The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe (review)

Barford has undertaken the mammoth task of trying to illuminate the history and culture of those people in the early Middle Ages who spoke a language that linguists consider to be Slavic. This endeavor is fraught with many difficulties, the methodological ones being foremost. To Barford's credit, he recognizes many of them. Despite his vast interdisciplinary knowledge and fundamental honesty, however, The Early Slavs is a disappointing book. The work, as a whole, reads like a series of introductory lectures by an author obviously capable of more sophisticated explanations.

Among the many fundamental problems that bedevil Barford's project is the nature of the surviving information. Slav, in the context of Barford's work, is largely a linguistic designation. Thus, he focuses on identifying various people who spoke languages or dialects that modern linguists consider to be Slavic, as compared, for example, to people who speak a Romance language, such as French or Spanish, that developed from Latin. The main methodological problem with regard to identifying people who spoke a Slavic language (for example, the forerunner(s) of Russian, Polish, or Serbo-Croatian) is that none of the people who lived in the areas (for example, Slovakia, Ukraine, or Slovenia) that currently are inhabited by peoples who speak a Slavic language, were literate in their own language for the first several centuries of the early Middle Ages.

Despite ongoing efforts for several hundred years, often driven more recently by nationalist agendas—as Barford aptly points out—the difficulties associated with the attempt to compensate for the lack of written sources in Slavic are insurmountable, at least for now. Barford, however, tends to give archaeological enterprises too much credit. Although he seems aware of the pitfalls in principle, he is not sufficiently critical of archaeological information in practice. For example, he allows pottery artifacts to demonstrate similarities and differences over time among peoples living in various areas that are now inhabited by Slavic speakers of one type or another. However, the identification of similarities and/or differences in archaeological artifacts is often subjective. Such conclusions must be quantitative if they are to support the weight of large generalizations, and some consistent measure must be adumbrated in order to sustain such generalizations. The problem of ascertaining a spoken language on the basis of a ceramic jug, especially in the absence of reliable written information, remains highly problematical.

The limitations of archaeology, even when uncontaminated by political or social biases, are rarely recognized by archaeologists, at least in print. In an otherwise unfortunate article, Grierson, the leading numismatist of the post-World War II era, cogently observed, "It has been said that the spade cannot lie, but it owes this merit in part to the fact that it cannot speak." ¹ Barford, tends to prefer the speculative construction of the past by archaeologists from flawed artifacts and guiding theories to information from written sources, produced by cultures that interacted with people thought today to be Slavs. As he puts it, "The picture from the written sources appears to be contradicted by the archaeological evidence" (74). It is not methodological hair splitting, however, to emphasize that archaeological information does not provide evidence of anything unless confronted with a particular problem to solve and an attending theory to motivate it. The obvious circularity of such a process would not be worth belaboring were it not the case that archaeologists, who are often hypercritical when dealing with written sources from the past, fail with alarming consistency to recognize their own biases.

This is not to say that early medieval writers, who putatively provide information (it is not evidence of anything until we pose a question), did not also have biases. However, the careful reading of the Latin, Greek, and Arabic writers requires extensive training not only in these languages and philology but also in historical...