About some initial concepts

In the past year, I was engaged in the compilation of the theoretical dictionary of archeology and now I give it to the print. Involuntarily, a number of general historical concepts had to be included in it: they always affect the theoretical formation of purely archaeological concepts. It seems to me useful to bear the wording that I came to these concepts to discuss my colleagues on a three-hobby. Here I selected six of these concepts (I put it in alphabet).

Historical homeland. So in modern political discussions, they mean the country in which it was not a person himself, but his distant ancestors. For example, for Russian Germans, whose ancestors arrived in Russia two centuries ago from Germany, the historical homeland is called Germany, despite the fact that most Russian Germans were assimilated in the Russian people. For Russian Jews, most of whom do not speak in the Yiddha or Hebrew, and does not adhere to the Jewish religion, and their ancestors left Palestine two thousand years ago, Israel - the state created on Earth of Palestine in the second half of the twentieth century.

In other words, the historical homeland is called what is called the ancestral home for a person. From the concept of the ancestral home, no special rights (historical law ), no legal consequences flow. From the concept of the historical homeland, it seems that (the rights to “repatriation”, claims of the indigenous population to discrimination and deportation).

However, it is worthwhile to carefully study the circumstances of the conflicts - and it turns out that in fact, they all follow at all from the presence of a historical homeland in part of the population, but from social troubles within a given country with the involvement of ethnic, religious and cultural differences. The roots of these troubles lie in the uneven and unjust distribution of goods, in ineffective management, in the provocations of the authorities, in an attempt to pursue a policy of “divide and reign” and set masses on the scapegoat (“internal enemy” identical to the external, but within the country).

Every person, no matter how he is passionate about the history of his ethnic group and, no matter how he was drawn into globalization, is attached and adapted primarily to his homeland - in which he himself was born not as a guest. Even rather to the "small homeland" (if the country is great and diverse). Some immigrants can quickly and deeply adapt to their new homeland.

So the famous archaeologist Henry Shliman, a German who spent a youth in Germany, lived a merchant for 20 years in Russia, had a Russian family there, considered himself Russian and loved Russia and his “magical Petersburg” as a homeland; Then he studied in Paris, led excavations in Turkey, and settled and married a second time in Greece, called his children Greek names, even renamed his servants to the ancient Greek? The excavated treasures offered the Hermitage, and when the king refused to accept, he gave them to Berlin.

Historical law - the idea that the right of the people to the land occupied by him now or occupied in the past directly depends on the antiquity of his residence on this earth and the people who used to live on this earth ( Autochton ) have more rights to it. The performance is false. It is usually put forward by aggressors to justify their territorial claims, as well as nationalists to justify the oppression and expuls the national minorities.

The right is not in practice by anyone and cannot be observed. After all, all nations have repeatedly changed their territory of their residence, and all people are ultimately taking place from a small section of Africa. Europe has repeatedly appeared for many millennia under the glacier, so that people settled it again and again, and climatic zones moved, and the peoples that inhabited them and adapted to them moved with them. If you find out the championship of residence every time, then we will come to a completely unexpected and surely unwanted results. Hungarians will have to return to North-West Siberia, the Slavs owned Germany, and the Germans (Goths and others) owned the center of Ukraine, the entire forest strip of European Russia-Finno-Ugra, etc.

Russia owns the former Eastern Prussia not because the Slavs (by the way, not eastern, but the western) once owned this land, but because Germany attacked the USSR and was punished for aggression. The Jews did not because the state of Israel in Palestine received that they settled this country to the Arabs, leaving it almost two thousand years ago, but because the international community recognized their state there after the mass destruction of them in Europe, taking into account their traditional desire for this earth (daily prayers, the Zionist movement) and that there were already there that there were already there) Settlements by the time of resolving this issue.

In fact, the right of each people to a certain territory in the modern world is due to a living tradition (not much exceeding the duration of one generation) and the system of international treaties.

However, without legal force, the antiquity of living enhances the feeling of attachment to your country, although, no matter how paradoxical, if there is no antiquity, this does not weaken a sense of love for the homeland. After all, the Motherland is a country in which a person himself was born and does not live as a guest, wherever and whoever his ancestors were.

Nationalism in archeology . Nationalism is an extremely controversial concept. For some, the slogan of progress and justice, for others, is a dangerous craving for national insults, humiliations, strife and conflicts. By direct meaning of the word, this is a program for ensuring national independence, the development of the national state and culture. In the case of national oppression-the program of national liberation struggle. Considering that humanity is still consisting of ethnic groups (nationalities) related to the idea (although it is not necessarily in reality) with a common origin, that is, in a sense of those like very large families, and ethnic groups strive for state design, nationalism seems natural and inevitable.

But the devil lurks in detail. For the current peoples of the millennium of history, the vicissitudes of relationships, migrations and a vessel in resettlement, a burden of distrust. This is amplified by the current globalization of the economy that mixed the peoples. Nationalism can be of different intensity. Each nation having its own nationalism is faced with the problems of national and religious minorities, old conflicts with neighbors, some with imperial ambitions.

Two nationalisms often encounter, say, one as colonialism, the other as separatism. Wisdom in establishing peaceful ties within the country and on its borders is often not enough. Therefore, nationalism now and then develops into chauvinism , sometimes into Nazism and racism , all three with purely negative consequences (chauvinism is hatred of other nations; Nazism is a totalitarian and aggressive regime based on a chauvinistic and racist ideology erected in a political program). Caring for their people flows into suspicion of other nations, into the humiliation and suppression of other peoples.

Therefore, reasonable rulers have to be very careful in national politics-so as not to wound the national feelings of one or another people, but not to indulge in excessive national ambitions, and in some places bad national traditions.

In archeology, all this affects very noticeably. On the one hand, the concern of various forces about the savings and the predominant study of national antiquities, the cultural heritage of the people is felt. On the other hand, the war on archaeological maps for the territory that once belonged to the people who now lives on the famous ancestors for monuments of high culture-whose ancestors they belonged to it, are breaking through. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Gustav Kosinna in Germany described archeology as “extremely national science” (the name of his book) and defended the particularly high ancient culture of the Germans as a justification of their right to dominate other peoples.

Meanwhile, this is a relic of the estate society, in which the status was determined by the nobility of the ancestors, and the fixation of success - precedents in the past. Often you have to deal with the rejection of any “unsightly” places in the archaeological past of their people only because it is not a story recorded in writing.

Let's say the invasion is ready or the arrival of the Varangians, unlike the Tatar-Mongol invasion. Any impartial study of such episodes or manifestations in the history of the Russian people is interpreted as Russophobia, although similar things in the history of France are not served as a francophobia. This shows that sometimes, during periods of national crises and after them, nationalism is inflamed and some part of the people becomes painfully suspicious and inanimate. In archaeologists, in such cases, the task is to contribute to the enlightenment of the people and to show the true relationship of cultures, the state and interaction of peoples in the distant past.

In more detail, these problems are described in my works “The Phenomenon of Soviet Archeology”, “Archeology in the saddle”, “History of archaeological thought” (Klein 1993b: 64-69; 2000b; 2011), as well as in the books of Schnirelman (2001; 2003; 2005; 2006).