1. Historical Setting

Copyrighted Material 1. HISTORICAL SETTING 1.1. In search of roots. Human collectives have always strived to discover their origins. Held fast by linguistic, tribal, or religious bonds, societies are wont to test the strength of their union by examining its age and provenience. In this quest for a genealogy the Slavs find them- selves in a less fortunate position than many other members of the Indo-European family of languages. Speakers of Greek and the Romance languages have the satisfaction of being heir to the glorious traditions of ancient Greece and Rome. The Celtic and Germanic peoples know much about their past from what was written about them by classical authors and from their own tales and legends. The Slavs, by contrast, did not enter the records of history until the sixth century a.d. Their early fates are veiled by the silence of their neighbors, the mute- ness of their own oral tradition, and the ambiguity of such nonverbal sources of information as archaeology, anthropology, or paleobotany. Yet, the darkness of prehistory has not inhibited the Slavs in their search for roots. Schol- ars have fanned the few flickers of evidence hoping to illumine the past and reveal some heretofore hidden contours and shapes. How useful a search of this kind may be is best il- lustrated by the ingenious investigations of the Polish botanist Józef Rostafin¿ski. Having no- ticed that Slavic lacked a native term for beech (Fagus silvatica) and for several other plants, Rostafin¿ski assumed that there was a correlation between the easterly extension of the beech and the western limit of prehistoric Slavic settlements and concluded that the original homeland of the Slavs was located in the basin of the upper and middle Dnieper.1 Such insights, however, are few and far between. All too often the absence of concrete evidence and reliable source material gave scholars free rein to engage in fanciful specula- tion, unrestrained by considerations of fact and probability. As a result, theories have been proposed in which the line between ascertainable reality and more or less imaginative con- jecture has been blurred or is altogether absent. 1.2. The autochthonous theory. One such theory would have the prehistoric Slavs dwell continuously upon the shores of the Vistula and Oder rivers and the Baltic Sea, a territory roughly coextensive with that of today’s Poland, since the middle of the second mil- lennium b.c. Championed mainly by Polish scholars and dubbed, therefore, the autochthonous theory, it was summarized by the Czech historian of early Slavdom Father Francis 1. In TrubaSev’s (1991) otherwise thorough discussion of the clues used in the determination of the Slavic homeland, the significance of plant names is surprisingly understated. Copyrighted Material 2 · HISTORICAL SETTING Dvornik: “The modern Polish school of archaeologists . came boldly forward with the theory that the primitive habitat of the Slavs should be located in the lands between the Elbe, Oder, Vistula and Bug rivers and that the so-called ‘Lusatian culture’ . was a product of the primitive Slavs” (Dvornik 1956:9).2 Could, however, the rich finds of the so-called Lusatian culture, which thrived from about 1300 to 400 b.c. in the basins of the Vistula, the Oder, and the upper Elbe, be shown to have been Slavic in origin? While harboring some doubts on that score, Dvornik finds the autochthonous hypothesis persuasive: “Most of the prehistoric maps show a vacuum in the lands where the Lusatian culture flourished. On several grounds it would seem reasonable to fill this vacuum with the Slavs” (Dvornik 1956:10). Reasoning ex vacuo, as one might call Dvornik’s attempt to assign an area to the Slavs chiefly because no one else is claiming it, is used also when a name or a term comes down to us in the form of a label separated from its referent. A striking instance of such an approach is the persistent attempt to prove that the names of the Neuri and the Budini, two tribes which according to the Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century b.c.) lived somewhere on the territory of today’s Ukraine or Belarus, are Slavic in origin. We know absolutely nothing of the ethnic affiliation of these tribes— their names have no clear etymology and could be associated with any branch of Indo- European—yet both or either of them have been considered Slavic (\owmian¿ski 1967: 367–369; Go]ab 1991:284–287) in an eager effort to establish some lineage for the historical Slavs who live in that area.3 In addition to claiming a connection between the Lusatian culture and the Slavs, the ad- herents of the autochthonous theory rest their case on several other assumptions. They include the claims that the ancient tribe of the Veneti, who lived along the Vistula and the Baltic, was linguistically Slavic and that Slavic etymologies can be postulated for the names of the river Vistula, which was well known in antiquity, and the town of Kalisz, which was mentioned by Ptolemy (ca. a.d. 100–178). Let us try to ascertain whether these assumptions can stand up to critical scrutiny. 1.3. Material culture and language. As far as the possibility of identifying the bearers of the Lusatian culture with the Slavs, one must remember that there is no necessary organic connection between material culture and language. Independent historical evidence for the purported connection between the Slavic language and the Lusatian culture is totally miss- ing. Besides, the contrast between the finely shaped and ornamented ceramics of the Lusat- ian era and the unrefined burial jars of the demonstrably Slavic Prague-period pottery (sixth–seventh centuries) is so striking as to render such a connection implausible. Slavic ar- tifacts are also cruder than those of the post-Lusatian cultures of the so-called Roman era, demonstrating the existence of a considerable cultural lag of the Slavs vis-à-vis their Central European predecessors (God]owski 1979:13, 20–21). 2. Polish scholars subscribing to the autochthonous theory include the linguists Lehr-Sp]awin¿ski (1946), Rudnicki (1959–1961), and Nalepa (1968); the historian Hensel (1980); the archaeologists Jaz˙dz˙ewski (1948–1949), Kostrzewski (1962), and Sulimirski (1956); and the anthropologist Czekanowski (1957). It should be noted that the autochthonists’ views have not been favorably received by many scholars. To be noted in particular are a well-argued critique of the autochthonous theory by the Polish archaeologist God]owski (1979) and an overview of the current state of research on the linguistic evidence for the location of the original homeland of the Slavs by Miodowicz (1984). The most recent survey of the problem, including a large bibliography, may be found in Birnbaum’s 1993 review of TrubaSev 1991, Popowska- Taborska 1991, Go]ab 1992, and Man¿czak 1992. 3. It is equally difficult to prove that the Scythian Ploughmen, who were also mentioned by Herodotus, might have been Slavic (Gimbutas 1971:46–53). Copyrighted Material HISTORICAL SETTING · 3 1.4. Were the Veneti Slavic? From various ancient sources we know of three different tribes bearing the name of the Veneti or Venedi.4 A large tribe of the Veneti, first mentioned by Herodotus, lived along the northern shores of the Adriatic Sea. A few surviving place names and brief inscriptions suggest that the Adriatic Veneti spoke an Italic dialect. The mem- ory of the Italic Veneti survives in the names of the province Venetia and the city of Venice. There was also a Celtic tribe of the Veneti living in the Morbihan district of Brittany. Ac- cording to Caesar, the Veneti of Brittany excelled “in the theory and practice of navigation.”5 Today several French place names, such as Vannes or Vendée, remind us of this tribe’s existence. Finally, a tribe of the Veneti was mentioned by Pliny the Elder (a.d. 23–79) who located it along the Vistula. Tacitus (ca. a.d. 55–120) identified the Vistula Veneti as the east- ern neighbors of Germania, while Ptolemy placed them along the southern shores of the Venedic Bay (Ouenedikós kólpos), that is, of the Baltic Sea. The Veneti are also mentioned twice on a Roman road map known as the Tabula Peutingeriana whose protograph may go back to the third or fourth century a.d. Since the Vistula/Baltic Veneti left no written records, their linguistic affiliation can only be gleaned indirectly. Tacitus was alone among the ancient authors to tackle the problem of their ethnic origin. After hesitating whether to classify them as Germanic or Sarmatian, he finally decided in favor of the former on the basis of their cultural similarity with the Germanic peoples. Yet, in most investigations dealing with Slavic prehistory, the Baltic Veneti are not considered Germanic, as Tacitus would have it, or Illyrian, like their namesakes on the Adri- atic, or Celtic, like the Morbihan Veneti. Rather, they are generally regarded as Slavic. To justify such an identification, which if correct would directly confirm the autochthonous theory, three circumstances are mentioned. It is noted, in the first place, that the Veneti of the first and second centuries a.d. and the historic Slavs of the sixth century inhabited the same area. Second, the name of the Veneti has survived in German as Wenden or Winden, where it designates the Slavs who live in the closest proximity of Germany. And, last, the sixth-century Gothic historian Jordanes (1.10) applied the terms Veneti and Slavs to the same ethnic community (Niederle 1923:32–33).

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