Download PDF | Mariya Ivanova - The Black Sea and the Early Civilizations of Europe, the Near East and Asia-Cambridge University Press (2013).
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THE BLACK SEA AND THE EARLY CIVILIZATIONS OF EUROPE, THE NEAR EAST AND ASIA
The Black Sea lies at the junction of three major cultural areas: Europe, central Asia and the Near East. It plays a crucial role in enduring discussions about the impact of complex Near Eastern societies on European societies, and the repercussions of early urbanisation across Eurasia. This book presents the first comprehensive overview of the Black Sea region in the prehistoric period. It penetrates artificial boundaries imposed by traditions, politics and language to encompass both the European and Asiatic coasts and both Eastern European and Western scholarly literature. With a critical compilation and synthesis of archaeological data, this study situates the prehistoric Black Sea in a global historical context. By adopting the perspective of technology and innovation, it transcends a purely descriptive account of material culture and emphasises society, human interaction and engagement with the material world.
Mariya Ivanova is a lecturer in Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Heidelberg and research Fellow at the German Archaeological Institute. She has participated in field projects in Turkey and in southeast and central Europe. She is the author of Fortified Settlements in the Balkans, in the Aegean and Western Anatolia, c. 5000-2000 BC and has published articles in Prihistorische Zeitschrift, Oxford Journal of Archaeology and Eurasia Antiqua.
Acknowledgements
“Artists — as also artisans — are itinerant wayfarers. They make their way through the taskscape, as do walkers through the landscape, bringing forth their work as they press on with their own lives. It is in this very forward movement that the creativity of the work is to be found,” wrote Tim Ingold in his essay “The Textility of Making”. In my own experience, this view also applies perfectly well to scholarly work. The writing of this book was a journey both figuratively and literally. At the Institute of Prehistoric and Near Eastern Archaeology in Heidelberg I had the unique privilege to follow unrestrained all paths opened by my curiosity. lam indebted to the German Research Council (DFG) for a research fellowship that allowed me to commit to research without the restrictions of administrative and teaching duties and to Professor Joseph Maran for his continuous support and encouragement at all stages of research and writing. In its initial stage, the present study was stimulated by a six-month-long untroubled and inspiring journey in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East enabled by a Reisestipendium of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI). The book would never have been completed had it not been for the one-year scholarship with which the DAI supported the writing of the manuscript.
J. Rassamakin generously assisted me during my stays in Kiev. To Juri and his colleagues at the Institute of Archaeology in Kiev I express my deepest gratitude. Iam also indebted to many friends and colleagues for supplying me with references and copies, sharing their ideas, offering hospitality and opening for me the doors of excavation storerooms and libraries: Peter Miglus and Adele Bill in Heidelberg; Friedrich Lith and Knut Rassmann in Frankfurt; Sabine Reinhold and Svend Hansen in Berlin; Getzel Cohen, Susan Allen and John Wallrodt in Cincinnati; Natalia Shishlina, Olga Brileva, Jekaterina Devlet and Nikolaj A. Makarov in Moscow; Genadij Toshchev in Zaporyzha; Irina Vdovichenko in Simferopol; Arsen Bobokhyan in Erevan; Levan Dschabaschwili in Tbilisi; Vladimir Slavchev in Varna; Krassimir Leshtakov and Vassil Nikolov in Sofia; and Aydogdy Kurbanov in Ashgabat. Alex Bauer (New York) and Ljubov Kircho (St. Petersburg) kindly supplied copies of their work; Bertille Lyonnet (Paris), Igor Manzura (Kishinev), Juri Rassamakin (Kiev), Oscar Muscarella (New York) and Ulf-Dietrich Schoop (Edinburgh) granted permission to reprint material from their work. My appreciation also goes to all who welcomed and assisted me in the foreign departments of DAI, at excavations and in museums in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
The book is based exclusively on published material, without reference to archives or unpublished artefacts from museum collections. While some secondary literature was also used, my aim was to access all primary publications. I am deeply indebted to the librarians of the Institutes of Prehistoric Archaeology in Tiibingen and Heidelberg; the R6misch-Germanische Kommission of DAI in Frankfurt; the Archaeological Institutes in Kiev and Moscow; the Institute for History of Material Culture in Saint Petersburg; the libraries of DAT in Istanbul, Teheran and Amman; the Archaeological Institutes in Erevan and Tbilisi; the Manfred O. Korfmann Library in Canakkale; the library of the Archaeological Museum in Varna; and the library of the Classics Department and the University Library in Cincinnati. I also acknowledge those who allowed me to see archaeological finds in the storerooms of several research institutions: Natalia Shishlina granted me access to the storerooms of the State Museum of History (GIM) in Moscow, Juri Rassamakin organized the permission for the depot of the Archaeological Institute in Kiev and Olga Brileva generously showed me finds from excavations of the Moscow State Museum for Oriental Art (MINV).
I express my gratitute to my editor at Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Rehl, and to Anastasia Graf, James Dunn and Elise Oranges, who guided me through the process of publication.
My deepest appreciation is due to my husband Gebhard Bieg and my daughter Katharina for their unconditional support and understanding. Without them the completion of this book would never have been possible.
Introduction
[A]t that time this sea was not navigable, and was called “Axine” (inhospitable) because of its wintry storms and the ferocity of the tribes that lived around it, and particularly the Scythians, in that they sacrificed strangers, ate their flesh, and used their skulls as drinking-cups; but later it was called “Euxine” (the hospitable), when the Ionians founded cities on the seaboard. Strabo, Geography 73.6
The clear-cut outlines of the almost completely landlocked Black Sea bring to mind another geographical unit, the Mediterranean. Historians and archaeologists exploring the Black Sea often have been tempted to resort to ideas developed for the Mediterranean region (see Ozveren 2001; Doonan 2009). However, the Black Sea is not the miniature of its southern neighbour: it is a region of striking ecological contrasts. The southern and eastern coastlands are a warm and humid country cut off from the outside world by the foggy and heavily forested chains of the Pontic Alps and the Caucasus. The north and northwest littoral of the Black Sea could not be in more contrast: an arid, grass-covered temperate plain which extends for hundreds of kilometres into the interior of the continent. Neither did the Black Sea ever develop into a cohesive region of culture and trade comparable to the Mediterranean world.
The region actually enjoyed several short periods of political and economic integration, but the stimulus always came from outsiders who sought to exploit the Black Sea as a supplier of staples and exotic goods. Unity arose either by the initiative of foreign settlers, as in the period of the Greek colonies in Antiquity and of the Italian merchant cities at the end of the Middle Ages, or by the political will of the Mediterranean empire which happened to control the Straits.’ Today, research in the Black Sea region is informally divided between several disciplines, which are funded by separate grant-making bodies (see King 2004, 4). The southern littoral is treated as a part of the Middle East; the west is studied together with the Balkans, while the northern and eastern coasts belong to the vague field of “research in the former Soviet Union”.
If peoples around the Black Sea never had a common history, except for the brief periods of intervention from the larger Mediterranean world, does it make sense to study the Black Sea as a unit in prehistory? External observers have expressed a spectrum of opinions of the Black Sea. It has been described as an isolated and hostile region on the far-off periphery of the known world, its indigenous peoples as backward and ignorant (Braudel 1966, 110; see also King 2004, 44, 65).2 More significantly, the Black Sea has been conceived as a frontier, the zone along a political boundary, which is characterized by harsh conditions and inhabited by distinct “frontier” communities, serving as a buffer between the civilized world and the barbarians (see King 2004, 8-11; Ascherson 1995, 8, 60-64).
There is also the view of the Black Sea as a plaque tournante (turntable) for the empires of the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the Eurasian steppes (Bratianu 1944). At the end of the Middle Ages, for example, when the steppes between the Danube and China fell under Mongol rule and the northern branch of the overland trade route to China was reopened, the Black Sea was transformed into a focal point in European trade with Persia, India and the Far East. For a short period Black Sea trade rivalled in global importance the largest trading ports of the Mediterranean (Ozveren 2001, 75; King 2004, 87-90). In the late nineteenth century, the region attained an equally important political role as a part of the “Eastern Question”. Yet the most fruitful idea of the Black Sea is probably the image of a bridge. Most obviously, the Eurasian steppes represent a geographical corridor connecting inner Asia and Europe. Moreover, in historical times, major overland trade routes from Central and Eastern Asia to Europe ended at the eastern Black Sea ports of modern Azov (Tana), Batumi and Trabzon (Trapezund), while the large rivers emptying into it acted as channels leading deep into the interior of Europe. It is this unique position of the Black Sea at the crossroads of Asia and Europe that makes it more than an arbitrarily circumscribed area and a meaningful unit of analysis.
THE SOVIET SEA
For most of the twentieth century, Black Sea archaeology developed under the shadow of the Soviet empire? The unchallenged explanatory framework for all historical disciplines, including archaeology, was the official ideology of historical materialism (Trigger 1989, 235 f.). The writings of Marx did not provide many clues for the study of pre-class societies. Hence, Marxist study of prehistory was constrained only by the basic principles of Marx’s philosophy, especially the recognition of change in the means (“forces”) and relations of production as the principal source of change in human society (Trigger 1989, 219 f.).
However, since conformity to the official ideology and to the policy of the Communist Party was closely overseen, many scholars were reluctant to engage with theoretical issues, which might have easily become politically dangerous. In the later decades of the Soviet period, the compilation and description of data in the tradition of cultural history dominated in archaeology. In field practice, the primary aim of reconstructing (Marxist) history encouraged an excavation strategy with large horizontal exposures. Together with the conduction of huge long-term salvage projects in the areas of industrial construction, this practice created an enormous body of archaeological data that was never sufficiently analysed and published. These peculiarities of theory and practice in Soviet archaeology strongly discouraged the writing of syntheses.
The fall of the Iron Curtain was followed by a period of economic crisis and ethnic conflicts in the Black Sea. A sharp decrease in state funding brought fieldwork virtually to a halt (see Dolukhanov 1993). Theoretical research also experienced difficult times. The theoretical framework of Marxism became unpopular, although there were no alternative explanatory models to replace it. On one side, the archaeologists were more concerned about mere survival than about theoretical sophistication (see Anthony 1995). The sections for theoretical research were among the first to close due to financial shortages (see Koryakova 2002, 245). On the other side, the abuse of Marxism for the purposes of political indoctrination led in the later decades of the Soviet period to a veritable trend of “methodological nihilism”, a deep mistrust for any involvement with theoretical issues (Rassamakin 2002b, 274). Archaeological research focused on data description, and especially on the analysis of unpublished materials from past field expeditions. Thus, while the political and linguistic boundaries between the East and West have become less impermeable in the recent two decades, the methodological and conceptual divide between former Soviet and Western (especially Anglo-American) archaeology has yet to be negotiated.
THE BLACK SEA BETWEEN EUROPE AND THE ORIENT
This book is a comprehensive study of the Black Sea littoral in the prehistoric period, from the arrival of the first farmers in the sixth millennium to the beginning of the Bronze Age in the early third millennium Bc. Its main concern, however, is the fourth millennium, the best-studied and indeed the most significant period in the early prehistory of the Black Sea.
The fourth millennium was a time of dynamic change that witnessed one of the key events in the history of the Old World: the emergence of the first urban centres in Southwest Asia. Gordon Childe described urbanization as the transformation of small self-sufficient, kin-based villages into large complex societies supporting bureaucracy, full-time craft specialists and long-distance trade (Childe 1934; see Childe 1950, with a summary). Childe was the first to call attention to the “revolutionary” character of the process of urbanisation and to its wide repercussions across Eurasia. The effects of this major event on continental Europe were further pursued by Andrew Sherratt, who focused mainly on technological innovation in food acquisition and nutrition (see Sherratt 1997, 2002).4 The “second generation” of plant and animal products and the new technologies of animal-powered tillage and transportation, which emerged in the urban core and reached Europe in the course of the fourth millennium, Sherratt argues, profoundly changed the economy and the culture of its neolithic inhabitants. The innovations triggered an expansion of the settled area from the river valleys into the interfluve zone and an enlargement of the pastoral sector (Sherratt 1993).
Strategically situated between the Middle East and Europe, the Black Sea might have played an important role for the spread of technological innovations during the fourth millennium Bc. The aim of this study is to explore the Black Sea as a case study for the transmission, adoption and impact of technological innovation on European societies in prehistory.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND CONCEPTS
“Traditional” archaeologists study past societies and their technology by describing the variation in archaeological data in time and space and making empirical generalizations. The positivist reorientation in Anglo-American archaeology of the 1960s brought about a dramatic reaction against this standard approach. Patterns in material culture were now considered to reflect behavioural responses to environmental constraints; the “processual” archaeology of the 1970s and 1980s claimed to reconstruct the processes which happened in the past by investigating the linkages between the environment, human behaviour and the material record. Material studies, not only of artefact variability but also of technological variation, were considered obsolete by most adherents of the processual school unless they could be employed in support of theoretical generalizations (see Stark 1998, 3 f.).
A recent revival of studies of past technology in itself owes much intellectual inspiration to the French theoretical tradition, especially to the school of cultural technology which emerged in France in the early 1970s as a collaboration between ethnologists, ethno-archaeologists and experimental researchers and was inspired by the theoretical writings of Mauss (1936) and his student Leroi-Gourhan (1943). Its members advocate a “technological” approach to technology, based on the awareness of the physical phenomena that take place during technical action (Lemonnier 1992, 27).° They put emphasis on the exact and complete account of technological information and have developed a recording tool which treats technology not as a compilation of isolated lifeless objects but as a sequence of actions and gestures, a chaine operatoire7 Moreover, French anthropology of technology does not assume a divide between society and technology. Its proponents argue that technology is a system of actions that are guided by human choices and are embedded in a social system of meanings (see Lemonnier 1986; 1992, 86).° The notions about technology on which this book is based derive from the French technologie culturelle and from the works of Ingold (1999, 2000, 2010).
A principal concern of the book is the holistic approach to technology. Observations of living technological systems show that the practice of “extracting” single technologies and studying them in isolation does not promote adequate understanding of past technological endeavours (cf. Sillar and Tite 2000, 14; Lemonnier 1986, 151).
What archaeological analysis habitually treats as separate technological areas (for example the processing of food, clay, bone, metal and stone) is actually a set of interdependent activities. Interdependence arises simply from the fact that practitioners of different crafts share and borrow from each other strategies of raw material procurement, tools and operations. Yet more significant than these superficial links is the common mental template that underlies and binds all techniques of a particular human group. Leroi-Gourhan (1945, 340, 344-345) demonstrated that this milieu technique is coherent with the general mental traditions of a given society and is embedded in a specific natural environment. In a similar line, Pfaffenberger (1988, 245) argued that the analysis of technology “requires at least a working knowledge of a society’s biological environment, history, social organization, political system, economic system, international relations, cultural values and spiritual life. Such analyses are by no means easy; they require nothing less than a commitment to situate behaviours and meanings in their total social, historical and cultural context. Yet nothing less will suffice if we seek to illuminate the nature and consequences of our attempts to humanize nature”.
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
This study begins with an overview of the natural environment in the Black Sea littoral in the first chapter. Chapter 2 introduces the notions of technology and technological innovation and considers the factors that influenced the spread and adoption of innovations. Chapter 3 offers a brief account of the key technological innovations that accompanied the emergence of farming in Southwest Asia and reviews the evidence for their spread into the littoral of the Black Sea in the sixth and fifth millenniums Bc. In Chapters 4 through 7, I focus on the fourth millennium and zoom in to details to situate the technology of the Black Sea inhabitants in their environmental, social and cultural contexts. Finally, Chapter 8 zooms out to the global picture and offers a discussion about the role of the Black Sea in the transmission of technological knowledge and experience between Europe and the Orient.
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