Paul:
You are right about Polish archaeologists being the advocates of the
Przeworsk origin of the proto-Slavs. Actually, I think it was
Lehr-Splawinski, rather than Jozef Kostrzewski, who equated the Przeworsk
culture with Tacitus' Venedi, the key argument in establishing a
respectable antiquity for the Slavs. However, in terms of pottery remains,
it was Rusanova--before Parczewski--who established a "Prague-Korchak" type
on the basis of statistical description of vessel proportions (a method
otherwise borrowed from Gening). She then argued that the type(s)
identified by such means derived from Przeworsk archetypes. It was pottery,
more than anything else, that constituted "Slavic ethnicity" in her and
other Soviet archaeologists' eyes.
While I agree with you in principle, I must say that in the 1960s and
1970s, the idea that the Slavs originated in the Przeworsk area, roughly
coinciding with the post-war territory of Poland, was advocated as much by
Polish, as by Soviet archaeologists. The most articulated theory about all
this is that of Valentin Sedov. See his _Proiskhozhdenie i ranniaia
istoriia slavian_ (Moscow, 1979), as well as his more recent _Slaviane v
drevnosti_ (Moscow, 1994). Besides advocating a Przeworsk origin for her
"Prague-Korchak" type, Rusanova edited a collection of essays on such
cultures as that of the Carpathian burial mounds, Zarubinets, Kiev,
Przeworsk, and Chernyakhov, all labeled "proto-Slavic." See _Slavianskie
drevnosti VI-VII vv. Kultura prazhskogo tipa_ (Moscow, 1976) and _Slaviane
i ikh sosedi v kontse I tysiacheletiia do n.e.-pervoi polovine I
tysiacheletiia n.e._, ed. by I. P. Rusanova and E. A. Symonovich (Moscow,
1993). As for Kostrzewski, my impression is that following his
confrontation with Kossinna, he laid more emphasis on the Lusatian culture
than on the Przeworsk origins of the Slavs. To my mind, this would indeed
be the most appropriate course, if one would have to counter-balance German
claims to prehistory. By the late 1960s, as Soviet archaeologists worked
hard to prove that Przeworsk was the root of the proto-Slavs, Kostrzewski
still spoke of the Slavic Bronze Age, valiantly followed by Tadeusz
Sulimirski. See J. Kostrzewski, "Uber den gegenwartigen Stand der
Erforschung der Ethnogenese der Slawen in archaologischer Sicht," in F.
Zagiba (ed.), _Das heidnische und christliche Slaventum. Acta II Congressus
internationalis historiae Slavicae Salisburgo-Ratisbonensis anno 1967
celebrati_, vol. 1 (Wiesbaden, 1969), pp. 11-25; Tadeusz Sulimirski, "Die
Veneti-Venedae und deren Verhaltnis zu den Slawen," in J. Herrmann and
K.-H. Otto (eds.), _Berichte uber den II. internationalen Kongress fur
slawische Archaologie, Berlin, 24.-28. August 1970_, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1973),
pp. 381-7.
In Poland, the whole story goes back to Wawrzyniec Surowiecki and his
_Sledzenie poczatku narodow slowianskich_. In Soviet Russia, the discourse
about Slavic ethnogenesis is a direct result of Stalin's policies of the
mid- and late 1930s, in response to Nazi propaganda. This may also explain
the stronger emphasis on ethnogenesis in Soviet Russia, where shortly after
the war, archaeology, to quote Leo Klein, became the "science about
ethnogenesis." True, similar concerns remained paramount in Poland. But
when Godlowski and Parczewski gave the final blow to ideas that the Slavs
were native to Polish territory, the Kostrzewski-Sulimirski-Hensel
ethnogenetic model simply died out. Not so in Russia, where "the sons and
products of the marsh" (J. Peisker) are still the main focus of
archaeological and linguistic research. Now that we already switched from
women in archaeology to ethnogenetic theories, it would be nice to talk
about the political and/or social circumstances of these developments.
Best regards,
Florin
_____________________________________________________________
Florin Curta
Department of History
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
University of Florida
4411 Turlington Hall
P.O. Box 117320
Gainesville, FL 32611-7320
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/fcurta
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