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Review:
Paul M. Barford, The Early Slavs. Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe
reviewed by Florin Curta, pp.99-101
Paul M. Barford, The Early Slavs. Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe. (London: The British Museum Press, 2001, xvi + 416 pp., 72 b&w figs., 12 maps, hbk, ISBN 0 7141 2804 X).
How does one write an introduction to the early Slavs? The earliest studies in English (Cross 1948; Dvornik 1956) are long out of print and date and have been replaced by the general accounts of M. Gimbutas (1971), Z. Vana (1983), and B. Chropovsky (1989). P. Dolukhanov (1996) made continuity from
the 'initial Bronze Age settlement to the rise of Kievan Rus' the centerpiece of his assessment of Slavic ethnogenesis. M. Gojda's book (1991) attempts to move away from the interpretive framework of culture history. When looking to other European languages, the history of the early Slavs seems to have become
a popular topic of current research (Pleterski 1990; Goehrke 1992; Sedov 1994; Kazanski 1999; Brather 2001; Dulinicz 2001).
As its jacket announces, the latest offering by P. Barford is one of the few histories of the early Slavs in English. It is, in many respects, a very courageous book. At the outset, this reviewer must declare his interest, for his own recent work (Curta 2001) is critical of traditional approaches and offers a very different
interpretation. Instead of arguing that case again, this review will concentrate on the merits of the present work, while pointing to some of the difficulties surrounding the interpretation advocated therein. It will also leave aside problems associated with the interpretation of Greek, Latin, and Arab literary sources and
concentrate on archaeology.
The author first devotes a good deal of space to 'the formation of a Slav identity', as well as to the 'expansion and assimilation' of the 500s, the 'consolidation and social change' of the600s, and the 'decisive decades' of the eighth and ninth centuries. He then covers the subject proper in seven chapters:
'Daily life'; 'The order of things: social structure'; 'Warfare'; 'Production, consumption, and exchange'; 'Pagan ideologies'; 'Towards a Christian Europe'; 'State-formation' (two chapters), followed by an after-word entitled 'The early Slavs and the modern world,' a select bibliography, and an index. Maps and
drawings illustrate the text effectively, although many labels attached to various parts of the East European map are highly conjectural (e.g. the 'western edge of the Slav settlement' on Fig. 24 or the 'German frontier' on Fig. 68).
The many archaeological projects carried out in several East European countries during the last 50 years form the backdrop for the creation of this book. The author declares that his work responds to 'a strong desire to find out how our ancestors really lived, thought and reacted ("what they were like")' (p. 268). The
reader should be braced, by a glance at the table of contents, for the unequal proportion of attention given to 'culture' and 'society' over 'history'. Like Gimbutas, Barford emphasizes the role of the archaeological evidence. Unlike Gimbutas and Dolukhanov, his approach to the archaeological record is both critical and
sophisticated. Using the narrative sources with care, Barford shifts the emphasis to material culture in a new way. 'The written sources are equal, and not superior, to the unwritten ones and have to be studied in a similar manner' (p. 4). To be sure, Barford's is not a book about archaeological cultures, but a history
book. In many ways, this is a work that continues a long tradition of Altertumskunde established in the field of Slavic studies by L. Niederle (1925), with his 'amalgamation of the historical, archaeological, and ethnographic evidence' (p. 274). Like Niederle, Barford treats archaeology as a historical discipline. Like
Niederle, he speaks of a 'Slav culture' (p. 55) that he attempts to describe by means of such 'themes' as 'dress and hygiene' or 'concepts of time'. Within the same culture-historical paradigm that inspired Niederle, Barford's Slavs are recognizable in the archaeological record primarily by means of pottery,
cremation burials, and 'square sunken-floored buildings with corner ovens' (p. 48). Like Niederle, but unlike Binford, Barford believes that ethnographic data could be used for the reconstruction ceremonies in the Voronezh province of Russia in the 1800s is associated with the sacred oak of the twelfth-century
Obodrites near Lübeck (p. 191). Barford's ambition would have been recognizable to Niederle: to write ethnic history on the basis of a combination of archaeological, linguistic, and ethnographic materials.
In doing so, the author does not explain his basic assumptions for the 'arrival of the first Slav-speaking settlers in the Danube region' (p. 43) - a critical omission for an author claiming that 'linguistic affinity alone is not enough to create ethnic identity' (p. 29). If Barford rejects a 'simplistic
migrationist theory' (p. 43), it appears that he never so much as alludes to the place of origin of his 'first phase of expansion'. But who were the Slavs? Barford's answer offers a smart alternative to the idea that an ethnic group could descend fully-fledged from the Pripet marshes of the north into the lower Danube
region. He rightly points to the archaeological correlate of a 'process of accretion, the initial small groups of Slav-speakers being augmented for various reasons by newcomers from other local populations who then adopted the identities and mores of the new group (a 'created' rather than 'handeddown' identity)' (p.
43). His evaluation of the archaeological evidence is a more nuanced explanation for a complicated picture of eastern Europe during the period that too readily gets subsumed under the title 'Great Migration'. Barford warns here against any determinist approach and few would disagree with that in
principle. It may be, however, that it is more Barford's desire to bring the Slavs from 'somewhere' rather than any firm chronology of archaeological assemblages that has directed his mind on this point. The attentive reader will raise doubts about the dates advanced for the Mogila group in southern Poland (early
sixth century, p. 53) or for the 'Sopki Culture' of north-western Russia (sixth or seventh century, p. 102). In reality, the only sites that could be dated with any degree of accuracy are those of the lower Danube region. Whatever dates exist outside this region for Barford's 'first phase of expansion', they all point to a
later date. Where earlier, the material taken into has little to do with what has been traditionally regarded as 'Prague type'.
What marks Barford's analysis as special is the emphasis he gives to the social organization of the early Slavs (Chapter 6 and passim). He argues that the 'unification' of the Slavs as an ethnic group was related to the creation of pantribal warrior associations (sodalities) and points to the importance of strongholds, a
'settlement type appearing over most of Slavdom by the ninth century' (p. 133). There he finds the evidence of settlement hierarchy and central places, two concepts conspicuously absent in 'Slavic archaeology'. This is an important argument and will need to be considered seriously by all subsequent
work on eastern Europe in the ninth century.
On the conversion to Christianity, Barford is less persuasive. Given the author's keen eye for dubious analogies, it is a little odd to have to remark on his comparison of the 'new ideology' and 'Marxism in the postwar central Europe'. Barford aims for balance; in the postcommunist years, it has become fashionable
to present the role of the Church as a 'civilizing and beneficial advance from the darkness of paganism' (p. 283). In particular, the gap between the known date of conversion and the earliest 'Christian' burials (p. 214) is discussed in the context of the social upheaval triggered by the adoption of Christianity. Here I feel
Barford has gone beyond his own standards in an attempt to reduce religion to ideology. Similarly, the attempt to characterize Slavic society as egalitarian (e.g. pp. 44, 67 and 124) has no support in the existing evidence (literary and archaeological) and contradicts his own model of state formation.
Despite occasional use of central European versions of tribal names attested in Byzantine sources (e.g. Sieverzane instead of Severeis, p. 71), this is a book clearly written for the English-speaking reader. As such, it will be of great assistance to college students, despite its utilization of the culture-historical
approach. In many ways, this is a useful and timely book, bringing together the currently unfolding views of the early Slavs and directing them toward the crucial questions of state formation and conversion to Christianity. It goes probably about as far as we ever can with this kind of approach.
References
BRATHER, S., 2001. Archäologie der westlichen Slawen. Siedlung, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Ostmitteleuropa. Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.
CHROPOVSKY´, B., 1989. The Slavs. Their Significance. Political and Cultural History. Prague: Orbis.
CROSS, S.H., 1948. Slavic Civilization Through the Ages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
CURTA, F., 2001. The Making of the Slavs. History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, ca. 500-700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DOLUKHANOV, P.M., 1996. The Early Slavs. Eastern Europe from the Initial Settlement to the Kievan Rus. London/New York: Longman.
DULINICZ, M., 2001. Ksztatowanie sie owianszczyzny Ponocno-Zachodniej. Warsaw: Instytut Archeologii i Etnologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk.
DVORNIK, F., 1956. The Slavs, their Early History and Civilization. Boston, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
GIMBUTAS, M., 1971. The Slavs. New York/ Washington: Praeger.
GOEHRKE, C., 1992. Die Frühzeit des Ostslawentums. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
GOJDA, M., 1991. The Ancient Slavs. Settlement and Society. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
KAZANSKI, M., 1999. Les Slaves: les origines, Ier-VIIe siecle apres J.-C. Paris: Errance.
NIEDERLE, L., 1925. Slovanske starozˇitnosti. Prague: Nakladem Bursíka & Kohouta.
PLETERSKI, A., 1990. Etnogeneza Slovanov: obris trenutnega stanja arheoloskih raziskav. Ljubljana: Filozofska fakulteta.
SEDOV, V.V., 1994. Slaviane v drevnosti. Moscow: Institut Arkheologii Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk.
VANA, Z., 1983. The World of the Ancient Slavs. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.
Florin Curta
Department of History, University of Florida
Gainesville, FL, USA
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