'The Slavs' was initially a generic name used by the Byzantines and the Late Romans to depict the new Barbarian hoards that invaded the civilized world. As they settled on the imperial soil, they came to be identified more precisely from the 6th c. AD onwards, when Late Roman and Early Byzantine sources distinguished the new 'Barbarian migrants' as the Sclaveni, Venethi, and Antes. Out of these three ethnonyms, the Greek term of Sclavenoi, translated into Latin as Sclaveni, forms the linguistic basis for the modern word 'Slavs'.
Slavic and Ceramics
Ceramic vessels are by far the most used and widely distributed archaeological artifacts: they constitute physical evidence of manufacturing, trade, and cultural exchange between different ethnic groups in Early Medieval and Medieval Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe. As such, they are used as chronological and cultural indicators for these regions. Furthermore, these ceramics are widely distributed on both geographic and temporal scales. Archaeologists have historically interpreted these ceramics as technological products of certain ethnic groups, but these research efforts have not to date included broad regional or supra-regional overviews because of logistical constraints to accessing ceramic collections from the multitude of sites located across the study area. The ceramics that are spread over half of Europe, and especially distinctive of the Germania-Slavica study area, are only described by separate localized taxonomies that are not integrated. They correspond broadly both on spatial and temporal scales, with the area of habitation of early medieval cultural/ethnic groups speaking various dialects of the Slavic linguistical group.
The term 'Slavic' was applied to describe ceramics based on the overlapping temporal and spatial distributions of Slavic-speaking groups and that of ceramic assemblages of distinct manufacture. The distinctiveness of the ceramic assemblages excavated in early medieval strongholds, open settlements, and burial fields was perceived as early as the 19th century by G. C. F. Lisch and R. Virchow; the latter even pioneering the term Burgwallkeramik as the new label of the ceramic group. The homogeneity in style, decoration, and morphology of these ceramic finds permitted A. Götze (1901) and especially C. Schuchhardt (1919), to categorize the ceramic finds on a temporal scale, with Schuchhardt even introducing the first typological construct directly related to the cultural /ethnic Slavic-speaking groups that inhabited the vast expanses of Central and Eastern Europe (he coined the early, middle, and late-Slavic as classification terms for ceramic periodization). The presence of abundant undecorated ceramics in Prague made E. Simek to call this pottery the Veleslavin type, changed afterwards into the Prague type by I. Borkovsky (1940). This term came to denote the earliest type of pottery ever associated with the Slavic-speaking cultural/ethnic groups. Later archaeological research added other terms to define the earliest type of non-decorated ceramics related to the Slavic-speaking groups: typological ceramic labels (relating to cultures in archaeological terminology) such as Korchak-Penkovka-Kolochin in Ukraine, Ipotesti-Candesti-Ciurel in Romania, Dziedzice in Poland, Prague in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and Sukow in Germany, came to denote ceramics similar if not identical with Borkovsky's Prague type. For the Baltic area, where ceramics of this group appear abundantly starting from the Vendel Period (500 - 780 AD) onwards, H. Jankuhn, C. Wilde, and later W. Hübener (1959) replaced the earlier term of 'Slavic or Wendish' ceramics with the ethnically-neutral term 'Baltic Ware'. After K. Godlowski's own chronological assessment, Slavic settlements came to be archaeologically identified as Slavic if they exhibited these three diagnostic features:
1. a particular style in house-building methods (oval/rectangular shape with oven/hearth in the corner)
2. burial grounds overwhelmingly exhibiting simple cremation graves (in the earliest period at least)
3. ceramic assemblages of the Korchak-Penkovka-Kolochin, Ipotesti-Candesti-Ciurel, Prague, Dziedzice, and Sukow type associated with the earlier phases of settlement habitation
As ceramics are one of the main diagnostics of historic Slavic identity, the very existence in archaeological contexts of such ceramic assemblages justified the use of the label Slavic. However, and in spite of the stylistic congruence of these ceramic artifacts, archaeology today cannot answer satisfactorily to questions related to stylistical innovation and transfer, technological diffusion, or cultural emulation of Slavic ceramics. Therefore the primary task of the CTDL is to provide the framework for gathering, correlating, and structuring these vast collections into a coherent database that can be used to pragmatically address major issues like: 1) defining the spatial and temporal distribution of ceramic types over Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe; 2) organizing ceramic type information for particular local studies; 3) characterizing the ceramic technological similarities and differences between Slavic and non-Slavic ethnically inhabited areas; 4) determining if there are correlations between ceramic types, habitation types, and ethnically settled areas; and 5) synthesizing this information to delineate the ceramic distribution and thus the social and political networks that were active in medieval Europe.
October 22, 2007
