TWO CHAPTERS OF THE SOVIETIZATION OF THE ROMANIAN ARCHAEOLOGY (from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s) (ENG) (original) (raw)
History of science and technology
The article is dedicated to an exploration of archaeological theory issues at the Institute of archaeology AS UkrSSR in the 1960s. This period is one of the worst studied in the history of Soviet archaeology. But it was the time when in the USSR archaeological researches reached the summit, quantitative methods and methods of natural sciences were applied and interest in theoretical issues had grown in archaeology. Now there are a lot of publications dedicated to theoretical discussions between archaeologists from Leningrad but the same researches about Kyiv scholars are still unknown. The archaeological theory includes both generalizations made on the basis of archaeological sources and archaeological methodology. The article emphasizes the history of methodology studies at the IA AS UkrSSR during the mentioned period. The research is based on evidence from the annual reports on a work of the Institute from the Scientific archive of the Institute of Archaeology NASU. According to t...
Since the fall of communism in 1989 and even after joining the European Union in 2007, Romania has been in a constant political, economic, social and cultural transition. This has had strong positive and negative effects on research, including archaeological research. The transition allowed Romania to join the international archaeological community and benefit from its wide range of opportunities. Thus, international collaborations have been established, archaeologists have been introduced to new research methods, and offered various academic mobilities and grants. In short, archaeological knowledge and information have been rapidly and extensively exchanged. Despite this, the Romanian archaeological community is somewhat stuck between an open, dynamic and global society, and the rigid, slowly transitioning government administration and often autocratic public institutions which frequently see the modern and the new as threatening. Archaeologists have to meet the expectations of the system (the institution) in which they work, of the community they live in, and of themselves. Thus, there is a (mostly inner) conflict between the archaeologist as a member of modern society, and the archaeologist as a member and representative of the public institution. How do Romanian archaeologists perceive this situation and their role today? Do they have authority and power or are just made to believe they have? Who is in fact creating and influencing heritage discourses? How did heritage discourses change over the last 28 years in Romania? What was and is the role of archaeologists in this change? The aim of this paper is to present and analyse power relationships and heritage discourses in Romanian archaeology over the last three decades, through qualitative interviews with archaeologists, from early career researchers to experts in the field, with background in museums, academia, and government institutions.
2018
Early Hungarian history, better known as Hungarian prehistory, is a research area with scarce written sources. Consequently, archaeology, as a scientifi c discipline boasting a rapidly increasing number of sources, may acquire signifi cant importance in this area. This is a fact even if from a methodological perspective, the historical and ethnic assessment of archaeological fi ndings must satisfy much stricter criteria than before. To arrive at a reliable historical interpretation, we would need to be familiar with the ethnic identity of the original owners of the archaeological fi ndings as well as with their political affi liation, which obviously surpasses the scope of archaeology. Nevertheless, thorough knowledge about the contemporary, signifi cant archaeological diff erences between the Eastern European grassy and forest steppes, forest regions, and the microregions of the former makes it possible to research migration with traditional archaeological methods. Completing our i...
Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archaeology in the Light of its History / Nathan Schlanger and Jarl Nordbladh (eds.). – New-York. Oxford. , 2008
From the 1930s onward, official Soviet historiography displayed a critical attitude towards the Russian archaeology of the first third of the twentieth-century, singling it out for its empiricism, eclecticism and absence of theoretical or methodological approaches. This idea, first set out by V.I. Ravdonikas in his ‘For a Marxist History of Material Culture’ (1930) was for more than half a century the mainstream view enforced upon successive generations of archaeologists. L. Klejn (1993) undertook a shrewd and witty analysis of ‘The Phenomenon of Soviet archaeology’ from the 1930s to the 1980s, but the same ideological demystification remains to be done for ‘the phenomenon of Pre-Soviet archaeology’. Besides using published sources, it is also essential to draw on archival material. These confirm the considerable activities of Russian archaeology in the 1920s, notably those associated with V.A. Gorodtsov, and those belonging to the ‘Paleoethnological’ school, including the pioneering use of statistics, ethnographic analogies and other methods. Altogether, this re-evaluation confirms that it is our role as historians to take on board relevant socio-political conditions and to seek to overcome the stereotypes and myths inherited from the recent past.
The End of History and Polish Archaeology after the Fall of Communism
Archaeology and neoliberalism, 2016
This chapter deals with Polish archaeology after the fall of communism. Two issues are discussed: (a) recent theoretical and practical research tendencies among Polish archaeologists, and (b) how the fall of communism contributed to making the archaeological. The material heritage of communism, the huge transformations caused by its collapse, the ruination and decay of factories, state agricultural farms, entire towns and villages, among others, also deserve archaeological attention and approach. Accordingly, the main conclusion of this chapter is that instead of analysing theoretical and practical research tendencies in Polish archaeology after the fall of communism, it would be more productive to start doing research on archaeological sites related to communism in Poland, its fall and material aftermaths. This is the task that Polish archaeology has to face in a near future.
2018
Early Hungarian history, better known as Hungarian prehistory, is a research area with scarce written sources. Consequently, archaeology, as a scientific discipline boasting a rapidly increasing number of sources, may acquire significant importance in this area. This is a fact even if from a methodological perspective, the historical and ethnic assessment of archaeological findings must satisfy much stricter criteria than before. To arrive at a reliable historical interpretation, we would need to be familiar with the ethnic identity of the original owners of the archaeological findings as well as with their political affiliation, which obviously surpasses the scope of archaeology. Nevertheless, thorough knowledge about the contemporary, significant archaeological differences between the Eastern European grassy and forest steppes, forest regions, and the microregions of the former makes it possible to research migration with traditional archaeological methods. Completing our investigation with natural scientific methods, we may have a lot more to say about these matters than our predecessors. For archaeology, the fundamental question about the early Hungarian history has remained the same to this day: from the archaeological findings of the territory stretching from the Urals to the Carpathian Basin, i.e. west of the Western Siberian proto-homeland hypothesized earlier based on linguistic arguments, what links can be made to the early medieval ancestors of Hungarians? Or in other words, can the location of the individual settlement areas – hypothesized on the basis of the written sources – be confirmed in light of the more recent archaeological findings? Moreover, do the origins and the system of relations of the findings from the Age of the Conquest direct researchers primarily towards the east, and if yes, to what extent? To answer these questions, two research methodologies have essentially been developed in the course of over 100 years. One of them proceeds from the Urals towards the Carpathians, referred to as the linear method, while the retrospective method takes the 10th century heritage of the Carpathian Basin as a point of reference and guides the researchers in finging the Eastern European antecedents. In my article, I will go over the latest archaeological findings based on the latter.
CAS Working Paper Series, 2024
This paper attempts to situate within the context of Romanian archaeology the activities of the Spring Schools conducted under the international research program (2021–2023) “The Construction of Knowledge in Archaeology and Art History in Southeastern Europe,” focusing on the schools’ aim of contributing to the development of critical thinking in the archaeologies of the region. It first notes that the issue of the need for critical thinking, and consequently for archaeological theory, was raised in Romania approximately a quarter of a century ago, but the number of those interested in this topic has not increased significantly since then. In an attempt to explain why this happened, the paper then situates the evolution of the local debates around critical thinking within the wider context of post-state socialism Romanian archaeology. It argues that the rejection of the topic is not due to a lack of resources to keep up with the Western race for ever-newer theories and methods (pace Ribeiro and Giamakis), but rather to the fact that critical thinking is not advantageous for career promotion and power acquisition within the profession. The chances that the younger generations of Romanian archaeologists will show greater interest in critical thinking and select from the ever-increasing number of innovations available to archaeologists are slim. Nevertheless, the Spring Schools endeavoured to keep this interest alive through lectures, workshops, colloquia, publication of their proceedings, and – last but not least – the professional prestige of the participants
The present paper has no ambitions to be exhaustive. We will try to present some of the main trends, respectively problems in the development, in the last fifteen years, of the archaeology of the Thracian lands from the end of the Prehistoric period up to the Late Antiquity. Due to objective reasons, the text has some essayistic elements, at the expense of listing facts and statistics. The latter could be found in the bibliographic references of our professional editions. Many of the trends and phenomena considered below are largely the same as those regarding the archaeological investigations of prehistoric and medieval sites, as in many cases the investigations of complex multilayered sites and the respective publications are interconnected and inseparable in terms of general history and modern institutions. While the Prehistory would consider 15 years only a twinkling, in Classical times such a period is longer than it took Alexander the Great to defeat and conquer Persia, to create an empire that comprised half of the Old World, and to lay the foundations of a new political and cultural era, the Hellenistic Period. Standing at the limits of this period – the last 15 years – we lack the distance that is necessary for to make an adequate evaluation. However, as we know the importance of what we, being professionals (at least we hope we are), are going to do in the coming decisive and crucial years, we decided it was worth it to answer several fundamental (groups of) questions: I. What did the transition predefine and change in Bulgarian archaeologists' mentality and research conduct? II. What was left behind, what was preserved, and what new appeared in the conditions of work? III. Which approaches and methods should we preserve and what should we change, regarding the modern development and the realization of the professional community, as well as the sites that should be investigated and socialized? The answers of these groups of questions are intertwined with prognoses about future perspectives. In various ways and at various levels they pertain to several problems: the attitude to the subject of study; the educational level and the intellectual conditions that exist for the work and development of the professional community; the organization (institutional) and self-organization of the Bulgarian archaeologists; the ways the process of research is financed – from investigations on the terrain to final publications; the financing and the