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Florin Curta

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Florin Curta
Born (1966-03-16) March 16, 1966 (age 58)
Romania
NationalityRomanian, American
Occupation(s)Archaeologist, historian
Academic background
ThesisMaking an Early Medieval Ethnie: The Case of the Early Slavs (Sixth to Seventh Century A.D.) (1998)
Academic work
Notable worksThe Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region (2001)

Florin Curta (born March 16, 1966) is a Romanian-born American archaeologist and historian who is a professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida. Curta is known for an unorthodox approach and interpretation of the ethnogenesis of the Early Slavs, a hypothesis published first in The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region (2001), and met with negative criticism.

Biography

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Curta works in the field of Balkans history and is a professor of medieval history and archaeology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida.[1] Curta's first book, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, was named a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and won the Herbert Baxter Adams Award of the American Historical Association in 2003.[2] Curta is the editor-in-chief of the Brill series East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450–1450.[2] In 2011, he contributed to The Edinburgh History of the Greeks. He is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Princeton University (Spring 2007) and a visiting fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University (2015). He attends an Eastern Orthodox Christian parish.[3]

Theories

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Being inspired by Reinhard Wenskus and the Vienna School of History, Curta's work since The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region (2001) is known for his usage of post-processual and post-structuralist approach in explaining Slavic ethnogenesis and migrations (especially regarding Slavic migrations to Southeastern Europe), arguing against the mainstream view and primordial culture-historical approach in archaeology and historiography.[4][5][6][7] Curta's hypothesis is opposed to both allochthonic (majority) and autochthonic (minority) concepts of Slavic ethnogenesis.[8] Curta argues against theories of Slavic mass expansion from the Slavic Urheimat and denies the existence of the Slavic Urheimat. His work rejects ideas of Slavic languages as the unifying element of the Slavs or the adducing of Prague-type ceramics as an archaeological cultural expression of the Early Slavs. Instead, Curta advances an alternative, "revisionist"[9][10] hypothesis which considers the Slavs as an "ethno-political category" invented by the Byzantines which was formed by political instrumentation and interaction on the Roman Danubian frontier where barbarian elite culture flourished.[4][11][12][13][14] He considers that the Slavic language was not an ethnolect, but a koiné language and lingua franca which formed by interaction of different languages and cultures and did not spread with the migration of a distinctive ethnic group of speakers. As such, the identity of Slavs was formed and spread by communities speaking the koiné language through language shift.[15] According to Curta, questions of identity and ethnicity are modern social constructs, imposed externally.[16] In 2024, Curta also rejected recent genetic research supporting the migration of the Slavs, insisting on his interpretation of archaeological, historical and linguistical data and literature that "no class of evidence attests to the existence of any migration across the territory of Romania. Migration is certainly not the mechanism responsible for the spread of Slavic [language]".[17]

Criticism

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Curta's conjectures were met with substantial disagreement and "severe criticism in general and in detail"[18] by other archaeologists, historians, linguists and ethnologists, who "unanimously agree on the highly debatable nature of Florin Curta's concept".[8] The scholarship in East Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe in particular mostly ignored or rejected Curta's hypothesis.[19] It was mostly ignored by Polish allochthonists, and negated by some neo-autochthonists.[8]

Scientists criticized what they saw as Curta's "arbitrary"[20] and "relativistic"[15] selection of historical and archaeological data (using only 1/3 of latter available data[20]), sites and his interpretation of chronologies to support his preconceived conclusions, in addition, they felt his "interpretative"[21] cultural model inadequately explained the emergence and spread of the Slavs, Slavic culture and language.[18][20][22][23][24][25][26][27] Curta's claim that the Common Slavic is "an artificial, scholarly construct not attested by any piece of hard evidence" (2015[28]) was criticized by Jouko Lindstedt that "only shows his ignorance of the historical-comparative method. The existence of a protolanguage that is only about 1,500 years old and has more than a dozen closely-related daughters, several of them with early written sources, is attested by very hard evidence indeed". Lindstedt also noted, as other linguists have already asserted, the Late Proto-Slavic/Common Slavic complex morphological and accentological system "shows no trace of a possible lingua-franca function".[29]

Some also noted his lack of critical evaluation of own theorization and analysis while refuting old ideas in literature.[9] Others criticized his "very cursory and selective analysis of sources concerning the history of Byzantium",[30] inadequate argumentation and contradicting information given by ancient Byzantine historiographers such as Theophylact Simocatta,[9][23] or arbitrary evulation and citation of Jordanes.[15] Curta's viewpoint was considered similar to the Romanian historiography's minimization of the role of Slavs in the history of Romania.[15] In a separate case, Hungarian historian Istvan Vasary in his response to Curta's review of his book, noted Curta's defensiveness of Romanian national historiography and Daco-Romanian continuity,[31] claims which Curta denied.[32]

The renewed version of the hypothesis published as Slavs in the Making: History, Linguistics, and Archaeology in Eastern Europe (ca. 500-ca. 700) (2020) was criticized to "still does not appear more convincing".[33] Although Curta's work found partial support by those who use a similar approach, like Walter Pohl and Danijel Džino,[18][34] and sparked new scientific debate (with some importance for archaeology[8]),[15] the migrationist model remains in the view of many as the most acceptable and possible to explain the spread of the Slavs as well as Slavic culture (including language).[11][35][36][15]

Bibliography

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Edited volumes

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  • East Central & Eastern Europe in the Early Middle Ages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
  • Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis. Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2005.
  • The other Europe in the Middle Ages. Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2008.
  • Neglected Barbarians. Turnhout: Brepols, 2011.
  • with Bogdan-Petru Maleon, The Steppe Lands and the World Beyond Them. Studies in Honor of Victor Spinei on his 70th Birthday. Iași: Editura Universității "Alexandru Ioan Cuza", 2013.

References

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  1. ^ "Interview with Florin Curta". Medievalists.net. January 2007. Retrieved December 24, 2011.
  2. ^ a b "Florin Curta". history.ufl.edu. University of Florida. Retrieved April 11, 2019.
  3. ^ Holt, Andrew (December 25, 2014). "An Interview with Dr. Florin Curta on Communism, Faith, and Academia". apholt.com.
  4. ^ a b Di Hu, "Approaches to the Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Past and Emergent Perspectives", Journal of Archaeological Research, 21(4), 2013, pp. 389–390
  5. ^ Johannes Koder, "On the Slavic Immigration in the Byzantine Balkans", Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone: Aspects of Mobility Between Africa, Asia and Europe, 300–1500 C.E., 2020, pp. 81–100
  6. ^ Florin Curta, The Early Slavs. Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe by Paul M. Barford (review), European Journal of Archaeology, 6(1), 2003, pp. 99–101
  7. ^ Florin Curta, "The early Slavs in Bohemia and Moravia: a response to my critics", Archeologické rozhledy, 61 (4), 2009, pp. 725–754
  8. ^ a b c d Kara, Michał (2022). "Archaeology, mainly polish, in the current discussion on the ethnogenesis of the Slavs". Slavia Antiqua. Rocznik poświęcony starożytnościom słowiańskim (63): 75, 116–119. doi:10.14746/sa.2022.63.3.
  9. ^ a b c Wolverton, Lisa (2003). "The Making of the Slavs: History and Archeology of the Lower Danube Region ca. 500-700 (review)". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 34 (1): 92–93. doi:10.1162/002219503322645655. ISSN 1530-9169. S2CID 143226004.
  10. ^ Mârza, Radu (2017). "Teaching Slavic History in Romania in 2017". Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana. 22 (2): 140–156. doi:10.21638/11701/spbu19.2017.211. ISSN 1995-848X.
  11. ^ a b Felix Biermann, "Kommentar zum Aufsatz von Florin Curta: Utváření Slovanů (se zvláštním zřetelem k Čechám a Moravě) – The Making of the Slavs (with a special emphasis on Bohemia and Moravia)", Archeologické rozhledy, 61 (2), 2009, pp. 337–349
  12. ^ Boris Todorov, The Making of the Slavs. History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500–700 by Florin Curta (review), Comitatus, 33, 2002, pp. 178–180
  13. ^ Paul Stephenson, The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region, c. 500–700 by Florin Curta (review), The International History Review, 24 (3), 2002, pp. 629–631
  14. ^ Florin Curta, "The Making of the Slavs between ethnogenesis, invention, and migration", Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana, 2 (4), 2008, pp. 155–172
  15. ^ a b c d e f Maslač, Domagoj (2022). "Slaveni u ranom srednjem vijeku i pogled Florina Curte" [Slavs in the Early Medieval Period and Florin Curta's View]. Rostra (in Croatian). 13 (13): 61–81. Retrieved October 21, 2024.
  16. ^ Greenberg, Marc L. (2002). "Common Slavic: Progress or Crisis in its Reconstruction? Notes on Recent Archaeological Challenges to Historical Linguistics". International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics. 44–45: 197–209. ISSN 0538-8228.
  17. ^ Curta, Florin (2024). "Migration and common Slavic: critical remarks of an archaeologist". Linguistica Brunensia. 72 (2): 41–56. doi:10.5817/LB2024-38774.
  18. ^ a b c Walter Pohl, The Avars: A Steppe Empire in Central Europe, 567–822, Cornell University Press, 2018, pp. 124, quote: "Predictably, his work was met by some severe criticism in general and in detail. I included a very favorable discussion of it in my paper about “Non-Roman Europe” at the Harvard Medieval Seminar in 2001, and it was not very well received by some of the senior scholars in the audience. The book may have its weaknesses, and I do not agree with all of its propositions, but its groundbreaking role should in any case be acknowledged."
  19. ^ Mühle, Eduard (2022). "Reviewed work: Florin Curta, Slavs in the Making: History, Linguistics, and Archaeology in Eastern Europe (ca. 500–ca. 700). London: Routledge, 2021". Speculum. 97 (3): 819–820.
  20. ^ a b c Pleterski, Andrej (2021). "Slavi e Valacchi alle porte dell'Italia nel contesto dell'etnogenesi degli Slavi" [Slavs and Vlachs at the gate of Italy in the process of ethnogenesis of the Slavs] (PDF). Quaderni friulani di archeologia (in Italian). 31 (1): 253–254, 266–268.
  21. ^ Pleterski, Andrej (2009). "The inventing of Slavs or inventive Slavs? O ideovém světě a způsobu bydlení starých Slovanů". Archeologické rozhledy. 61 (2). Praha: Archeologický ústav AV ČR: 331–336.
  22. ^ Tomáš Gábriš, Róbert Jáger, "Back to Slavic Legal History? On the Use of Historical Linguistics in the History of Slavic Law", Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 53 (1), 2019, pp. 41–42
  23. ^ a b Shuvalov, Petr V. (2008). "Изобретение проблемы (по поводу книги Флорина Курты)". Петербургские славянские и балканские исследования (in Russian) (2): 13–20. ISSN 1995-848X.
  24. ^ Andrej Pleterski, "The Ethnogenesis of the Slavs, the Methods and the Process", Starohrvatska prosvjeta, 3 (40), 2013, pp. 8–10, 22–25
  25. ^ Andrej Pleterski, "The Early Slavs in the Eastern Alps and Their Periphery", in The Slavs on the Danube. Homeland Found, Editors-in-Charge Roman A. Rabinovich and Igor O. Gavritukhin, Stratum plus, No. 5, 2015, pp. 232, quote: "Однако под влиянием англосаксонских антропологических теорий возникла и третья концепция, согласно которой славяне в Европе распространялись не как «биологический» феномен, а как культурная модель образа жизни с языковым компонентом данной культурной модели (Barford 2001; Curta 2001; 2008; 2010; 2010а; Džino 2008; 2009). Недостаток данной концепции состоит в том, что она в основном сосредоточена на механизме передачи культурной модели, и гораздо меньше — на ее происхождении. На другие слабые места в ее аргументации указывает Владимир Сокол — это недостаточное знание адептами концеп1 За дружескую помощь я благодарю Владимира Нартника. №5. 2015 ции конкретных материалов, что приводит к произвольным интерпретационным выводам (Sokol 2011)."
  26. ^ Belaj, Vitomir; Belaj, Juraj (2018). "Around and below Divuša: The Traces of Perun's Mother Arrival into Our Lands". Zbornik Instituta za arheologiju / Serta Instituti Archaeologici, Vol. 10. Sacralization of Landscape and Sacred Places. Proceedings of the 3rd International Scientific Conference of Mediaeval Archaeology of the Institute of Archaeology. Zagreb: Institute of Archaeology. pp. 75–76. ISBN 978-953-6064-36-6. The lexical content of the living culture of the ancient Slavs before their separation refutes Curta's conclusions. As if Curta before our eyes were writing a new historiographic myth about them (Belaj, V., Belaj, J. 2018). Negative answers to such considerations were not in short supply either. Suffice it to mention the 2009 and 2013 works by the Ljubljana scholar Andrej Pleterski, and the 2010 work by the Ukrainian scholar Maksim Žih. The latter mocked Curta: "in summary, we could say that F. Curta's works are frequently structured on the principle leading "from (an a priori) concept towards sources". We may add that Curta's way of thinking is suspiciously similar to the stadial theory of the Soviet scholar Nicholas Yakovlevich Marr9 (see: Belaj, V., Belaj, J. 2018) ... In addition to the fact that Curta's conclusions cannot withstand a logical critique, they are also based only on selected evidential material he necessitated in order to infer the conclusions he had already made in advance.
  27. ^ Rejzek, Jiří (October 19–22, 2017), "Linguistic comments to Curta's making of the Slavs", Language contact and the Early Slavs (PDF), Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, retrieved August 10, 2022, The controversial and provocative Curta's view of the Slavic ethnogenesis has been challenged by several historians and archeologists. As far as I know, linguistic arguments have not been used in the discussion too much, even though the new theory gave rise to several linguistic issues. If the Slavs "were made" by the Byzantines from different ethnic groups on the border of the empire, how to explain the affinity of Slavic and Baltic languages? Why should the Proto-Slavic serve as lingua franca in the Avar khaganate? Is it possible that the speakers of Proto-Slavic came from "nowhere"? How to explain the early presence of the Slavs and Slavic in Poland, Ukraine and Russia, far from the Byzantine Empire and out of range of the Avar khaganate?
  28. ^ Curta, Florin (2015). "Four questions for those who still believe in prehistoric Slavs and other fairy tales". Starohrvatska prosvjeta. III (42): 286–303.
  29. ^ Lindstedt, Jouko; Salmela, Elina (2020). "Migrations and language shifts as components of the Slavic spread". In Tomáš Klír, Vít Boček, Nicolas Jansens (ed.). New Perspectives on the Early Slavs and the Rise of Slavic: Contact and Migrations (PDF). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. p. 275–300. ISBN 978-3-8253-4707-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  30. ^ Turlej, Stanisław (2010). "Justynian i początki Słowian. Uwagi na temat teorii Florina Curty" [Justinian and the Early Days of the Slavs. Remarks on Florin Curta's Theory]. Prace Historyczne (in Polish). 137: 11–19. Retrieved November 23, 2024.
  31. ^ Vasary, Istvan (2006). "06.03.16, Vasary, Response to Curta". The Medieval Review.
  32. ^ Curta, Florin (2006). "06.04.03, Curta, Response to Vasary". The Medieval Review.
  33. ^ Romanchuk, Aleksey A. (2021). "Пределы конструктивизма: в качестве реплики на «Slavs in the Making» Ф. Курты" [The Limits of Constructivism: a Comment to the "Slavs in the Making" of F. Curta]. Stratum Plus (in Russian) (5): 435–444.
  34. ^ Danijel Džino, Becoming Slav, Becoming Croat: Identity Transformations in Post-Roman and Early Medieval Dalmatia, BRILL, 2010, pp. 93–94
  35. ^ Lindstedt, Jouko (October 19–22, 2017), "How the early Slavs existed: A short essay on ontology and methodology", Language contact and the Early Slavs (PDF), Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, retrieved August 10, 2022, Despite Florin Curta (2015) declaring the prehistoric Slavs as a "fairy tale", they certainly existed at least in a linguistic sense: the Slavic language family is unexplainable without an earlier protolanguage, this Proto-Slavic must have had speakers, and "Slav" is the name that mediaeval sources mainly propose as the designation of those ... but there is also no reason to argue that they are totally unrelated groups of people. Linguistics shows the spread of the Slavic language in Eastern Europe in the second half of the first millennium CE; history and archaeology tell us about at least some major migrations in this same period of worsening living conditions (due to the Late Antique Little Ice Age and Justinian's Plague); population genetics shows the relatively recent common ancestry of most of the population in this area. These are distinct stories, but not unrelated stories, and the challenge is to construct an integrated view of the early speakers of Slavic on their basis, not to bury the Slavs under ontological doubts and methodological scruples.
  36. ^ Michel Kazanski, "Archaeology of the Slavic Migrations", in: Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online, Editor-in-Chief Marc L. Greenberg, BRILL, 2020, quote: "There are two specific aspects of the archaeology of Slavic migrations: the movement of the populations of the Slavic cultural model and the diffusion of this model amid non-Slavic populations. Certainly, both phenomena occurred; however, a pure diffusion of the Slavic model would hardly be possible, in any case in which a long period of time when the populations of different cultural traditions lived close to one another is assumed. Moreover, archaeologists researching Slavic antiquities do not accept the ideas produced by the "diffusionists," because most of the champions of the diffusion model know the specific archaeological materials poorly, so their works leave room for a number of arbitrary interpretations (for details, see Pleterski 2015: 232)."
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