THE EUROPEAN STEPPES IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Volume 8
Following the traditional chronological arrangement of the papers, the eighth volume of the “Steppes” continues the publication of both the developed interpretations of finds of expeditions and purely analytical researches on medieval archeology of Eastern European steppes. This time the collection is devoted to the Golden Horde time.
It was not long ago when serial collections of articles on the Golden Horde, which included finds on archeology, numismatics, epigraphy, art, historical anthropology and combination of these disciplines, were published in Kazan only (the “Tatar archaeology”). Then “Steppes” – volume 3 (2003) and volume 6 (2008) – appeared. And today we can gladly introduce one more Kazan interdisciplinary series “The Golden Horde Civilization” which obviously will be published annually. The first two numbers were published in 2008 and 2009. Along with these editions there is a permanently increasing number of papers which are being published in different chronologically mixed collections, and monographs also appear from time to time. All these facts testify to an appreciable rise of interest in the Golden Horde studies. But what is this revival caused by? Whether it was just a consequence of quite natural reasons, i.e. a substantial growth of the source base, popularization of medieval steppe archaeology in the post-Soviet space and an opportunity to write everything a researcher wants about the Golden Horde today, or some ideological and political purposes and tendencies are also involved? Perhaps, the last factor should not be completely ignored because there are realities of our life when one priority is replaced by others. However, we want to believe that historical objectivity of interpreting the archaeological facts will not depend on this. This activity in the Golden Horde studies has become a long-expected phenomenon for those who are interested in the subject.
Each of the abovementioned Golden Horde series obviously has its own identity, goals and new perspective publishing plans. These series also differ by the original “disciplinary line”. Thus, whereas the problematic of the “Tatar archeology” is rather diverse (despite of the title) and the “Steppes” considers, first of all, archaeological finds, it is clear that the main task of “The Golden Horde Civilization” series is reconstruction of the history of the Golden Horde Empire and its noticeable glorification.
The preface is not a proper place to argue about the tastes and priorities of any publishing projects. It will be useful and interesting to move together in parallel, expanding and supplementing a research field by new arguments and versions. Nevertheless, certain points concerning the methodology of research still should be highlighted.
None of the experts challenges a great influence of the Golden Horde on the destinies of cultures and peoples of the Southeastern Europe, and it is common knowledge today. In our opinion, the question whether the Horde deserves the high-sounding epithet “the Golden Horde civilization” or not, which has been recently disputed at scholarly gatherings, is not so important. Anyway, these disputes seem to be fruitless because “arguments” of both sides are based rather on impressions and emotions than on strict criteria of the level of a state development. From our point of view, all the researchers engaged in a study of historical sources have faced, are facing and will face the problem of their methodologically competent publication, and everything else is secondary to that.
The editorial board of the “Steppes” as well as that of the Kazan series aspires to publish in their books the sources supplied with a comprehensive analysis, though we differ with the editor-in-chief of “The Golden Horde Civilization” Ilnur Mirgaleyev in that historical interpretation directly follows from the archaeological finds. Besides, historical interpretation, in our opinion, can be neither a primary, nor a secondary part of research, and what is more, nor its fundamental part, as our colleague argues, but it is always only explanatory, hypothetical and in many aspects subjective because a researcher inevitably adjusts his ideas to dead artefacts of archaeological culture. I.M.Mirgaleyev’s thesis that “archaeology is no more than an auxiliary discipline for the Middle Ages [put in bold by me - À.Ye.], because the Middle Ages including the Golden Horde are rather well described in written sources, there is a great historiography on the subject” (Mirgaleyev I.M., 2009, The Golden Horde Civilization, vol. II, p.7) looks at least a delusion. According to I.M.Mirgaleyev, the archaeology of the preliterate period is a full-fledged historical discipline for the longer period of mankind’s cultural development, whereas for the shorter (literate) period it is auxiliary. Apparently, the colleague proposes willy-nilly a certain “compromise”, a new view of the “old dispute” about the status of archaeology, a question, which was solved long ago (see Leo Klejn’s works, for example, “Introduction in Theoretical Archaeology”, SPb., 2004). This is not the case of the golden mean when the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Archaeology is traditionally divided into the preliterate and literate periods, though this subdivision is merely chronological, including the preliterate periods of Stone and Bronze Ages, on the one hand, and the literate periods (i.e. antiquity and the Middle Ages), on the other. Each of these two big chronological parts of the cultural past has its own regularities and features, but this cannot justify the division of archaeology into auxiliary and basic parts. However, archaeology can be called an “auxiliary discipline”, though not in the sense of its structural subordination to history, but only as a supplier of facts translated into the language of history. Every discipline is to a certain extent auxiliary and often mutually to another discipline. It is obvious that each kind of sources, including the written ones, can provide no comprehensive idea about society and culture, about events of the past. This is the subject for further research.
The book includes 13 papers: from Ukraine (4), Russia (8) and one joint paper by Ukrainian and Russian experts. As in the previous volumes of the series, the eighth volume contains papers not on purely archaeological problems, but also on the related subjects, such as historical geography, Juchi numismatics, and historical and technological study of textiles.
A.V.Yevglevsky
