Download PDF | Marek Hladík - Mikulčice and Its Hinterland_ An Archaeological Model for Medieval Settlement Patterns on the Middle Course of the Morava River (7th to Mid-13th Centuries), Brill 2020.
388 Pages
Preface
This book is the result of a research project that was a part of my postgraduate thesis. As the book is published several years after the end of that project, there was time to refine and modify some parts of the thesis. In particular, I improved the methodological foundations and procedures on which the entire research was based. Although the explanation of the theoretical foundations, methodology and objectives is not extensive, I attempted to introduce a theory that is supported by a functional methodology.
Therefore, I consider it essential to combine both parts in one text. I would like to ask readers to consider the book as a whole. Several aspects of the book concern topics of a more global nature, such as the relationship of settlement and the natural environment, social and economic relationships of early medieval centres to their surroundings, etc. However, its primary ambition is to present a focused case study and use it to answer specific questions. This book does not aspire to define universal patterns; on the contrary, I attempt to interpret and understand relationships in a specific geographical area at a particular moment time. However, it is the space (the Morava region) and the time (9th–10th century) in which one of the most prominent economic and political units in contemporary Central Europe existed. This fact highlights the importance of such a case study in relation to the global issues mentioned above. In other words, the primary objective of the book is to present an archaeological model of socio-economic relationships in the hinterland of one of the most significant Great Moravian centres, the Mikulčice-Valy fortified settlement, during the 9th century.
This model is based on data from long-term archaeological research of the region of Mikulčice, which was carried out by several institutions during the second half of the 20th century. The creation of the final interpretative model would therefore be impossible without a thorough review and subsequent analysis of these archaeological sources. This step has not yet been made in the studied area. An important step in the research was the addition of new data to an archaeological database. The new data was obtained through a predefined methodology, which ensures the verifiability of the research findings.
The second pillar of the presented archaeological model is environmental data from the studied area. The book puts great emphasis on the reconstruction of the natural environment at the heyday of Great Moravia in the 9th century, mainly using archaeobotanical and palynological data obtained from the archaeological contexts in the region. Both sets of data were compared and analysed using multidimensional statistical methods in the GIS environment. The resulting mathematical and geoinformational models were the basis for an interpretative archaeological model.
Introduction
Understanding economic and social interactions of any community in the past and the relationship between those interactions and a specific geographical area is one of the fundamental problems of the culture-historical interpretation of archaeological data. As this problem plagues research of any historical period, in any region, establishing scientific approaches resulted in diverging attitudes (based on the philosophical and communication sets of the relevant paradigm), which define specific questions, as well as the methodology of research. This is particularly true for research conducted on the social, economic and spatial interactions in Central Europe during the early Middle Ages. More specifically, this book will deal with Great Moravia in its geopolitical and military context. The case study presented in this book is focused on the economic and social relations between the Mikulčice agglomeration and its hinterland, and in part on the relations and interactions between neighbouring agglomerations. The closest to Mikulčíce were the centres in Pohansko near Brěclav and in Uherské Hradište—Staré Město (Herold 2012, Macháček 2010). All three lie in the Morava river basin (north of the Danube).
Mikulčice and Staré Město are located in the fluvial plain of the Morava, while Pohansko is in the fluvial plain of its right-bank tributary, the Dyje. Since Mikulčice is the most important centre of Great Moravia, it is quite appropriate to generalize from data obtained from that site in order to create a model of economic (subsistence) and social (community/spiritual) organization of the Great Moravian society. Based on that, I hope to contribute to the current debate surrounding the economic and political structure of early medieval Central Europe, in general, and of Great Moravia, in particular (Kalhous 2014, Macháček 2012, 2015, Štefan 2014). I am especially concerned with offering a specific method of research that could constitute a basis for developing arguments about those complicated issues. In fact, the methodological parameters of the debate are largely based on the Central European historiography of the second half of the 20th century. Much misunderstanding results from a rather under-developed methodology and weak theoretical basis, both a legacy of the totalitarian regimes established in the region during the second half of the 20th century (see Chapter 2.1.2). Nonetheless, archaeological theory in Central Europe has recently made great strides, and time is ripe for new approaches to old problems.
The research focus is on a significant region of Central Europe during the early Middle Ages. This area has all the prerequisites of a model region suitable for addressing the issue of structure and development of early medieval settlement structure in Central Europe. As Great Moravia had a relatively short history, the current debates have highlighted both its beginnings in the 9th and its demise in the early 10th century. In a broader context, this book aims the process through which the region under study changes from a periphery to a centre of development. To be sure, change happened relatively fast. The importance of this study is highlighted by the absence of any comprehensive assessments of the available archaeological data in the light of that change, for no systematic exploration of the economic hinterland of Mikulčice has so far been undertaken. Regional studies of a similar kind, but limited to a well-defined period, became fashionable during the development of the processual paradigm in the archaeology of the second half of the 20th century (Bernbeck 1997, 153, Kuna 2004, 463).
The rise of regional studies was in fact a byproduct of the growth of settlement archaeology ever since the 1960s (Bernbeck 1997, 154, Johnson 1977, 479, Kuna 2004, 446 and 464) In Central Europe, however, the study of the “settlement space,” as the space of units with an actual function in a certain settlement system, owes much to the work of the German archaeologist Herbert Jankuhn (Jankuhn 1977). A “regional approach” was first adopted in Czechoslovak archaeology during the late 1980s (Beneš 1991, Čaplovič 1989, Dresler and Macháček 2008, Gojda 2000, 87–91, 2004, Horňák and Stegmann-Rajtár 2007, 2008, König 2007, Kuna 2004, Poláček 2009, Ruttkay 1985a, b, 2006, Ruttkay 1993, 1996, Šalkovský 1988, 2011, Wiedermann 2001, Wiedermann et al. 2006). In this book, I build upon previous research on settlement in Central Europe during the early Middle Ages. The specific region on which my study is based (the northern part of Záhorie and south-eastern Moravia—see Chapter 4) represents an area that was settled by a Slavic-speaking population beginning with the turn of the 6th to the 7th century (Curta 2008, Fusek 2008a, Galuška 2000, Jelínková 1990, Klanica 1986).
This region was also the core of the Great Moravia during the 9th century. Around 900, the status of this geographical space changed due to geopolitical changes in the Central Europe (Hladík, Poláček, and Škojec 2008, Měřínský 1986a, Wihoda 2006). After the “transition” period in the 10th century and after the annexation of Moravia to Bohemia and of Slovakia to Hungary, the territory examined in this work, became a periphery of the Přemyslid Bohemia (Přemyslid Moravia) and Arpadian Hungary (the Arpadian-era Duchy of Nitra). The border between Bohemia and Hungary was on the Morava River (Steinhübel 2004, 211, 305–10, Žemlička 2006, 76–77). The organisation of Moravia and Slovakia into border regions, as well as the building of castles turned them into areas of military interest, as marches of Bohemia and Hungary, respectively against each other, or against the East Bavarian March (Steinhübel 2004, 239–42, 305–10). That function survived well into the Late Middle Ages (Měřínský 2008). Until the early 13th century, the eastern half of the Middle Morava region (northern Záhorie) was a “no man’s land,” poorly populated (Jan 2008, Hoferka 2008).
The political, social and economic changes taking place ca. 1200 brought about stabilization of the settlement network, as well as the first urban centers and major roads (Hoferka 2006, Jan 2003, Janšák 1960, 1961, 1964a, b, Klápště 2005, Kordiovský 2008, Marsina 2003, Měřínský 2008, Procházka 2008, Ruttkay 1983, Ruttkay and Slivka 1985, Slivka 1998). The middle course of the Morava River is currently a border region between Moravia and Slovakia. From a historical perspective, one needs to understand how the border was perceived by people living in the region (Slivka 2004). Although strictly referring to geography, the reference to the frontier between the Slovak (Záhorie Region) and the Czech (south-eastern Moravia) Republic signals a difference in the quality of archaeological research on either side of the river (see Chapter 3). For a more specific geographical definition, in what follows I will often refer to the “southern part of the Lower-Moravian Valley during the Early Middle Ages.” The second section in Chapter 4 is dedicated to an exact definition of the area under consideration. The chronological span of the archaeological analysis in this book begins in the 6th and ends in the 13th century. I will pay attention to all components of the settlement network (Neustupný 1986b, 226, 1994), in an attempt to gain what Dušan Třeštík has called the “construction of one part of the image of the living world of the past”: “History was (and unfortunately still is) considered identical with the past and historians (and archaeologists) somehow naturally assumed that their work directly reconstructed the past reality.
They would never admit that the only thing they could really do is to construct and not to reconstruct images, thus imitations of the past reality, not the reality itself” (Třeštík 2001, 357). I prefer Třeštík’s approach to that of Evžen Neustupný, whose “reconstruction” aims at describing (“depicting”) past events (Neustupný 2007b, 11). In doing so, I recognize that the experience coming from the hands of an archaeologist is not the same as the experience of the direct participants. Archaeology classifies, simplifies, organizes, shortens one century to a page, and that narrative synthesis of narration is no less spontaneous than the synthesis of our memory when remembering the past decade we lived through (Veyne 2010, 12).
On the other hand, I agree with the Neustupný’s idea that archaeology is a field dealing with a certain segment of the human world on the basis of artefacts. More specifically, archaeology examines the human world of the past based on archaeological sources. Among its basic goal is the understanding of the structure of the past human world and the description (or depiction) of its events (Neustupný 2007b, 11). I am less confident than Neustupný in the meaning of definitions and representations (Ankersmit 1983, Hauser 2012, Šuch 2009). But my goal is to introduce the results of concrete research, not to engage in theoretical (much less philosophical) debates.
In other words, the definition of my approach is simply a way to make it the results of this study compatible with the terms of the ongoing debate in the early medieval archaeology of Central Europe (Herold 2012, Kalhous 2014, Macháček 2010, 2015, Štefan 2014). However, most authors participating in that debate are methodologically ambiguous in relation to structuralism, modernism and postmodernism. None of them draws the distinctioin between the traditional “realistic” concept of history and “narrative” or “textual” concept of history (Ricoeur 2001, White 2010). In my opinion, this is the result of the specific development of historiography in Central Europe during the second half 20th century. On the other hand, that situation reflects the problems of the postmodern archaeological discourse. In particular, that applies to the problem of a systemic approach, which is the basis of several works of archaeology (Fleming 2012, Macháček 2010). The definition of archaeology advanced by Neustupný encompasses applied to a complex, independent discipline, and is logically integrated (as a theoretical system). As such, it defines the means and the goal (subject) of research, and stresses the significance of space (human world, artefact) and time (past human world, past vs. current events) in the process of study, as well as the relationship between structure and event.
Time and space have always been key factors in how the perception that individuals and communities had of the world and their own existence. Human observations or attitudes (religious or scientific, and everything in between) take place in a certain space and time framework. The relationship between humans and the world has also changed in time, as humans have built and strengthened their position in the natural world, eliminated dependencies upon their environment, and detached themselves from it (Sokol 2012, 259). With that detachment came a changing relationship between people, time and space—away from the all-encompassing space into which humans lived in the mythical time to the abstract, analytical “out-of-time” space in which people naively separate themselves from their world. Such observations have a key role in my study, as well as in marking the distinction between its results and other studies of spatial and social structures in early medieval Central Europe (Macháček 2010, Dresler and Macháček 2013, Dresler 2015).
Chapter 2 to 4 give a detailed explanation of the theoretical and methodological rationale of this book. They also define the main research aims and present the resulting methodology applied in the research. The inspiration for such a lengthy theoretical introduction came primarily from the works of Evžen Neustupný and Jiří Macháček Even though I do not entirely accept their ideas, I find myself in agreement with Neustupný’s remarks archaeological empiricism (Neustupný 2010, 24). On the other hand, I firmly believe that the only way to gauge the value of the interpretation is to the understand the methodology behind it (Ochrana 2009, 12). In short, the heavily theoretical and methodological part of the book is part and parcel of the interpretation advanced at the end. Archaeology is, after all, a discipline positioned at the border between social sciences and empirical disciplines (Boast 2009, Johnson 1999, 2009). This is important if one takes archaeology to be related to history.
As Hayden White aptly pointed out, if we assume that both disciplines have an identical subject of research, namely what happened in the past, then one would have to admit that neither can be defined as a “hard,” exact science, for in both cases the goal is retrospective reconstruction, which is couched in language (White 1973). Therefore the role of theory is to elucidate the ideological underpinnings of my discourse. This applies not only to methodology and aims of research, but also to broader socio-cultural, as well as academic standpoints. “Therefore theory cannot die, but it can change direction and its role and relative importance may change in the process” (Kristiansen 2011, 73). The relative importance, in this case, refers to this book being an augmented version of my doctoral dissertation (Hladík 2012a).
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