THE EUROPEAN STEPPES IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Volume 6
It is only after eight years since the series “The European Steppes in the Middle Ages” was launched, that we have succeeded to compile the volume exclusively with materials of the Golden Horde time. There are many reasons why this could not be done earlier. However, there is no need to discuss them in the preface. It can be just pointed out that certain difficulties that arose during the work on the project go back to the 1930-50s. Though the traditional historiography does not present progressive development of the studies of the Golden Horde, accumulation of significant amount of evidence has led to an activation of research which can be observed now. Among the basic determining factors in modern research activity are the views of that part of archaeological and historical community who consider that the Mongolian domination in Southeastern Europe – or, broadly, in the Euroasian Steppe – has directly or indirectly brought to people occupying these extensive territories not only well-known cultural and political cataclysms, but also a number of progressive cultural impulses.
Speaking about the importance of research of the Golden Horde domain and its neighborhood (including towns and nomadic Steppe) from the present point of view, it is necessary to recollect G.A.Fiodorov-Davydov’s opinion significant for the Golden Horde archaeology that the Golden Horde culture “emerged as though on «an empty place», without its own long-term local bases in nomadic environment, … and many features and elements borrowed from different peoples did not merge quite integrally, they were combined rather mechanically, as though «hastily»” (1994). Accepting this position on the whole, we should notice that materials of new archaeological excavations permit to assert that the matter is far from being clear. Anyhow, the Golden Horde culture has become an original reflection of a successful symbiosis of two absolutely different worlds, i.e. an urban civilization and steppe nomadic elements with their special culture and social structure. They functioned as mutually enriching parts of a common historical area. Materials of the volume often imply confirmation of this general understanding of the Golden Horde culturogenesis.
The chronological limits of the volume have appeared to be wider than those usually determining the Golden Horde time. This can be accounted for by the fact that archaeologists in a corpus of widely dated material, for example, the 12th-13th, 13th-14th, or even 12th-14th centuries quite often simply do not dare to separate the Golden Horde layer from the Polovtsian one and therefore, often reasonably expand the dating. Probably, researchers quite often write so because there are no special distinctions between certain nomadic monuments of the 11th-12th cc. and those of the Golden Horde time. This prudence, though does not help scholars who are faced with many problems to solve them, nevertheless, it looks much more comprehensible than a long-time tendency to artificially absolutize the dates of the most expressive complexes which has already taken roots in archaeology. Sometimes researchers absolutely unreasonably refer monuments to this or that well-known historical event which results in appearance of the so-called “sensations”. Alternatively, very often this original vision of the material could hardly be estimated immediately and correctly for a number of reasons.
This situation is not a consequence of only those problems which are to some extent connected with a ‘far from being perfect’ chronological scale of types of the Golden Horde, and especially the pre-Golden Horde time, objects. Everything is much more complicated. In particular, it is very problematic for now to divide into phases some cultural phenomena found, for example, in a funeral rite and usually “served” by not only the same categories of inventory, but also by identical types of things. Having appeared in the Polovtsian time, one or another cultural phenomenon, even in a somehow modified form, could also exist in the Golden Horde period. The problem of analysis of this material consists in the fact that in different Steppe regions the same processes went on with their own peculiarities due to specific cultural, historical, and environmental conditions. At the same time a part of cultural phenomena and the material world accompanying them remained constant per se, though the epoch was different, with its own tendencies.
The volume comprises 20 papers from 5 countries: Russia (11 papers), the USA (4), Great Britain (2), Ukraine (2), and Bulgaria (1). Compiling the editorial portfolio with papers widely involving related historical and scientific disciplines – the policy adopted in the first volume of our “Steppes” – remains unchanged. Therefore, it is not accidental that this volume contains materials on anthropology and numismatics; at the same time, the papers on restoration of a costume, historical ethnography, early forms of religion and history of the Mongolian conquest have appeared for the first time.
A.V.Yevglevsky
