THE EUROPEAN STEPPES IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Volume 7
This volume of “The Steppes” has already become the fourth book of the series devoted to the Khazarian time and therefore it testifies for certain results and positive tendencies. First of all, it is the publication of significant corpus of new archaeological sources both excavated long ago and those found recently. It should be noted that the Khazarian problematic, as well as the steppe Early Middle Ages cultures of Southeastern Europe in general, attract attention of more and more scholars from different countries, particularly those who was usually interested in later chronological periods. And the increasing of interest to a culture and history of the Khazarian Qaganate and neighbour steppe states of the Early Middle Ages in Oriental countries such as Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia is especially pleasantly surprising. An interest of scholars from Turkey, Kirghizia, South Korea, Japan studying the Middle Ages is also appreciable. We believe that the time when our oriental colleagues will write interesting and substantial works on this subject is round the corner. Nowadays in these countries in high schools the historical faculties promote such subjects, i.e. post-graduate students prepare their thesis and students write their degree works. We have first-hand knowledge of this tendency due to a direct dialogue with the scholars of the countries, having participated in joint expeditions and the international conferences which have been held in 2007-09 in various regions of the Central Asia. From our point of view, there is also a particle of work of publishing group of “The Steppes” both in development of the Khazarian study and in increasing of interest to it. But along with the advantages, there are also problems in scholar research as it is usual. Thus, many scholars often unfairly skip some essential research steps necessary for preliminary comprehending of an empirical material when they make their cultural-historical generalizations on many subjects of the Early Middle Ages steppe archaeology. It is important to be more accurate when working with reports and museum collections, i.e. to compose summary tables, maps, carry out of examinations, etc. Sometimes processing of a source is rapidly hastened, in other words, one takes from it just obvious information and ignores that which demands more complex analysis. Taking as an example some field reports of excavation of the Ukrainian archaeologists which are still unpublished, it is possible to assert that huge amount of information remains unknown to the learned society so far. Unfortunately, there are even less chances to publish such materials properly every year because researchers’ lack of time and forces and one more often can hear a sad phrase: “I have excavated a lot but have not published much”.
We have got restrictions of other kind in the post-Soviet archeology too, for example, limits of our penetration into a material, a technique of extraction of the information and its correspondence with adjacent sciences. Unfortunately, the banal thing is quite often forgotten, i.e. that whatever weighty facts of written sources we would involve for understanding of peculiarities of material and spiritual cultures, they always should be concerned very cautiously. Especially it is true for researches on ethnogenesis. Some researchers tend to link almost every archaeological object with a certain ethnos but such conclusions, at the best, look just like interesting and courageous versions but not the proved hypotheses. Meanwhile, there always were enough essential problems and directions in archaeology not less important than ethnogenetic researches but much more solvable perspective for today.
The volume contains record number of papers for “The Steppes” – 25 from 5 countries: 11 from Ukraine, 10 from Russia, 2 from Bulgaria, 1 from Austria, and 1 from Hungary. In many respects such a significant volume has resulted from the editorial board’s tendency to publish primary sources mostly, first of all those which had been excavated long time ago (because the information about them is gradually loosing due to some reasons). Contributors were asked to present a maximal detailed description of the monuments. Materials published in the volume have appeared to be very diverse and we decided to group them as usual in some blocks: fortification and building, burial grounds, pottery manufacture, research of textiles and reconstruction of a costume, a complex compound bow, numismatics, etc.
A.V.Yevglevsky
