Migrations in the Archaeology of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages (Some Comments on the Current State of Research)

Curta, Florin

doi:10.1163/9789004425613_005

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 17 publications

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“…Today, speakers of Slavic languages represent the largest linguistic group in Europe, mainly inhabiting Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe. Several aspects of their initial arrival in the Balkans are not yet well understood, such as their place of origin and timing, the mechanisms ranging from colonization, invasion, and infiltration, their degree of demographic impact in the region and the underlying reasons with demographic pressures, climate change and depopulation due to the Justinian Pandemic being postulated 42 , 43 . We document a clear signal of Eastern European-related gene flow in the vast majority of individuals in our dataset after 700 CE (n=49), likely associated with the arrival of Slavic-speaking populations according to historical and archaeological evidence 42 .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A genetic history of the Balkans from Roman frontier to Slavic migrations

Olalde,

Carrión,

Mikić

et al. 2023

Cell

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A genetic history of the Balkans from Roman frontier to Slavic migrations

Olalde,

Carrión,

Mikić

et al. 2023

Cell

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Isotope data in Migration Period archaeology: critical review and future directions

Depaermentier

2023

Archaeol Anthropol Sci

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Early Mediaeval Archaeology was long influenced by traditional narratives related to so-called Völkerwanderungen. Based on the interpretation of ancient written sources, the “Migration Period” was traditionally perceived as a time of catastrophic changes triggered by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and massive migration waves of “barbarian” groups across Europe. In the last decades, isotope analyses have been increasingly used to test these traditional narratives by exploring past mobility patterns, shifts in dietary habits, and changes in subsistence strategies or in socio-economic structures among early medieval societies. To evaluate the achievements of isotope studies in understanding the complexity of the so-called Migration Period, this paper presents a review of 50 recent publications. Instead of re-analysing the data per se, this review first explores the potentials and limitations of the various approaches introduced in the last decades. In a second step, an analysis of the interpretations presented in the reviewed studies questions to what extend traditional expectations are supported by isotope data from the Migration Period. Beside revising the concept of massive migrations, isotope data reveal so-far underestimated mobility patterns and open new perspectives in the investigation of early medieval world.

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Medieval landscapes of Greece and Turkey: a post-colloquium commentary

Bintliff¹

2020

JGA

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Our colleague Effie Athanassopoulos has done an excellent job in assembling a collection of papers to reflect the current state of the art for Medieval landscape archaeology in the Aegean and Anatolia. One of the shared themes in many of these papers is the state of maturity of this subfield of Mediterranean Archaeology. It echoes a much wider question in post-Roman studies for this large region, as to how progress in this period and area compares to what has been achieved in Western Europe. For example, the limitations of Byzantine Archaeology have repeatedly been raised by some of its practitioners and associated historians since the 1980’s, while Greek Post-Medieval Archaeology has been seen as even more a Cinderella-subject over the same period. To judge by this colloquium, much progress has been made: there is a larger body of researchers, who read each other’s work and share methods and questions to address, yet it is still a small community. In the practice of archaeological survey, recognised as a prime tool for landscape archaeology, we still find recent projects which choose to ignore the surface sites of post-Roman eras (e.g. the Antikythera Project). Nowadays, an excavation which dug away the recent levels to get at the Classical ones would be seen as scandalous, so why should we permit the equivalent to occur in regional survey, where nobody is going to revisit the same fields to compensate for such neglect?

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Migrations in the Archaeology of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages (Some Comments on the Current State of Research)

Cited by 3 publications

References 17 publications

A genetic history of the Balkans from Roman frontier to Slavic migrations

A genetic history of the Balkans from Roman frontier to Slavic migrations

Isotope data in Migration Period archaeology: critical review and future directions

Medieval landscapes of Greece and Turkey: a post-colloquium commentary

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