Balkan Dialogues

Negotiating Identity between Prehistory and the Present

Maja Gori, Maria Ivanova, Maja Gori, Maria Ivanova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138941137
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317377467
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Spatial variation and patterning in the distribution of artefacts are topics of fundamental significance in Balkan archaeology. For decades, archaeologists have classified spatial clusters of artefacts into discrete "cultures", which have been conventionally treated as bound entities and equated with past social or ethnic groups. This timely volume fulfils the need for an up-to-date and theoretically informed dialogue on group identity in Balkan prehistory. Thirteen case studies covering the beginning of the Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age and written by archaeologists conducting fieldwork in the region, as well as by ethnologists with a research focus on material culture and identity, provide a robust foundation for exploring these issues. Bringing together the latest research, with a particular intentional focus on the central and western Balkans, this collection offers original perspectives on Balkan prehistory with relevance to the neighbouring regions of Eastern and Central Europe, the Mediterranean and Anatolia. Balkan Dialogues challenges long-established interpretations in the field and provides a new, contextualised reading of the archaeological record of this region.

Part I
Rethinking groups and cultures

1
Later Balkan prehistory

A transcultural perspective

Joseph Maran

Introduction

In the 1960s and ’70s German scholarship played an important role in shaping and propagating an approach to the later prehistory of the Balkans that focused on chronology, cultural history and diffusion of culture, and lay greater emphasis on pottery than on other types of finds. As I shall argue, this approach has been responsible for many of the problems that have impaired the investigation of this field until today (Novaković 2012). Hopefully the contributions to this volume will contribute new theoretical perspectives to the still much under-theorized field of Balkan prehistory. It is particularly opportune that the volume covers the entire region – from the northern fringe of the Carpathian Basin to the Aegean and Anatolia in the south – as this is the only manner in which to counter the still prevalent tendency to regard the borders of the area’s modern nation states as suitable frames of reference not only for archaeological research, but also for the definition of Balkan cultural groups, whose distribution is often presumed to stop at the respective boundaries of a country (Tsirtsoni 2006).

When dealing with the Balkans, consideration must be taken of the degree to which the history of archaeological research has been influenced by the stereotypes still unfortunately associated with this region. Maria Todorova (1997) has drawn attention to a particular discourse that she terms “Balkanism”, in which “… the Balkans have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self-congratulating image of the ‘European’ and the ‘West’ has been constructed …” (Todorova 1997: 188). As with the discourse on orientalism, so too that of Balkans stereotypes has helped legitimize the interference by Western political powers in a region that would allegedly otherwise descend into eternal chaos and ethnic warfare. Yet in contrast to the lands subject to orientalism, the Balkans (with the exception of Greece, which is generally not treated as belonging to them) have not been admired for the antiquity of their monuments or the cultivation of beauty and sensuality, but have instead provoked outright fear and contempt.

From diffusionism to anti-diffusionism

Given the negative stereotype of the Balkans that crystallized in the early 20th century and presented the region as unstable, wild, backward and unreliable, it should come as no surprise that Western and Central European archaeology took on later Balkan prehistory not primarily because its practitioners cared about the region as such or were interested in the cultural distinctiveness of its sub-regions. Rather, they were motivated by the desire to study the Balkans’ role as a natural geographical bridge between northern parts of Europe and the Near East which, together with Egypt, was regarded by diffusionism as the cradle of major cultural achievements (Childe 1929: V–X). This sort of reasoning found its lasting expression in those well-known maps – still used today – that show arrows starting in the Near East, crossing the Balkans, and steadily pointing north or west until they finally reach the northern regions of Europe (Fig. 1.1). Proponents of diffusionism were as confident that human societies could be categorized according to “higher” and of “lower” development as they were convinced of the unilinear evolution from “simple” to “complex” stages of technology and culture. The fact that a combination of these evolutionist and diffusionist ideas implicitly or explicitly shaped the approach to the field accounts for some of the severe fallacies that continued to affect archaeological research long after the Second World War.

Figure 1.1 Map visualizing the spread of farming economy from the Near East to Europe. After Zimmermann (2002: 133 fig. 1).

One such fallacy concerns the spread of farming economy at the outset of the Neolithic period; for a long time it was thought to have occurred primari ly via land-routes connecting the Near East to Europe (Schachermeyr 1955: 57–8) because scholars generally dismissed the possibility of maritime mobility in this early period. Their reluctance to accept the idea that people of the earliest Neolithic were capable of mastering the Mediterranean Sea was most likely prompted by evolutionist notions about stages of technological progress, which associated maritime mobility with post-Neolithic societies. A consequence of these preconceptions was that for a long time research projects devoted to Greece in the early Neolithic era concentrated on northern regions that were close to the “natural” land-routes between Anatolia and Europe. By contrast, until the late 1950s the southern areas of the Greek mainland as well as Crete were deemed dead-ends when it came to seeking information on neolithization, as it was believed that the Neolithic economy had spread by land from north to south. It was only in the 1960s that discoveries in the Franchthi Cave and especially in Knossos gradually led to the insight that various features of farming economy had most likely been transmitted early on through maritime connections (Broodbank and Strasser 1991; Broodbank 2013: 184–8) among those very regions that had been hitherto regarded as relatively unimportant to the question of incipient neolithization (Efstratiou 2005 with earlier literature).

Another diffusionist fallacy lay in the role assigned by cultural-historical research to 2nd millennium BCE palatial societies in the Aegean, which were believed to have had some sort of civilizing effect on the surrounding Balkan regions as well as repercussions that extended to northern Europe (Childe 1942: 170–2; Vladár 1973; Schauer 1984). Since the 1980s, proponents of World Systems Theory have replaced this image of a “civilizing sun”, whose warm rays gradually spread over a growing number of regions, with that of Aegean palatial cultures economically exploiting peripheral and marginal areas and thereby provoking transformations through patterns of economic dependency in an ever-expanding zone around their core (Frank 1993: 395–9). As diametrically opposed as these views may be, they both deny agency to societies north of Greece and perceive them as simply reacting to that which had been initiated by and transmitted unidirectionally from societies in a distant civilizational center (Stein 1998, 2014).

Understandably, in the 1970s processual archaeology tried to rid itself of the burden of diffusionism and to develop new approaches for explaining the existence of similar cultural traits in different areas. Of particular importance to this counter-movement were contributions by Colin Renfrew (1969, 1970), who proposed that metallurgy had developed autonomously in Southeastern Europe during the Copper Age rather than spread there from the Near East. More recently, the desire to challenge long-standing diffusionist assumptions led Markus Vosteen (2002) to argue that wheeled vehicles had been independently invented five times in the area between northern Germany in the northwest and southern Mesopotamia in the southeast at various points of the mid-4th millennium BCE. Although such studies undoubtedly served as an important antidote to the simplistic assumptions of diffusionism, the backlash against the latter tended to propose that innovation occurred independently and autochthonously while disregarding the alternative possibility that it arose from a transfer occasioned by intercultural contacts. Thus, when Renfrew and Vosteen argued for the independent development of the aforesaid technological innovations, they were referring not to regions separated by vast geographical distances, but rather to sub-regions that lay right next to each other in the western part of the Old World. Renfrew tried to resolve this problem by arguing that in the 5th millennium BCE, provinces where copper metallurgy existed in the Balkan and Near East were separated by a zone that encompassed the Aegean and West Anatolia, and that offered no comparable evidence of early metallurgy (Renfrew 1970). Today we know that this seeming gap in metallurgical activity was based on insufficient research as well as the different depositional practices of the Aegeo-Anatolian Chalcolithic (Pernicka 1990; Maran 2000; Lichter 2006; Zachos 2007; Zimmermann 2011). As regards the earliest wheeled vehicles, to argue that they did not exist prior to 3500 BCE, and then were suddenly invented independently in five different zones of Europe and the Near East, three of which formed a contiguous area of Central Europe, is tantamount to denying that people interact and learn from each other (Sherratt 1996: 160; Burmeister 2012: 86). The idea of pristine cultures living in perfect isolation is a construct (Howes 1996) that ignores the fact that intercultural contacts have been the rule rather than the exception since the beginning of history. As Philip L. Kohl (2007: 237) has rightly pointed out: “… Prehistoric processes are interconnected and shared among different peoples, and, for that reason, our reconstructions of them must be as inclusive as possible”.

By opting for either diffusionism or autochthonism, that is, by viewing economic and technological innovations as the product either of unidirectional flow from a few “civilizational cores” towards so-called peripheral areas or that of polycentric invention occurring independently in various areas, research on the introduction of innovations in early societies has manoeuvred itself into the trap of having to choose between two overly simplistic options.

Deconstructing the archaeological cultures of the Balkans

Before outlining possible alternatives that could get us out of this impasse, I would like to stress that perhaps the most important way of changing our perspective on later Balkan prehistory would be to apply a dynamic concept of culture that radically breaks with culture-history.

The severe shortcomings of applying culture-history to archaeology have been exposed by others (cf. Jones 1997: 15-37; Wotzka 1993, 1997; Müller 2001: 38–42; Furholt 2009: 23–5), who have pointed out that the conceptualization of cultures as neatly bound entities characterized by recurrent combinations of material traits is rooted in turn-of-the-20th-century German cultural-historical ethnography that came to be known as Kulturkreislehre. At that time, German archaeologists, above all Gustaf Kossinna, appropriated these ethnographic concepts and gave them a new twist by attaching essentialist notions of ethnic and racial identity to the differentiated units (Trigger 1996: 235–41; Jones 1997: 15–7; Grünert 2002: 71–4; Rebay-Salisbury 2011). While this bounded and representative view of culture has been abandoned in cultural and social anthropology (Hahn 2013: 17–39), it lives on in archaeology. I too am accustomed to referring to archaeological cultures because they seem useful for communication purposes. All the same, I have reached the conclusion that it is time to question, deconstruct and finally abandon our beloved “cultures”, such as Vinča, Gumelniţa, Dimini or Vatya, to name but a few, and to seek alternative means through which to analyse the spatial patterning of material culture.

In order to elucidate the necessity of such a move, let me briefly recapitulate the main flaws in the traditional concept of an archaeological culture so as to clarify the high price that we still pay by our grudging use of the term. On the one hand, in trying to demarcate the distribution of archaeological cultures, we end up emphasizing the differences between the perceived entities and minimizing the features that they hold in common. As is well known, most archaeological cultures of the Southeastern European Neolithic, Copper Age and Bronze Age are based on little more than the distribution of certain pottery features within the political borders of nation states (Tsirtsoni 2006: 239–42). We do not know what alternative spatial patterns would emerge if we were to free ourselves of the constraints of these firmly entrenched and nationally oriented archaeological constructs and instead chart various features of material culture with no reference to political borders (Jones 1997: 15–39; Müller 2001: 40, 418–25, 2006; Furholt 2009: 203–41; Gyucha and Parkinson 2013). On the other hand, by defining an archaeological culture we proceed in the exact opposite way since we overstress the degree of uniformity of its material remains, thereby depriving ourselves of a chance to recognize signs of diversity within communities as well as between communities of a given region (Hofmann and Bickle 2011; Damm 2012; Bickle 2016). All this leads to an extremely static, object-like treatment of culture, in which change is naturally perceived as coming from the outside through migration, war or environmental disasters because the transformative power of agency and the heterogeneity of any given society’s social space are not taken into consideration.

The alternative is to define culture as the means through which people shape and create what they perceive to be reality – their lifeworld – and which can therefore not be characterized by long-term and stable spatial distribution. We thus need to shift away from an understanding of culture as something embodied and represented, that is, something that exists and can be possessed, to some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Balkan dialogues: Negotiating identity between prehistory and the present
• PART I Rethinking groups and cultures
• PART II Identities in transition
• PART III Frontiers and boundaries
• Index