The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe

94 | BERNARD S. BACHRACH The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe. By P. M. Barford (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001) 416 pp. $39.95 Barford has undertaken the mammoth task of trying to illuminate the history and culture of those people in the early Middle Ages who spoke a language that linguists consider to be Slavic. This endeavor is fraught with many difªculties, the methodological ones being foremost. To Barford’s credit, he recognizes many of them. Despite his vast interdisci- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/34/1/94/1706921/002219503322645664.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 plinary knowledge and fundamental honesty, however, The Early Slavs is a disappointing book. The work, as a whole, reads like a series of intro- ductory lectures by an author obviously capable of more sophisticated explanations. Among the many fundamental problems that bedevil Barford’s pro- ject is the nature of the surviving information. Slav, in the context of Barford’s work, is largely a linguistic designation. Thus, he focuses on identifying various people who spoke languages or dialects that modern linguists consider to be Slavic, as compared, for example, to people who speak a Romance language, such as French or Spanish, that developed from Latin. The main methodological problem with regard to identifying people who spoke a Slavic language (for example, the forerunner(s) of Russian, Polish, or Serbo-Croatian) is that none of the people who lived in the areas (for example, Slovakia, Ukraine, or Slovenia) that cur- rently are inhabited by peoples who speak a Slavic language, were liter- ate in their own language for the ªrst several centuries of the early Middle Ages. Despite ongoing efforts for several hundred years, often driven more recently by nationalist agendas—as Barford aptly points out—the difªculties associated with the attempt to compensate for the lack of written sources in Slavic are insurmountable, at least for now. Barford, however, tends to give archaeological enterprises too much credit. Al- though he seems aware of the pitfalls in principle, he is not sufªciently critical of archaeological information in practice. For example, he allows pottery artifacts to demonstrate similarities and differences over time among peoples living in various areas that are now inhabited by Slavic speakers of one type or another. However, the identiªcation of similarities and/or differences in archaeological artifacts is often subjective. Such conclusions must be quantitative if they are to support the weight of large generalizations, and some consistent measure must be adumbrated in order to sustain such generalizations. The problem of ascertaining a spoken language on the basis of a ceramic jug, especially in the absence of reliable written information, remains highly problematical. The limitations of archaeology, even when uncontaminated by po- litical or social biases, are rarely recognized by archaeologists, at least in print. In an otherwise unfortunate article, Grierson, the leading numis- matist of the post-World War II era, cogently observed, “It has been said that the spade cannot lie, but it owes this merit in part to the fact that it REVIEWS | 95 cannot speak.”1 Barford, tends to prefer the speculative construction of the past by archaeologists from ºawed artifacts and guiding theories to information from written sources, produced by cultures that interacted with people thought today to be Slavs. As he puts it, “The picture from the written sources appears to be contradicted by the archaeological evidence” (74). It is not methodological hair splitting, however, to empha- size that archaeological information does not provide evidence of anything unless confronted with a particular problem to solve and an at- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/34/1/94/1706921/002219503322645664.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 tending theory to motivate it. The obvious circularity of such a process would not be worth belaboring were it not the case that archaeologists, who are often hypercritical when dealing with written sources from the past, fail with alarming consistency to recognize their own biases. This is not to say that early medieval writers, who putatively provide information (it is not evidence of anything until we pose a ques- tion), did not also have biases. However, the careful reading of the Latin, Greek, and Arabic writers requires extensive training not only in these languages and philology but also in historical methodology. Barford re- lies, in general, on modern translations. Even more problematical, however, is his failure to make clear that every translation is an interpret- ation. In short, the tendency of archaeologists to avoid rigorous training in languages as well as historical methodology is a blight that no amount of “theoretical” expertise can eliminate. Barford, who is rightly cautious about theory, seems largely innocent of historical method. Indeed, Early Slavs would have beneªted from the precedent of The Idea of History (Oxford, 1946), by Robin G. Collingwood, who was an archaeologist and a historian as well as a systematic philosopher. In its favor, Barford’s book provides a plethora of current archaeological information from places where speakers of Slavic languages dwell. It also provides an exceptionally useful critique of nationalist- driven archaeological efforts in these lands and illuminates problems cre- ated by Marxist domination of Slavic territory. Finally, for those inter- ested in interdisciplinary historical research, it highlights many of the ºaws in linguistic and archaeological methods when applied to the writ- ing of history. Collaborative work of an interdisciplinary nature is no longer an option but a necessity; the day of the Einzelkampfer, if it ever existed, has passed. Bernard S. Bachrach University of Minnesota 1 Philip Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: A Critique of the Evidence,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, IX (1959), 123–140..

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