Our present knowledge of the origin of the Slavs is, to a large extent, a legacy of the nineteenth century. A scholarly endeavor inextricably linked with forging national identities, the study of the early Slavs remains a major, if not the most important, topic in East European historiography. Today, the history of the Slavs is written mainly by historians and archaeologists, but fifty or sixty years ago the authoritative discourse was that of scholars trained in comparative linguistics. The interaction between approaches originating in those different disciplines made the concept of (Slavic) ethnicity a very powerful tool for the “politics of culture.” That there exists a relationship between nationalism, on one hand, and historiography and archaeology, on the other, is not a novel idea. What remains unclear, however, is the meaning given to (Slavic) ethnicity (although the word itself was rarely, if ever, used) by scholars engaged in the “politics of culture.” The overview of the recent literature on ethnicity and the role of material culture shows how far the historiographical discourse on the early Slavs was from contemporary research in anthropology and, in some cases, even archaeology.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SLAVIC ETHNICITY

Slavic studies began as an almost exclusively linguistic and philological enterprise. As early as 1833, Slavic languages were recognized as Indo-European.