KIEV AND APPANAGE RUS'

FLORIN CURTA (Gainesville, FL, USA)

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF IDENTITIES

IN OLD R USSIA (CA. 500 TO CA. 650)

"The Slav is the son and product of the marsh." Ever since Jan Peisker's s remark was published in the 1926 edition of the Cambridge Medieval His- tory,' historians and archaeologists alike have used the results of linguistic research to write the ethnic history of the Slavs in the marshy lands of south- ern Belarus. With no written sources for the sixth and seventh century, ar- chaeology was often used to illustrate conclusions already drawn from lin- guistic studies. The "linguistically-driven archaeology" of sixth- to seventh- century , Belarus, and was the paradigm that dominated re- search on the early Slavs in the after ca. 1950 and remains the most important framework of analysis in the post-Soviet decades.? Disputes about the Slavic, Baltic, or Finno-Ugrian attribution of certain archaeologi- cal assemblages show that the primary concern for archaeologists and histo- rians studying the early Middle Ages remains ethnicity. The concept of "identity" was adopted only recently in the post-Soviet anthropological dis- course and, as Dittmar Schorkowitz has shown, ,it did not alter the funda-

1. Jan Peisker, "The expansionof the Slavs," in The CambridgeMedieval History, ed. by H. M. Gwatkinand J. P. Whitney(New York/Cambridge:Macmillan/Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926), 426. Though harshly criticizing Peisker's theories about the social and political organization of the early Slavs, Lubor Niederle neverthelessendorsed his ideas about the migrationof the Slavs from the Pripet marshes. See Lubor Niederle, "Des theories nouvelles de Jean Peisker sur les anciens Slaves," Revuedes études slaves I (1922): 19-34 ;and Manuel de l'antiquitéslave. L'histoire(Paris: Champion,1923), 1:49. 2. Florin Curta, "From Kossinna to Bromley: ethnogenesisin Slavic archaeology,"in On Barbarian Identity: Critical Approachesto Ethnicityin the Early MiddleAges, ed. by Andrew Gillett (Turnhout:Brepols, 2002), 201-18. Valentin V. Sedov still attributesthe culture of the so-called"long barrows" in northwesternRussia to the Slavs on the basis of A. A. Zalizniak's linguistic analysis of the birch-bark letters found in Novgorod,all of which post-date A.D. 1000. See Valentin V. Sedov, Slaviane. Istoriko-arkheologicheskoeissledovanie (: lazyki slavianskoikul'tury, 2002), 363. For Zalizniak's theories,see his Drevnenovgorodskii dialekt (Moscow:Iazyki russkoikul'tury, 1995). 32

mental thrust of the old ethnogenetic research.3 Other forms of (group) iden- tity, such as gender or age, have been largely ignored in most recent studies pertaining to the history and archaeology of Old Russia during the sixth and seventh centuries. In this article, I intend to explore some of the most interesting avenues of recent research on the period and area under discussion. My intention is to emphasize alternative explanations for the dramatic changes in the material culture of Westem Eurasia that took place between 500 and 650 (Fig. 1). The culture-historical approach has driven scholars into a cul-de-sac, as the obsessive preoccupation with ethnicity obscured other, most interesting as- pects of material culture. Following a critical review of the assumptions un- derpinning some of the most important studies on the early Slavs (such as those of Valentin V. Sedov), I will introduce new categories of analysis, such as age and gender. These concepts may enable us to understand unique phenomena of the early Middle Ages, such as exceptional children burials, hoards of silver and bronze accessories of female dress, and female burials with smelting implements or weapons. The search for the Slavic origins pushed the antiquity of the Slavs into prehistory, a phenomenon that has recently and appropriately been called udrevnenie.4 Boris Rybakov, a professor of history at the University of Mos- cow and director of the Archaeological Institute, first attributed to the early Slavs hoards of silver and bronze artifacts found in Ukraine, which Alek- sandr Spitsyn (1858-1931) had called "antiquities of the Antes."5 Rybakov's s argument was that the archaeological distribution of such hoards coincided with Jordanes' description of the territory inhabited by the Antes. Moreover, he linked the Slavs to the archaeological remains excavated in Chemyakhov

3. Dittmar Schorkowitz,"Die Herkunft der Ostslavenund die Anfdngedes Kiever Reiches in der postsowjetischenRevision," Jahrbucherfur GeschichteOsteuropas 48 (2000):-569-601, and "Rekonstruktionendes Nationalen im postsowjetischen Raum. Beobachtungen zur Permanenzdes Historischen,"in Inventing the Pasts in North Central Europe: The National Perception of Early Medieval History and Archaeology, ed. by Matthias Hardt, Christian Lubke,and DittmarSchorkowitz (Bem :Peter Lang, 2003), 273-333. 4. Schorkowitz,"Die Herkunftder Ostslaven,"570. 5. Boris A. Rybakov, "Anty i Kievskaia Rus'," VestnikDrevnei Istorii I (1939): 319-37; and "Ranniaia kul'tura vostochnykhslavian," Istoricheskiizhurnal 11-12 (1943): 73-80. For the "antiquitiesof the Antes," see AleksandrA. Spitsyn,"Drevnosti antov," in Sbornikstatei v chest' akademika Alekseia Ivanovicha Sobolevskogo,ed. by V. N. Perettsa (Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademiinauk SSSR, 1928), 492-95. For Rybakov's political opportunism,see Anatolii P. Novosel'tsev, "'Mir istorii' ili mif istorii?," Voprosyistorii 1 (1993): 23-31; Joachim Hoster, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft1953 bis 1991. Studien zur Methodologie-und Organisationsgeschichte(Munich: Otto Sagner, 1995), 25-26.