TWO CHAPTERS OF THE SOVIETIZATION OF THE ROMANIAN ARCHAEOLOGY (from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s) (ENG) (original) (raw)
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Late Iron Age archaeology in Romania and the politics of the past
Dacia N.S., 2015
The paper approaches the topic of nationalism in relation to the Late Iron Age archaeology of Romania. It is argued that nationalist agendas have played a significant role in the development of Late Iron Age scholarly work since the beginnings of the discipline in the 19th century and particularly after the start of the 20th century. This phenomenon took extreme forms during Nicolae Ceauşescu’ national-communist regime and continues today, albeit, with reduced intensity. For illustrative purposes, four main ideas are discussed in connection to Late Iron Age Romanian archaeology: the assumed unity of the Late Iron Age inhabitants, referred to as Dacians; the Dacians as ancestors of modern Romanians; the issue of ethnic labelling in Late Iron Age archaeology; and finally the implicit superiority of the Dacians. Although the relationship between nationalism and archaeology should not be condemned intrinsically, in the case of Romania such a link is problematic because of three factors: the belief in the scientific character of the discipline; the lack of theoretical discussions on ethnicity; and the archaeologists’ denial of political responsibility for their research. This strategy has led most Late Iron Age scholars to retreat to the “ivory tower”of positivist research, allowing for a large number of non-academic publications about the Dacians to flood the internet and bookshops.
MANIFESTO FOR THE ROMANIAN PUBLIC ARCHAEOLOGY
In this paper I shall only discuss a few of the problems of archaeology in Romania from the perspective of my one-year experience as member and vice-president of the National Commission of Archaeology. My goal here is to attempt to systematize the discussions during the meetings and round tables of the year that has just passed. The meetings were held in Bucharest, in the building of the Ministry of Culture, and some, in Cluj-Napoca, Caransebeș, and Iași. The meetings of the commission were completed with three round tables meant to facilitate dialogue with the local communities interested in patrimony issues Thus, I shall speak of the manner in which archaeology is publicly perceived and the manner in which the National Commission of Archaeology is perceived inside the community of archaeologists.
ActaMN 57,1, 2020
The aim of this paper is to make a critical evaluation of the Romanian historiography from 1948–1989 which had as a subject of study the social history of the northern Balkan communities in the Late Iron Age period. The two years that I have chosen have both a symbolical and a chronological value. The year 1948 marks the beginning of an extensive and radical process of political, economic, social, and cultural changes, while the year 1989 symbolizes the fall of the Romanian “communist” regime. I propose a contextual analysis, which takes into account the evolution of the “communist” regime, as well as some key events that shaped the discourse. Through this evaluation, I want to intervene in the symbolic struggles that had as a final stake the Late Iron Age archaeology from Romania. Without claiming an objective analysis, I want to offer an alternative to the distorted portrayals which had existed so far. Although labelled as a “Communist” or “Marxist” historiography, it never strayed too far from the nationalist ideology, creating massive distortions along its way. In almost 50 years, the Romanian Late Iron Age historiography has gone from a formal and superficial application of Marxist theories, to a relative liberalization, and finally returned to an almost right‑wing discourse over the Dacian past. Moreover, I will show, in contrast to the classical post‑Communist view that the Late Iron Age archaeology in Romania was in touch, at least at some point, to the contemporary historiographical debates.
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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.
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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...
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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.