideology is even stronger in
the case of the Soviet Union. Until the mid-1930s, Slavic studies were viewed as
anti-Marxist and the dominant discourse about the early Slavs was that inspired
by N.I. Marr (Goriainov 1990). Marr's supporter in the discipline, N.S. Derzhavin
(1877±1953), believed that the Slavs were native to the Balkans and that sources
began to talk about them only after AD 500, because it was at that time that the

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CURTA: POTS, SLAVS AND `IMAGINED COMMUNITIES' 369

Slavs revolted against Roman slavery (Derzhavin 1939). According to Derzhavin, the
term `Slavs' was just a new name for the old population exploited by Roman land-
owners, not an ethnic label. Derzhavin's interpretation of early Slavic history was
very popular in the early years of Soviet archaeology, because he interpreted cultural
and linguistic changes as the direct results of socio-economic shifts.
Another interpretation, however, was abruptly put forward in the late 1930s.
The shift `from internationalism to nationalism' has been described by Viktor
Shnirel'man (1993, 1995a) and its impact on Slavic archaeology is currently under
study (Aksenova and Vasil'ev 1993; Curta in press). As Stalin set historians the
task of active combat against fascist falsi®cations of history, the main focus of
archaeological research shifted to the prehistory of the Slavs. Archaeologists
involved in tackling this problem had been educated in the years of the cultural
revolution and were still working within a Marrist paradigm. Mikhail I. Artamonov
was the ®rst to attempt a combination of Marrism and Kossinnism, thus recognizing
the ethnic appearance of some archaeological assemblages while, at the same time,
rehabilitating the concept of `archaeological culture' (Artamonov 1971; Klejn
1977:14; Ganzha 1987:142; Shnirel'man 1995a:132. For Kossinna see Klejn 1974).
During the war, as the Soviet propaganda was searching for means to mobilize
Soviet society against the Nazi aggressor, Slavic ethnogenesis, now the major, if
not the only, research topic of Soviet archaeology, gradually turned into a symbol
of national identity (Shnirel'man 1995b). As Marr's teachings were abandoned in
favor of a culture-historical approach, the origins of the Slavs (i.e. Russians) were
pushed even further into prehistory. The only apparent problem was that of the
`missing link' between the Scythians and the Kievan Rus'. Boris Rybakov, a professor
of history at the University of Moscow, offered an easy solution. He attributed to the
Slavs both Spitsyn's `Antian antiquities' and the remains excavated by Khvoika at
Chernyakhov (Rybakov 1943). Many embraced the idea of a Slavic Chernyakhov
culture, even after this culture turned into a coalition of ethnic groups under the
leadership of the Goths (Klejn 1955; Korzukhina 1955).
The 1950s witnessed massive state investments in archaeology (see Fig. 1 for the
main sites mentioned in this article). With the unearthing of the ®rst remains of
sixth- and seventh-century settlements in Ukraine, the idea of the Chernyakhov
culture as primarily Slavic simply died out. Iurii V. Kukharenko (1955) called the
hand-made pottery found on these sites the `Zhitomir type' which he viewed as a
local variant of the Prague type established by Borkovsky in 1940. Later, Kukharenko
(1960) abandoned the idea of a variant in favor of a single Prague type for all Slavic
cultures between the Elbe and the Dnieper. Others, however, argued that since the
pottery found at Korchak, near Zhitomir, derived from the local pottery of the early
Iron Age, the Zhitomir type antedated BorkovskyÂ's Prague type. As a consequence,
the earliest Slavic pottery was that of Ukraine, not that of Czechoslovakia (Petrov
1963:123). Irina P. Rusanova (1976, 1984±1987) ®rst applied statistical methods to
the identi®cation of pottery types. Her conclusion was that vessels of certain propor-
tions made up what she called the Prague-Korchak-type. To Rusanova (1978:148),
this type was a sort of symbol, the main and only indicator of Slavic ethnicity in
material culture terms. In contrast, Valentin V. Sedov (1970, 1979, 1987, 1988)

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370 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 4(3)

Figure 1. Location map of principal sites mentioned in the text: 1. Chernyakhov; 2. Dzhedzhovi
Lozia; 3. Jazbine; 4. Korchak; 5. MusÏicÂi; 6. Nova Cherna; 7. Pen'kovka; 8. Popina; 9. Prague;
10. SaÏrata Monteoru; 11. Suceava-S° ipot.

spoke of two types of Slavic pottery with two separate distributions: the `Prague
zone' and the `Pen'kovka zone,' fall-out curves neatly coinciding with the borders
of the Soviet republics.

S LAVIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN POST-WAR E UROPE

The establishment, between 1945 and 1948, of Communist-dominated governments
under Moscow's protection profoundly altered the development of Slavic studies in
eastern Europe. The interpretation favored by Soviet scholars became the norm even
in countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia, where such studies had longer tradi-
tions than in Soviet Russia. In countries with less developed Slavic archaeologies,
the Slavs were now given the most important role in the study of the early
Middle Ages (BaÂlint 1989:191; Curta 1994:238±239). In Czechoslovakia, BorkovskyÂ's
ideas about Slavic origins were rejected in favor of an interpretation stressing the
Slavic immigration from Ukraine (PoulõÂk 1948:15±19). Others argued that there
were two migrations to Slovakia, one from the west (Moravia), the other from the

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CURTA: POTS, SLAVS AND `IMAGINED COMMUNITIES' 371

south (ZaÂbojnõÂk 1988:401±402; CÏilinska 1989±1990; Jelinkova 1990; HabovsÏtiak

1992±1993). Similar theories were advanced for Bohemia (Zeman 1968:673, 1984±
1987). The Slavs were archaeologically identi®able by means of the Zhitomir-
Korchak type, with its, now local, variant, known as the `Prague type.' But in the
1960s, BorkovskyÂ's thesis that the Slavs were natives to the territory of Czecho-
slovakia resurfaced (BudinskyÂ-KricÏka 1963; Bialekova 1968; Chropovsky and Ruttkay
1988:19; Chropovsky 1989:33). The Polish linguist, Tadeusz Lehr-Sp/lawinÂski
(1946), ®rst attributed the Przeworsk culture to the Slavs, an idea developed in
the Soviet Union by Rusanova and Sedov. Lehr-Sp/lawinÂski's thesis was widely
accepted by Polish archaeologists during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as later
(e.g. Hensel 1988). By that time, Jozef Kostrzewski (1969) was still speaking of the
Slavic character of the Lusatian culture of the Bronze Age. With the elaboration of
the ®rst chronological system for the early medieval archaeology of central Europe
(God/lowski 1970), it became evident, however, that no relation existed between
the early Slavic culture and its predecessors. Moreover, like JirÏõÂ Zeman (1976,
1979) in Czechoslovakia, KazÇimierz God/lowski insisted that, besides pottery,
sunken huts and cremation burials were equally important for the de®nition of
Slavic culture. The speci®c combination of these cultural elements ®rst appeared
at the end of the VoÈlkerwanderungszeit in those areas of eastern and central
Europe which had recently been abandoned by Germanic tribes. To God /lowski
(1979, 1983), the Slavs did not exist before c. 500 as a cultural and ethnic group.
God/lowski's student, Micha/l Parczewski (1988, 1991, 1993), dealt the ®nal blow to
traditional views that the Slavs were native to the Polish territory through his argu-
ment that the early Slavic culture spread from Ukraine into southern Poland during
the second half of the sixth century and the early seventh century.
During the 1950s, many Yugoslav historians and linguists supported the concept
of a Slavic homeland in Pannonia (e.g. Popovic 1959). Similarly, some archaeologists
derived the Slavic Prague type from Dacian pottery (GarasÏanin 1950). Others, how-
ever, maintained that no Slavic settlement in the Balkans could have taken place
before c. 500 (BarisÏic 1956; Ljubinkovic 1973:173). When the Croatian archaeologist
Zdenko Vinski (1954) published a number of pots from the collections of the
Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, interpreting them as Prague-type pottery,
many replied that the earliest Slavic pottery in Croatia was not earlier than the
eighth century and had nothing to do with the Prague type. Ljubo Karaman
(1956:107±108) criticized Borkovsky for having made this pottery exclusively
Slavic. Josip KorosÏec (1958:5, 1958±1959, 1967) further criticized Soviet archaeolo-
gists for their attempts to link the Slavs to the Scythians or to the Chernyakhov
culture, an accusation well attuned to the Yugoslav-Soviet relations of the late
1950s. He rightly pointed to the need of the Soviet archaeologists to create a pottery
type that would both be earlier than BorkovskyÂ's Prague type and certify the
presence of the Slavs in the Dnieper basin before the rise of Kievan Rus'. According
to KorosÏec, however, there was no relation between the pottery found in Romania,
Bulgaria and Yugoslavia and the Prague type. But KorosÏec's skepticism does not
seem to have deterred historians from `discovering' the earliest Slavic settlement.
Franjo BarisÏic (1969) posited a massive Slavic settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina

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372 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 4(3)

after the raids of 550 and 551. He argued that the ®rst Sklavinia to be established
south of the rivers Danube and Save was that of Bosnia. In support of his con-
tention, he cited the site excavated by Irma CÏremosÏnik at MusÏicÂi, near Sarajevo
(CÏremosÏnik 1970±1971). The choice was well founded. CÏremosÏnik had compared
the pottery found there with that from the Romanian site at Suceava, thought to
be of an early date. Although Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, and Bulgarian
archaeologists pointed to the rectangular sunken pit-house as typically Slavic,
CÏremosÏnik (1980) believed the yurt-like huts found at Jazbine (Bosnia) to be Slavic
and traced their origin to Neolithic house forms. Others, in an attempt to legitimize
the antiquity of the Slavs in Yugoslavia, believed that the materials found at MusÏicÂi
were older than any other ®nd from Romania or Bulgaria (CÏ orovicÂ-LjubinkovicÂ
1972:52). A recent attempt to legitimize Serbian claims to territory in the context
of the war in Bosnia relied on the re-attribution of the ®nds from MusÏicÂi to the
Serbs ( Jankovic 1998:111).
The problem of the early Slavs was approached somewhat differently in Bulgaria.
When V. Mikov (1945±1947) published the ®rst article on early Slavic history that
took into consideration the archaeological evidence, he was forced to recognize
that, unlike other countries, only few remains existed in Bulgaria that may have
been associated with the sixth- to seventh-century Slavs. Shortly thereafter, a
group of Soviet archaeologists and ethnographers arrived in So®a with the mission
to teach Bulgarians how to organize the Slavic archaeology, thereafter the main task
of the newly created department of the Institute of Archaeology. KraÆstiu Miiatev, the
director of the Institute, published the ®rst study on Slavic pottery, primarily based
on museum collections (Miiatev 1948). Inspired by Derzhavin's theories, Miiatev
believed that the Slavic pottery had local, Thracian origins. The main Bulgarian
member of the Soviet-Bulgarian archaeological team was Zhivka VaÆ zharova, who
had just returned from Leningrad and was closely associated with Soviet scholars,
especially with Mikhail I. Artamonov. In an article published in the USSR,
VaÆzharova ®rst linked the ceramic material found at Popina, near Silistra, to the
Prague type. She interpreted the neighboring site at Dzhedzhovi Lozia as the
earliest Slavic settlement in the Balkans (VaÆzharova 1954, 1956, 1971a:18).
VaÆzharova put forward a chronology of the Slavic culture in Bulgaria, which equated
the earliest occupation phase at Dzhedzhovi Lozia with the Prague and Korchak-
Zhitomir cultures (VaÆzharova 1964, 1966). Her interpretation of the site, however,
was criticized by Soviet archaeologists (Rusanova 1978:142). As a consequence,
VaÆzharova began entertaining ideas of a much later chronology, while acknowled-
ging signi®cant differences between the pottery found at Dzhedzhovi Lozia and
the Prague and Zhitomir-Korchak types (VaÆzharova 1968:154, 1971b:268). She
later argued that the early Slavic culture in Bulgaria was the result of two different
migrations, one from the north, across the Danube, the other from the west,
originating in Pannonia (VaÆzharova 1973, 1974).
But the need to push the antiquity of the Slavs back in time was too strong and
the association between Slavs and Thracians too alluring. According to Atanas
Milchev (1970:36; 1976:54; 1987), upon their arrival in the lower Danube basin,
the Slavs were welcomed by the Thracian population of the Balkan provinces.

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CURTA: POTS, SLAVS AND `IMAGINED COMMUNITIES' 373

To native Thracians, the Slavs were not invaders, but allies against a common enemy
± the Roman Empire. Against Rusanova's claims that the ®rst Slavic settlements in
Bulgaria cannot be dated earlier than the seventh century, Milchev (1975:388)
argued that the archaeological evidence from Nova Cherna, near Silistra, indicated
the presence of Slavic federates in Roman service (see Angelova 1980:4). The evi-
dence comes from a refuse pit inside an early Byzantine fort, in which Milchev
and Angelova found sherds of hand-made pottery associated with wheel-made
pottery and a late sixth-century bow ®bula. They promptly ascribed the hand-
made pottery to the Korchak-Zhitomir type, as de®ned by Rusanova (Milchev and
Angelova 1970:29). Angelova also ascribed to the Pen'kovka type small fragments
of pottery found in a sunken building and spoke of the Antes as the ®rst Slavs in
Bulgaria (Angelova 1980:3). As a consequence, Zhivka VaÆzharova returned to her
®rst thesis and maintained that the site's earliest phase was characterized by
sixth-century Prague-Korchak and Pen'kovka pottery (VaÆ zharova 1986:70, n. 1;
contra Koleva 1992).
To many archaeologists, Romania is the key territory for understanding the spread
and development of the Slavic culture (Kurnatowska 1974:55, 58; VaÂna 1983:25). On
the other hand, there is clear evidence that, in post-war Romania, attempts to give
Slavs the primary role in national history needed serious encouragement from the
Romanian Communist leaders and their Soviet counselors (Georgescu 1991:27).
Archaeologists and historians were urged to ®nd evidence for the earliest possible
presence of the Slavs. During the 1950s, excavations began on many sites with
allegedly Slavic remains, such as SaÆrata Monteoru and Suceava. Kurt Horedt
(1951), a German-born Romanian archaeologist, ®rst introduced the phrase `Slavic
pottery' into the archaeological jargon of his country. He spoke of the Slavic expan-
sion as the most important event in the early medieval history of the region. Maria
Coms° a (1959:66), Artamonov's student at the University of Leningrad, argued that
the stone oven associated with sixth- to seventh-century sunken buildings was a
speci®c Slavic artifact. In 1943, Ion Nestor began excavations at SaÆrata Monteoru,
a large cemetery with cremation burials. He continued to work there after the war
(Anonymous 1953). Nestor (1969:145) insisted that the Slavs were primarily recog-
nizable by means of cremation burials, either in urns or in simple cremation pits.
Moreover, he did not agree with Coms° a's chronology of the Slavic culture in
Romania. According to Maria Coms° a, the Slavs had already occupied Wallachia
during the reign of Justin I. Nestor (1959, 1965, 1973) maintained that an effective
settlement could not have taken place before the second half of the sixth century.
He accused Maria Coms° a of paying lip service to `Niederle's school' in order to
demonstrate that the expansion of the Slavs had begun as early as the ®fth century.
According to him, `there is only a slight chance that some Slavic groups settled in
Moldavia and Wallachia as early as the ®rst half of the sixth century'. To Nestor,
the expansion of the Slavs was inconceivable without the migration of the Avars.
During the 1970s, the dating of the earliest Slavic artifacts on the territory of
Romania began to move into the late sixth and early seventh century (Teodor
1972b, 1978:40; Mitrea 1974±1976:87; P. Diaconu 1979:167). By 1980, the earliest

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374 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 4(3)

date admitted for the Slavic migration to the lower Danube was either shortly before
AD 600 or much later (Teodor 1984a:65).
Nestor was well aware that the earliest information regarding the Slavs was
securely dated to the early sixth century. In order to eliminate the apparent contra-
diction between historical sources and archaeological evidence, he suggested that
the Slavic raids into the Balkan provinces originated not in Wallachia but in the
regions between the Prut and the Dniester, i.e. outside the present-day territory
of Romania (Nestor 1961:431; contra S° tefan 1965). In the years following
Ceaus° escu's bold criticism of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia (1968),
Romanian archaeologists directly attacked the idea, shared by many in the Soviet
Union, that the Chernyakhov culture represented the Slavs (Teodor 1969, 1972a).
Coms° a (1974) and others (Daicoviciu 1968:89) had depicted the Slavs as peaceful
and dedicated to agriculture. Nestor (1961:429) and Teodor (1969:191, 1980:78,
1982:38) insisted that the Slavs were savage conquerors. In their enthusiasm for
proving that the Slavs, like Russians, were aggressors, some researchers, such as
Mitrea (1968:257), pointed to evidence of destruction by ®re on several sixth- to
seventh-century sites in Romania. This, they contended, indicated the destruction
of native (Romanian) settlements by the savage Slavs. The argument was rapidly
dropped when it became evident that it would work against the cherished idea
of Romanian continuity. However, during the 1980s, Romanian archaeologists
made every possible effort to bring the Slavic presence north of the Danube close
to AD 602 (the date traditionally accepted for the collapse of the Roman frontier
on the Danube), in order to diminish as far as possible Slavic in¯uences upon the
native, Romanian population. The tendency was thus to locate the homeland of
the Slavs far from the territory of modern Romania, and to have them moving
across Romania and crossing the Danube as quickly as possible. Any contact with
the native Romanians could thus be avoided. A content analysis of the Romanian
archaeological literature pertaining to the early Slavs has shown that this tendency
coincides with the increasingly nationalistic discourse of the Communist govern-
ment, in particular with Ceaus° escu's claims that the Great Migrations were respon-
sible for Romania lagging behind the West (Curta 1994:266±270; see Verdery 1991).
During the 1950s and 1960s, the Slavs were viewed as the political and military
rulers of the local population and were given the status of the third component of
Romanian ethnogenesis. By 1980 no reference had been made to their contribution
to Romanian ethnogenesis. Romanian archaeologists now maintained that the Slavs
`had neither the time, nor the force to change the components, the direction and the
evolution of the Romanian ethnogenesis' (Teodor 1984b:135). Nestor (1970:104)
spoke of a general regression of civilization caused by Slavs. The primitive hand-
made pottery brought by the Slavs replaced wheel-made ceramics of much better
quality, while the formerly good Christian Romanians had now turned to cremation.
Others blamed the Slavs for having caused a return to prehistory (BaÃrzu and
Brezeanu 1991:213). Permanently wandering, bearers of a rather primitive culture,
always bent on crossing the Danube, the Slavs found their way to civilization only
after getting into contact with the native population and the Roman Empire.

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CURTA: POTS, SLAVS AND `IMAGINED COMMUNITIES' 375

During the 1960s, large-scale excavations took place in Romania, some of which
remarkably resulted in the total excavation of sixth- to seventh-century villages
(Dolinescu-Ferche 1974, 1979, 1986, 1992; Dolinescu-Ferche and Constantiniu
1981; Teodor 1984a, 1984b; Mitrea 1974±1976, 1992, 1994). But the results of
these excavations proved very dif®cult to accommodate to the new orientation of
Romanian archaeology. In 1958, the Slavic remains found at Suceava-S° ipot were
viewed as a perfect match for Slavic ®nds in the Soviet Union (Teodor 1958:527;
see Nestor 1962:1435). Just 15 years later, Suceava-S° ipot was a site showing the
adoption of the local, Romanian culture by `a few scattered Slavic elements'
(Teodor 1971; Nestor 1973:31). Having decided that there were no genuine Slavic
settlements to be found in Romania, Romanian archaeologists were now searching
for the native settlements pre-dating the arrival of the barbarians. Nestor's student
Victor Teodorescu (1964, 1971) put forward the in¯uential suggestion that archaeo-
logical assemblages of the ®fth, sixth, and seventh centuries constituted a new
culture, which he called Ipotes° ti-CaÃndes° ti. Following his example, Dan Gh. Teodor
`discovered' yet another culture, called Costis° a-Botos° ana (Teodor 1983). Initially,
these new cultures were viewed as a combination of Slavic and native elements.
Soon, however, the origins of the Ipotes° ti-CaÃndes° ti and Costis° a-Botos° ana assem-
blages were pushed back to the ®fth century, before the arrival of the Slavs, and
thus identi®ed as the remains of the local Romanian population (G. Diaconu
1978). At this point, most of the archaeological assemblages previously ascribed to
the Slavs changed attribution. Romanians had taught Slavs how to produce
wheel-made or better-tempered hand-made pottery, and persuaded them to give
up their stone ovens and adopt local, presumably more advanced, ones made of
clay. Once believed to be a relevant, if not the most important, archaeological
index of the Slavic culture, cremation burials were now viewed as the sign of a
sixth-century revival of ancient, Dacian traditions (BaÃrzu 1979:85). The large
cemetery at SaÆrata Monteoru, labeled `Slavic' in the 1950s and 1960s (Matei
1959), now turned into a site of the Ipotes° ti-CaÃndes° ti culture and was attributed
to the Romanian population (Teodor 1985:60).

C ONCLUSION
This sweeping survey of developments in Slavic archaeologies suggests that the
relationship between archaeology and nationalism is much more complex than
envisaged by recent studies. BorkovskyÂ's Prague culture served a purpose very
different from that of the Prague-Zhitomir-Korchak type favored by Soviet archae-
ologists. Issues of chronology and interpretation were given different weight in
Poland, former Yugoslavia, and Romania. Moreover, `text-driven archaeology' was
an approach more often associated with Yugoslav and Bulgarian archaeologists,
but not with their Czechoslovak colleagues. In addition, in eastern and south-
eastern Europe, the political value of archaeology for the construction of historical
narratives by far exceeds the signi®cance of its theoretical and methodological
underpinnings. In order to understand `the archaeological machine', it is therefore
necessary not only to assess the impact of the culture-historical approach, but

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376 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 4(3)

also to examine the contribution of archaeology to the shaping of national

consciousness. That Slavic archaeology was dominated by historicist approaches
needs no further emphasis. It is not without interest, though, that different and
often contrasting interpretations of the archaeological evidence coincided with,
and took advantage from, the re-evaluation of nineteenth-century historiographical
works of such in¯uential ®gures as Nicolae Iorga in Romania or Vassil Zlatarski in
Bulgaria. The concept of the archaeological `culture' also carried many assumptions,
which were central to nineteenth-century classi®cations of human groups ± in
particular, an overriding concern with holism, homogeneity, and boundedness. In
eastern Europe, the concept of the archaeological culture is still de®ned in mono-
thetic terms on the basis of the presence or absence of a list of traits or types derived
from assemblages or intuitively considered to be most appropriate attributes (`type-
fossils'). Archaeological cultures are actors on the historical stage, playing the role
individuals or groups have in documentary history. As shown by the history of
Slavic archaeologies, the tendency was to treat archaeological cultures as ethnic
groups, in order to legitimize claims of modern nation-states to territory and
in¯uence. At the crucial intersection between archaeology and nationalism,
archaeologists thus played a decisive role in the cultural construction of `imagined
communities'.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Different versions of this article were presented at the conference `Vocabularies of
Identities in Russia and Eastern Europe' (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
1998), the Mellon Seminar in Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University
(1999), and in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pitts-
burgh (1999). I wish to express my thanks to the organizers of and participants in
all three events, as well as to my colleagues at the University of Florida, Maria
Todorova, Thomas Gallant, and Frederick Corney, for their help, advice, and encour-
agement. I am also grateful for the comments and suggestions of Paul Barford
(Warsaw), which have greatly enriched the article.

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B IOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Florin Curta is Assistant Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the Uni-
versity of Florida. He has a PhD in History from Western Michigan University (1998)
and a MA in Medieval Studies from Cornell University (1999). He worked for several
years as an archaeologist at the Institute of Archaeology `V. PaÃrvan' in Bucharest,
Romania. Besides participation in archaeological ®eld surveys and research in the
Cernavoda-Medgidia area of Dobrudja, TaÃrgs° or (Romania), Chis° inaÆu (Moldova),
and Szeged (Hungary), he gained his experience from excavations on the late
antique and medieval sites at Sighis° oara and Pietroasele (Romania), as well as
from participation in the urban archaeology project of the Landesdenkmalamt
Baden-WuÈrttemberg in Constance (Germany). His research focuses on the early
medieval archaeology of south-eastern Europe. This is most evident in his book,
The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. AD
500±700 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), as well as in a number of articles
published over the years on the archaeology and history of the early Slavs.

Address: Department of History, University of Florida, PO Box 117320, Gainesville,

FL 32611±7320. [email: fcurta@history.u¯.edu; http://web.clas.u¯.edu/users/fcurta]

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384 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 4(3)

A BSTRACTS
Les slaves et les `communauteÂs imagineÂes'
F. Curta
En deÂpit de nombreuses eÂtudes sur l'impact du nationalisme sur l'archeÂologie, le deÂbat concerne
pour l'instant seulement l'ideÂologie de l'eÂcole archeÂologique d'histoire culturelle et surtout la
notion de `culture' arche ologique. Il n'y a que peu d'eÂtudes sur l'apport des arche ologues aÁ l'envis-
agement du passe national. L'objet de cet article est de mettre en relief l'arche ologie slave, en tant
que discipline aÁ travers les diffeÂrentes eÂcoles archeÂologiques nationales, par rapport aÁ la `politique
culturelle' profondeÂment lieÂe aux manifestations des e tats nationaux, ces `communauteÂs imagineÂes'
dont a parle Benedict Anderson. On a souvent remarque que les theÂories actuelles sur les anciens
slaves, soit en UkraõÈne ou en Russie, soit en Roumanie, sont le re¯et d'attitudes politiques plutoÃt
qu'intellectuelles. Dans les pays d'Europe orientale, la de®nition de la culture archeÂologique reste
monotheÂtique et deÂpend toujours de la preÂsence ou de l'absence d'un nombre de qualiteÂs ou de
types eÂtablis au cours de l'analyse de sites typiques ou consideÂreÂs intuitivement comme des attributs
culturels repreÂsentatifs. Beaucoup d'archeÂologues estimaient par conseÂquent que les cultures archeÂ-
ologiques eÂtaient des acteurs sur la sceÁ ne de l'histoire, jouant le roà le d'individus ou de groupes dans
l'histoire documentaire. Les cultures arche ologiques devenaient des ethnies, utilise es pour leÂgitimer
les revendications territoriales et politiques des e tats-nations modernes.

Mot-cleÂs: archeÂologie slave, Bulgarie, `communaute imagineÂe', nationalisme, Pologne, Roumanie,

TcheÂcoslovaquie, Union SovieÂtique, Yugoslavie

Slawen und imaginaÈre Gemeinschaften

F. Curta
Trotz der kuÈrzlichen Betonung des Ein¯usses von Nationalismus auf die ArchaÈologie, konzentriert
sich die Diskussion weiterhin auf den ideologischen Rahmen der kulturhistorischen Schule der
ArchaÈologie, besonders auf den Begriff der `archaÈologischen Kultur'. Vergleichsweise wenig Auf-
merksamkeit ist jedoch darauf verwendet worden, wie ArchaÈologen zur Konstruktion der nationalen
Vergangenheit beitrugen. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die slawische ArchaÈologie, eine Disziplin, die
kreuz und quer durch die nationalen Abteilungen archaÈ ologischer Schulen verlaÈuft, im weiten Kon-
text der `Kultur-Politik', die alle Nationalstaaten als `imaginaÈre Gemeinschaften' (B. Anderson)
charakterisiert. TatsaÈchlich scheint die aktuelle akademische Diskussion zu den fruÈhen Slawen in
der Ukraine, Ruûland und RumaÈnien enger mit politischen, als mit intellektuellen U È berlegungen
verknuÈpft zu sein. In Osteuropa ist das Konzept `archaÈologischer Kulturen' noch immer durch
monothetische Begriffe de®niert, die auf der Basis der An- oder Abwesenheit einer Anzahl von
bestimmten Merkmalen oder Typen basieren, die entweder von typischen FundplaÈtzen gewonnen
wurden oder denen man kurzerhand intuitiv kulturelle RepraÈsentativitaÈt zubilligte. Somit betrach-
teten ArchaÈologen archaÈologische Kulturen als Schauspieler auf der historischen BuÈhne, die eine
Rolle spielten, wie es von Individuen oder Gruppen in dokumentarischer Geschichte getan wird.
ArchaÈologische Kulturen wurden zu ethnischen Gruppen und damit zur Legitimierung von
AnspruÈchen auf Territorium und Ein¯uû moderner Nationalstaaten verwendet.

SchluÈsselbegriffe: Bulgarien, `imaginaÈre Gemeinschaften', Jugoslawien, Nationalismus, Polen,

RumaÈnien, slawische ArchaÈologie, Sowjetunion, Tschechoslowakei

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