Download PDF | Aleksander Bursche, John Hines, Anna Zapolska - The Migration Period between the Oder and the Vistula (Volumes 1 & 2)-Brill (2020).
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Introduction
Aleksander Bursche
The present volume concludes six years of interdisciplinary studies completed under Project Maestro (2012–2018), funded by the National Science Centre in Poland and coordinated by the University of Warsaw. The focus of this research was the settlement situation in the territory between the Oder and the Vistula rivers during the Migration Period, that is late 4th–late 6th c. AD,1 which has been insufficiently considered, and even seriously misrepresented in the past. Our aim was to address this group of issues with minds free of preconceptions and make our findings widely accessible, especially to an international community.
The Migration Period between the Odra and the Vistula Project (subsequently MPOV) was implemented by a team of fifteen researchers from four disciplines: archaeology, history, numismatics and palynology, associated with seven universities and museums in Poland:2 dr hab. Anna BitnerWróblewska (Warsaw), dr hab. prof. UW Bartosz Kontny (Warsaw), prof. dr hab. Małgorzata Latałowa (Gdańsk), dr hab. prof. UG Henryk Machajewski (Gdańsk), prof. dr hab. Magdalena Mączyńska (Kraków), Sławomir Miłek (Kalisz), dr Anna Pędziszewska (Gdańsk), dr Marzena Przybyła (Kraków), dr Bartłomiej Rogalski (Szczecin), Marcin Rudnicki (Warsaw), dr hab. prof. UŁ Jan Schuster (Łódź), dr Joanna Święta-Muszynicka (Gdańsk), dr hab. prof. UR Marcin Wołoszyn (Rzeszów/Leipzig), dr Anna Zapolska (Warsaw) and dr Marcelina Zimny (Gdańsk).
The work was coordinated by prof. dr hab. Aleksander Bursche (Warsaw). Most of the Project Team members have contributed texts to the present volume. The Project Team was advised by members of an international Steering Committee in the persons of prof. Karl-Ernst Behre (Wilhelmshaven), prof. dr. hab. Claus von Carnap-Bornheim (Schleswig), prof. dr. hab. Andrzej Kokowski (Lublin), prof. dr. hab. Ulla Lund Hansen (Copenhagen) and prof. dr. hab. Piotr Kaczanowski (Kraków), replaced after his premature death in 2015 by dr. hab. Judyta RodzińskaNowak (Kraków). One of the main tasks planned and implemented within the Project was archaeological and archaeobotanical fieldwork carried out in two regions of Poland: the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland and Western Pomerania (Map 0.1). The choice of these regions was dictated by the special role these regions have for MPOV studies. The archaeological record from the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, most notably from cave sites, consists of heterogeneous materials, mostly with origins outside the region, which mark the onset of the Migration Period.
In Western Pomerania we find archaeological materials understood previously to represent the latest horizon of Germanic settlement in what is now Poland, datable to the beginning of the 6th c. However, this view was soon challenged by the findings of the project research showing that these communities are still to be found at a later date in Kujawy (Kuyavia), even as late as the 7th c. In the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland the site selected for investigation was the Hanging Man Cave in the Kroczyce-Okupne Massif, Zawiercie district (Map 0.2, site 4). Since the beginning of the 21st c. this had produced some remarkable archaeological evidence dating to the early Migration Period. In Western Pomerania the focus of research was Suchań in Stargard district (Map 0.2, site 6), the site of the discovery in 2006 of artefacts belonging to a scattered hoard from the late 5th c. The other site investigated in that region is Karsibór in Świnoujście district (Map 0.2, site 3), the findspot of a ploughedout, early 6th-century hoard of Roman solidi which continued to surface piecemeal through much of the 19th c. and has a rich archival record, now in the National Museum in Szczecin. This archival record served as a point of departure for an attempt to locate the original place of deposition of the hoard.
The first two sites were subjected to a regular archaeological excavation, while the site at Karsibór was investigated by surface survey. Palynological studies have included field and laboratory work, the latter making it possible to use data from previously analysed sites for the purpose of the Project. The key aim of the fieldwork was to identify potential palynological sites in the area around Suchań and in the vicinity of the Hanging Man Cave. This search was unsuccessful due to the absence of natural waterbodies in the study areas and the absence of the Late Holocene peat deposits caused by drainage and peat extraction in the wetlands. Archaeobotanical “on-site” work ran alongside the excavations in the Hanging Man Cave. Unfortunately, these studies were limited to the cultural layer which, following 14C dating of the carpological material, turned out to date from a later time than the Migration Period. In this situation the focus was shifted to supplementary analyses and complementary 14C dating of a number of earlier analysed profiles from personal research work, and obtaining new, unpublished data from regions of particular interest (e.g., Pyrzyce Lowland, Suwałki Lakeland) from other scholars. Ultimately, data from 52 palynological sites were used for the purpose of the Project MPOV. An assemblage of human bones excavated in the Hanging Man Cave was subjected to analysis, the cranial fragments in particular.
The latter were 14C dated, the teeth analysed for strontium content. The results of the archaeological investigations published in this volume have the nature of representative case studies. The environmental context of settlement change is discussed in a separate synthetic chapter. Several visits were paid to museums and archives in Poland and abroad, particularly in Germany (in Berlin and Schleswig), Scandinavia (Stockholm and Rønne on Bornholm) and Russia (in St. Petersburg), to find and examine archival documentation about archaeological discoveries and artefacts which no longer survive today or are made available for research. Unfortunately, despite great efforts, we did not succeed in accessing Migration Period artefacts deriving from our study region, Pomerania and Silesia in particular, now in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, where they were transferred in 1945 as spoils of war mostly from the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin, and from other collections.
New documentation – in photographs and drawings – was created for many artefacts, most of which had not been illustrated previously or were recorded in drawings or photographs of a mediocre quality in older publications. Most of these are published in the present volume and in the catalogue to the Barbarian Tsunami exhibition3 and on the Project website (see below). A concerted effort was made to collect all the data about new Migration Period studies (some still unpublished) made in our area, and reports on Migration Period stray, often accidental finds, their findspots and photographic documentation. Ever since the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries Migration Period artefacts have been discovered at much greater frequency than before. However, they tend to be stray finds usually recovered from the topsoil with the use of metal detectors. Most of them fall prey to treasure hunters, especially if they are made of non-ferrous metals or alloys. Ultimately they find their way, usually without information about their provenance, into private collections, often outside Poland rather than entering Polish museums. Reports of only a fraction of these finds reach the research community, as a rule, without precise details of their findspots or even their more general contexts.
The largest and the best known group of finds are the materials from Kujawy, most notably from a complex of central places of the Przeworsk Culture at Gąski and Wierzbiczany in Inowrocław district (Map 0.2, site 2). While the Project was in progress the team members and members of the Steering Committee met on three occasions at Nieborów. An invitation to the last of these meetings, a conference combined with a preliminary presentation of the Project results, was extended to several researchers from outside Poland specializing in the Migration Period archaeology. They shared their views on this subject and were invited to contribute to a joint final publication. Its concept, main premises and content were proposed and approved. As a result the present volume includes several texts contributed by researchers not directly involved in the Project, which made it possible to present the background and a wider research perspective.
This strategy was adopted at the express suggestion from the MPOV Steering Committee. During the Project implementation period, the Project Team members presented more than 60 papers and posters publishing the results of the investigations, mostly at international conferences and workshops, but also at symposia in Poland. Some of these occasions were large-scale, like the Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists and the General Congress of Polish Historians, others were smaller, addressed at groups focused upon aspecific subject, such as the Internationales Sachsensymposium (four occasions: at Paderborn, Warsaw, Antwerp and Canterbury) and Internationales Symposium Grundprobleme der frühgeschichtlichen Entwicklung im mittleren Donauraum (also on four occasions: at Straubing in Germany, Ruma in Serbia, Nitra in Slovakia and Mistelbach in Austria). The findings from the Project have been presented nearly everywhere in Europe, from Gaspra in Crimea (before the Russian annexation), to St. Andrews and Edinburgh in Scotland, from Thessaloniki to Lund and Stockholm, and also in the USA. An important tool made use of during the Project both academic and aimed at the general public, in keeping with the principle
of “open science”, was the website, with a Polish and an English language version We posted here all information about the key research problems addressed, tasks implemented, research results expected, and actual outcomes. Also to be found here are reports from the completed archaeological and archaeobotanical fieldwork projects, research papers published within the Project and information about forms of dissemination, complete with references (links) to specific texts or radio broadcasts. Nevertheless, the key role for research, education and dissemination was played by the Thesaurus with its 100 expertly written entries, updated where necessary by Project Team members. The role of the Thesaurus is highlighted by the fact that most of its entries appear at the top of the list of results in all search engines, and as rule, higher than the comparable Wikipedia entries. On several occasions, our fellow researchers from many countries of Europe got in touch with us to enquire about a particular entry, or to suggests how it might be updated using their most recent findings and publications. The Project website will continue to be active on the server of the University of Warsaw Center of Digital Competences and updated as far as possible. An important form of Project results dissemination was a pair of exhibitions organized by the Department of Archaeology of the National Museum in Szczecin in cooperation with the University of Warsaw Institute of Archaeology.
The first, Treasures of Suchań, presented in late 2014 and early 2015, was dedicated to the archaeology of Suchań, and its microregion. This exhibition primarily presented the results of investigations carried out within the Project, but from other initiatives as well, run by the Museum and the Institute in Warsaw, including the fieldwork on site 18 at Suchań: the findspot of the spectacular deposit of gold pendants and two Scandinavian bracteates.4 A catalogue to this exhibition was published in Polish and English.5 The second, travelling exhibition, Barbarian Tsunami: Migration Period between the Odra and the Vistula was a major logistic endeavour, the product of cooperation between twelve museums in Poland: the State Archaeological Museum in Warsaw, Lublin Museum in Lublin, the Museum of Warmia and Mazury in Olsztyn, the Museum in Lębork, Poznań Archaeological Museum, Zamość Museum in Zamość, Janusz Peter Regional Museum in Tomaszów Lubelski, the Regional Museum in Rzeszów, the Archaeological Museum in Kraków, the City Museum of Wrocław, and Kalisz District Museum in Kalisz.
The whole was coordinated and organized by the National Museum in Szczecin, while the University of Warsaw, assisted by the Project Team members, acted as consultant on exhibition content-related matters. The main goal of the exhibition was to present, in a form accessible to the general public, the results of the research made within the MPOV Project, which similarly as the Yatvings: The Forgotten Warriors exhibition,6 was an important innovation in the history of museum science in Poland. To this end modern technologies were employed: multimedia presentations and transparent showcases were used for the first time in Poland, in a travelling exhibition. A catalogue to the exhibition was produced in Polish and English language versions with illustrations and descriptions of all the more than 700 artefacts displayed.7 Texts introducing the subject of the Migration Period archaeology to the general public reported the main findings of the MPOV Project in an accessible style.8 The exhibition is scheduled to run from autumn 2017 until spring of 2020 and to tour 12 towns in Poland. The Project generated more than 30 texts related to its research, now published, and many more forthcoming. Next to reports from the fieldwork,9 publication of new evidence10 or reinterpretation of early finds,11 there are also analyses of individual artefact categories12 and other papers of a more general, synthetic nature.13
One of the key tasks that Project Team members set for themselves was to make the archaeology of the MPOV known to the research community worldwide. Because of this most of their written contributions, like the present volume, have been published in the conference languages. Independently of the texts published by the researchers involved, our Project has inspired other authors to publish their contributions on Migration Period subjects or are currently working on them. For example, Karsten Dahmen published the two largest hoards of solidi from the 5th c. known from the Baltic zone found at Trąbki Małe in Braniewo district (Map 0.2, site 7).14 The coins and the relevant archival documentation had entered the Münzkabinett in Berlin in the 18th c. The main aim of the Project and, at the same time, of the publication of the present volume, was to investigate the causes of settlement change in Central Europe on the cusp of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the cultural, social, demographic and ethnic processes on the one hand, and environmental change on the other. Greater insight was made possible by a cross-sectional interdisciplinary and comparative approach. No less importantly, we decided at the outset that no studies of the earliest Slav settlement in Poland would be made within the Project. This would have necessitated using a different type of methodology, research and techniques, and above all obtaining a large series of absolute dates, like those that are available to the west of the River Oder.15 The present interdisciplinary study of the Migration Period between the Oder and the Vistula involving a broad spectrum of research disciplines (history, archaeology, anthropology and palaeoecology) is the first of its kind ever to be made in Poland.
This is mostly because of specific problems left over from the legacy of the communist era: obstacles to research posed by censorship when in the countries of the Soviet Block were in thrall to communist party ideologues. In Polish People’s Republic the very existence of the Migration Period on its territory was passed over in silence, or was challenged in research literature and textbooks. It was in conflict with the universally accepted autochthonist doctrine of the origin of the Slavs. Against the evidence of the written and archaeological record, and linguistic data too, it held that this territory had been settled without a break, at least since the Bronze Age, by Slavs or their ancestors. Schoolchildren were taught about Early Slav Biskupin of the 7th–6th c. BC, a fortified timber-built settlement in Kujawy (Map 0.2, site 1). In this situation there was no reason to posit the existence of a Migration Period in the basins of the Oder and the Vistula, for what migrations could there have been in a land inhabited for centuries, millennia even, by the Slavs?
Finally, researchers like K. Godłowski,16 J. Kolendo17 and M. Parczewski18 demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that the Early Slav Biskupin is a scholarly fable, and that in the first half of the 1st millennium AD the land between the Oder and the Vistula was inhabited for the most part by Germanic communities. Accordingly, the Slavs appeared in south-eastern reaches of Poland only with the onset of the Early Middle Ages, that is, not earlier than the 6th c. The Migration Period has been making a comeback, a subject addressed by many conferences and publications, but not as an object of interdisciplinary studies pursued consistently by a research team. Indeed, it is thanks to the findings of the MPOV Project research that some paradigms currently still widely accepted can be challenged, if only that which equates the onset of the Early Middle Ages with Slav settlement. We know now that on the threshold of the Early Middle Ages in the Oder and Vistula basins there were enclaves of Merovingian and Scandinavian settlement which predate the coming of the Slavs. In this volume we set out to answer the same questions that were posed at the start of the Project: – What were the causes of settlement shifts during the Migration Period, and what was their character?
What was the direct cause of the sudden depopulation of the study region? – Was this depopulation set off by external, political factors (Hunnic invasions, Slav migrations) which ultimately resulted in major demographic change? – Or was a more important role played by adverse climate change, exhausted soil fertility, ensuing economic crisis, and in consequence, a partial depopulation driven by a prospect of settlement in economically more attractive lands in southern and western Europe? – How did these phenomena evolve over space and time? – To what extent, and for how long was the area of interest to us uninhabited? – Is our current understanding of these processes the result of inadequate research; in particular the failure to record artefacts resting in the topsoil which they entered from cultural layers as a result of postdepositional processes? – Can we allow for the survival into the Early Medieval Period of local communities continuing the cultural models observed in Late Antiquity, similar to the Merovingian culture zone, and if so, where?
As mentioned earlier, the present volume publishes texts contributed by members of the MPOV Project Team and also by ten guest researchers invited to cooperate in this effort. The main research premise was to analyse the phenomena unfolding in the Oder and the Vistula basins in the Migration Period within a broader context and from two perspectives. The idea was to present, first, for the sake of comparison, parallel processes unfolding in lands adjacent to the Project study area, and how they were related, if at all; second, the archaeological evidence from areas in which human populations appear after moving out of lands in what is now Poland, migrating around the middle of the 1st millennium. In the first section, Theory, history and environment, are included four chapters: two historical, one theoretical and one natural science. Marzena Przybyła discusses the problem of migrations in archaeology, Peter Heather (London) examines the question of identity in Late Antiquity in a broad perspective, and Marcin Wołoszyn makes a detailed critical analysis of all the written sources that may, with varying levels of confidence, be related to the phenomena taking place in the lands on the Oder and the Vistula during the Migration Period. A central role in our volume is played by the scientific report which presents the fullest overview panorama of settlement dynamics in northern and central Poland in the first millennium AD to date. In it, six Polish palynologists specialists report on findings from their join research, a feat unique from the perspective of the humanities.
This cooperation involved examining the most recently obtained palynological evidence parallel to making a new analysis and reassessment of a broad spectrum of pollen profiles previously published. By applying advanced methods of pollen analysis and dating to archaeology we can hope to reconstruct from the pollen record settlement processes based on the presence, and absence, of vegetational change caused by human activity. Despite many factors which complicate interpretation, these data are an excellent, independent reference point for conclusions based on the archaeological and the written record. In three sections of this volume we present archaeological chapters. Part 2, Between the Oder and the Vistula opens with a discussion of the Migration Period chronology (M. Mączyńska) and stylistic changes (A. BitnerWróblewska, M. Przybyła & A. Pesch). Two further texts report on Migration Period settlements (H. Machajewski) and on cemeteries and burials (H. Machajewski, J. Schuster). These are followed by analyses of particular categories of sources, e.g. finds identified with nomads recorded in Poland (J. Rodzińska-Nowak), and gold bracteates (A. Pesch, Schleswig). This part closes with two texts which discuss in a synthetic manner settlement changes taking place in Late Antiquity between the Oder and the Vistula (M. Mączyńska).
In Part 3, Case Studies, we present several short studies concerning the Migration Period, some of them from very recent discoveries (finds from the 5th–7th centuries from Kujawy – Marcin Rudnicki and Mirosław Rudnicki, and military equipment from Kujawy – B. Kontny and Marcin Rudnicki), others that have been revisited (Karsibór, Świnoujście district – A. Zapolska; Łubiana, Kościerzyna district – M. Mączyńska), and investigations made in Suchań, Stargard district (A. Bursche and B. Rogalski). The section closes with a paper by S. Miłek reporting on new Migration Period evidence from the Middle Prosna river valley. Part 4, Beyond the Oder and Vistula, includes texts intended to provide a comparative background. Their authors discuss the archaeological situation during the Migration Period in regions immediately adjacent to the territory lying between the Oder and the Vistula, or at some distance from it, to the north (A. Rau, Schleswig), the north-east (B. Kontny and A. Bitner-Wróblewska), the south-east (M. Lubichev, Kharkiv; K. Myzgin, Warsaw), the south (Z. Rácz, Budapest) and the west (J. Schuster and M. Schmauder, Bonn). Finally, in his contribution M. Kazanski (Paris) reviews archaeological finds from the West presumably related to migrations of groups from areas in East-Central Europe. Among these texts a special role is played by studies concerned with the archaeological Olsztyn and Elbląg Groups, contributions from two Project Team members (A. Bitner-Wróblewska and B. Kontny).
They provide a relevant point of reference for the territory between the Oder and the Vistula because of their settlement which – as is confirmed by the archaeological record, and the findings from palynological analyses – continued unbroken deep into the Migration Period, and even beyond: that is, as far as the 7th if not the 8th c. As noted earlier, the main premises, concept and contents of this entire volume were presented, and approved, at the MPOV Project conference in Nieborów held in April 2016. The chief task of the editors was to preserve this concept and strive to keep the book presented here as coherent as possible. From the very start, however, we adopted a hands-off policy, leaving our authors a degree of freedom in their views instead of trying to make them conform to some common standard. We only interfered in cases where the differences of opinion were extreme and some of them lacked support in a solid background of the sources. In a country where communist censorship has been responsible for crippling independent thinking, particularly in the field of study forming the focus of this volume, the opposite approach would not only not have been tolerated but would also be at odds with scholarly ethics. In any case, bringing about a far-reaching convergence of views among such a large group of authors in freely pursued historical scholarship, or in the field of humanities in general, is neither possible nor desirable.
All the researchers involved in the Project and, with very few exceptions, other authors too, had the occasion to acquaint themselves earlier with most of the unpublished materials now included in this volume, to get to know and discuss their views. Many were the discussions held at the Project meetings in Nieborów, other conferences, during fieldwork and the work on the Barbarian Tsunami exhibition and on the texts for this book. They helped us to arrive at a number of entirely novel conclusions concerning processes unfolding in our region during the Migration Period: conclusions which all of us, or nearly all, can share. They are enumerated in the final section of Conclusions, which represents an attempt at a synthetic perspective on the changes taking place during the MPOV addressed from many angles: beginning with environmental changes, through changes in settlement, culture, and ethnicity, to demographic and social. We take this opportunity to thank the National Science Centre in Poland for funding the MPOV research project, and the University of Warsaw for professional support of its implementation. We are grateful to the National Museum in Szczecin for invaluable assistance in running the fieldwork, and organizing two exhibitions presenting the Project results.
Our warm thanks go to all those institutions which gave us access to study their archival records and archaeological materials. We are truly grateful to the members of the MPOV Project Team for their loyal teamwork, the Steering Committee for invaluable advice and suggestions which many times gave our work a new direction, and finally, to the authors for contributing their texts to this volume. We thank also all those who informed us about new discoveries, gave access to unpublished materials and texts, were involved in the Project during different stages of its implementation, discussed its merits, offered their advice and assistance. Finally, we wish to thank Anna Kinecka, Piotr Godlewski, W. Krzyżanowski, David Wigg-Wolf, Nikita Khrapunov & Constantin Kazanski, for translating the texts into English from Polish, Russian and German languages, dr. Ireneusz Jakubczyk for digital processing of figures, tables and maps, as well as Tomasz Płóciennik for checking the bibliography. At the Sachesnsymposion held in autumn of 2017 in Kent I asked John Hines to whether he would be willing to proofread our texts, and he kindly agreed to do so. In the end what was supposed to have been standard proofreading turned out to be a demanding and time-consuming editorial effort which John, with his wife’s support accomplished with flying colours. For this, we and our authors are extremely grateful.19
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