The discussion between Florin and I on the ethnogenesis of the Slavs seems
to be generating a lot of words which (to judge from the lack of response)
don't seem to be of any interest to any other members of the group, for
which I apologise and promise this time to try to be brief.
I found Florin's reply of 27 May 2000 18:51 very informative and containing
much valuable information. I must admit that I had never tried to make the
connection between the area claimed by Godłowski and Parczewski as the
"homeland" of the Slavs and those lands lost to Stalin in 1944 which still
generate such sentimental feelings for the Poles. I have to add that this
suggestion is only partly valid since the majority of the area pinpointed by
Godłowski (the upper and middle reaches of the Prut, Dniestr and southern
Bug and Volynia and the middle Dniepr region - Godłowski 1989, in Barbaricum
I p. 13) lay outside the pre-1939 borders of the Second Polish Republic and
thus in Besarabia in Romania and the Soviet Union. The idea is however
worthy of further exploration.
What Florin obviously knows and assumes the reader does too is that the idea
that the Slavs originated in the Balkans comes from the early medieval
Kievan Chronicle (PVL [ch 2 on the Slav nations] ) which says their homeland
was on the Danube, the area where they first come to the attention of
Byzantine writers such as Procopius. In their search for a national origin
the medieval monks turned to the nearest contemporary written records, seven
hundred years later Soviet scholars did the same.
In suggesting that the idea that the Przeworsk Culture was *Protoslav may
have been aimed against the Soviets, I was thinking more about the bit of
the Potsdam agreement which is conveniently not usually remembered by the
Poles. This (temporary) agreement states that Silesia and the Polish
fragment of former East Prussia are parts of the Soviet Occupation Zone of
Germany which had been temporarily awarded at the request of the Soviet
Union to the Polish administration. Both Churchill and James Byrne (US
secretary of State) in speeches in 1946 stressed their opposition to this
resolution of the situation and emphasised its temporary nature (despite the
expulsion of millions of Germans from these areas), but in the end proved
incapable of influencing Stalin. By demonstrating the links of the
Przeworsk, Pomeranian and Lusatian Cultures, all of which on modern
archaeological distribution maps can conveniently be made to fill most of
the modern area of Poland, stopping just short of the modern western
frontier, were the Poles not creating an historical justification for the
position of the frontier predating by several millennia the Teheran and
Potsdam agreements ? These areas became known as the "Recovered
Territories".
As for the last part about autocthonous debate being stifled, I agree that
there has not been much of a visible autocthonous backlash against
Godłowski's theories. At a recent conference Parczewski himself expressed
his surprise at this. There have been the inevitable reiterations or only
slight modifications of former views by the old guard, for example Hensel,
Jażdżewski, Leciejewicz and others). There has however been a little work,
for example M. Brzostowicz's study of Roman artefacts in Slav deposits (not
however very convincing).
The dendro dates you refer to do not actually affect the dating of the
beginnings of Early Slav culture, but rather certain types of pottery (eg.
Tornow) which were thought to be early but are now seen to be later. The
former chronological position of the pottery and features which Parczewski
isolates as being earliest remains unchanged. The problem is that the
earliest Slavs in central Europe seem not to have built the kind of
structures (wells, wooden rampart constructions) which produce this kind of
material and when the odd sample is preserved it is not oak but pine which
we cannot yet date. To confuse the issue, we have also a number of
radiocarbon dates from several sites in eastern Poland which seem to place
undoubted "Prague type" pottery back several centuries earlier than the
migration period. Are they all 'rogue' or is there something going on that
we do not understand? (or.....?)
At one point Florin says that what I say is "simply not true", but what is
then said in fact seems to demonstrate that as I hinted there was in fact
relatively little written on the issues we are discussing in the Stalinist
period because of the extreme ideological difficulties the unwitting author
could get himself into by attempting to discuss ethnogenesis at all. When I
talked of Nazi propaganda in the period before 1941 I was of course
referring to its effect on the Soviet public which in the period was
relatively isolated from the outside world. And yes, Lehr-Spławiński would
be better described as a linguist (but published in philological series).
Paul Barford
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