From Ethnic Determinism to Epistemic Optimism: A Critical History of the Recent Past of Serbian Archaeology

Abstract

Although the history of Serbian archaeology has recently been a vivid field of study from various standpoints, the focus of this research has mainly been upon the early phases of the discipline, while the last thirty years have rarely been discussed. Additionally, the more extreme abuses of archaeological practice for political purposes, although minority positions, but still evident in the recent past, are mainly avoided. Therefore, this paper presents a critical discursive analysis of the recent history of Serbian archaeology in the context of the wars and crises of the 1990s and the post-conflict circumstances. The issue is raised of the transition achieved by Serbian archaeology from the dominance of ethnic determinism, apparent in the majority of archaeological interpretations, to the state of epistemic optimism, as a possible characterisation of the current state. 

            The idea of “the Serbian gromile”, penned by Đorđe Janković, is taken as the case study, focusing on the explanatory mechanisms supporting it. The emergence of this idea is contextualized in the situation of social crisis, war, and trauma, and interpreted on the other hand as a continuation of the tradition of the Slavic archaeology, adhering in Yugoslavia to the culture-historical approach. The interpretation of “the Serbian gromile” offered here is thus specific in arguing that it is not an exception, but the tip of an iceberg – a part of the general tendency of Serbian archaeology in the traditional key.

            The analysis has revealed that the explanatory mechanism, serving as a scaffold to the interpretation offered by Janković in his search for the early Medieval “Serbian gromile”, was in fact the abuse of interdisciplinarity. Namely, the relationships with ethnology and physical anthropology were problematic in Serbian archaeology under the culture-historical framework, since they were not theoretically explicated and therefore prone to political appropriation. The dark shadow of interdisciplinary unity can only be avoided through the explication of approaches of individual fields of research and their integration, from the research design to the final interpretation. In its new iteration, incorporating social anthropology and bioarchaeology, interdisciplinarity in Serbian archaeology fostered new perspectives in the spirit of epistemic optimism.