Archaeological Reconstructions of the Ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs in the Scientific Heritage of Volodymyr Baran and Denys Kozak
Abstract
The purpose of the research paper is a comparative analysis of the creative scientific heritage and ethnological criticism of the relevant archaeological reconstructions of the famous Ukrainian researchers V. Baran and D. Kozak, who at the turn of the millennium proposed their own hypotheses about the ethnogenesis and development of Eastern Slavic communities, including the formation of the ‘Ukrainian ethnos’ itself. An important task is also to characterize the excessive nationalization of archaeology and the ideologization of ethnogenetic reconstructions based on purely material artifacts, as demonstrated by the works of these Ukrainian archaeologists.
The scientific novelty. Ukrainian archaeologists still do not have an unambiguous interpretation of the category called ‘archaeological culture’, and even more, there is no theoretical explanation of its identity with ‘ethnicity’. Another vulnerability of archaeological reconstructions is the unjustified politicization of ancient ethnicity, especially in the context of contemporary interethnic relations. Quite often, researchers incorrectly biologize ancient ethnic groups, including ‘Slavic’ ones, while avoiding any theoretical reflections on the phenomenon of ethnic identity in antiquity and the possibilities of its reconstruction by means of modern science. There are also purely terminological difficulties that are not sufficiently articulated, such as the interpretation of such concepts as clan, tribe, union of tribes, chiefdom, nation etc. At the present stage, most versions of the rise and formation of East Slavic communities have been proposed by representatives of archaeological science. Modern Ukrainian archaeology is no exception.
Conclusions. The ethnological analysis of hypotheses concerning the ethnic history of Slavic communities proposed by archaeologists of the so-called ‘Kyiv school’ (in particular, in the scientific heritage of V. Baran and D. Kozak) shows that so far they do not go beyond the positivist methodology of understanding the historical process and are marked by significant schematism, linearity, teleology, and a priori adherence to the postulate of the actual existence of a ‘single ethnic group of Slavs’ in the past. As a result, the schemes of Slavic ethnogenesis available in the contemporary humanitarian discourse of Ukraine are characterized by arbitrariness of constructions, complete hypotheticality, engagement with the ideological moment and preferences of each author, which, however, are present mostly involuntarily, out of habit, rather than declaring any specific ideological attitudes.
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