Origins
Perhaps for no other of the major peoples of Europe has the process of identifying how and when they emerged as a distinct ethnicity been more shrouded in uncertainty and controversy than for the Slavs.
Slavic identity is importantly based on linguistic ties; the first Slavs emerged in part as a communication community all speaking the same language, a fact stressed by one of the models for the meaning of the Slavs' name, that it derived from the word
slovo, meaning "word" or "speech"—that is, that the Slovani, in contrast to their neighbors, the Germanics, whom they called Nemcy (the dumb, mute), were the people of the word or of commonly intelligible speech. (Another theory maintains that Slavic is derived from
Slava for honor or glory.) But a common language is not enough to establish a common ethnic identity, especially in the ancient world in which the Slavs emerged. It was common for ancient peoples, especially those living in border regions with many ethnicities, to speak a number of tongues. In the Western Roman Empire most people spoke Latin in addition to their native tongue. Slavs who migrated into the Balkans during the sixth century and later probably spoke Greek as well as Slavic, and possibly the language of the
Avars. Other elements than language are needed to knit a group together in an ethnic entity.
Modern concepts of what is meant by an "ethnic group" have evolved as a result of archaeological and ethnographic study. The latter widened the term beyond the meaning it was given early in the 20th century as being based on types or assemblages of archaeological material, conceived of as "cultures." The concept of "communication communities" enlarged but did not replace the archaeological culture model, because material culture is, of course, another kind of communication between people and a potent means of self-identification, of belonging to a specific group. Additional components of what goes to create an ethnic group in current thinking include a collective name, a common myth of descent, a shared history, an association with a specific territory, and a sense of solidarity. Among tribal societies such as that of the Slavs the sense of solidarity and the myth of common descent were often provided by the tribal leaders and their dynasties, who in a sense formed the core family or clan linked (more in a mythic than an actual genealogical sense) to all the other clans in the tribe. The thrust of current thinking about ethnicity is that it is created rather than inborn, more a cultural construct than something inherited or "in the blood."
It is obvious that none of these components can be seen directly in the archaeological record, but only, very tentatively, inferred. The realities behind what are used as "markers" for given ethnic groups—such as Early Slavic pottery or Lombard fibulae—were probably far more complex and are very uncertainly known. A piece of broken pottery tells us, by itself, absolutely nothing about its user's language, for example. It has to be said that many scholars of the early Slavs (especially Polish and Ukrainian ones) have seriously overinterpreted the available evidence and even indulged in wishful thinking on occasion.
This is certainly the case for claims that the origins of the Slavs can be seen in cultures of the distant past, for example, the so-called Pit Grave or Kurgan culture of the fifth millennium
BCE. Questionable also is the claim that by about 2,000 BCE the Slavs occupied the whole basin of the Vistula and most of the Oder, in addition to their eastern settlements between the Pripet Marshes and the Black Sea. Beyond the fact that the uncertainties noted in postulating the existence of an ethnic group from material remains alone are multiplied many times over when studying people so far distant in the past, it is nearly certain that the common ancestor of modern Slavic languages, which constitute such an important part of the Slavic identity, emerged thousands of years later, in the middle of the first millennium CE. This proto-Slavic may well have emerged from precursors bearing a resemblance to modern Slavic languages, but these too must have been of relatively recent date and can have had only the most distant of relations to languages spoken by people several millennia earlier, according to the rate of language change over time known to linguists. Since the makers of the Pit Grave culture must have spoken a language (or languages) with only the remotest resemblance to proto-Slavic, it is hard to see that they or any other people of their time can be claimed as being "Slavs." (It is not even certain that they spoke an Indo-European language.)
Such misconceptions are fueled by the assumption that people today assume and think of their own ethnicity in the same way peoples in the distant past did. Citizens of modern nation-states are assigned their ethnicity from birth and are "socialized" to think of themselves as a nationality. The process of group identification in tribal societies was far different and more fluid, particularly in the case of the mobile warrior societies that dominated central and eastern Europe after the Neolithic Age. Warriors with their families could choose to belong to a tribe or decide to leave it for another—a decision often based on the success of a tribe or group of tribes in waging war and obtaining plunder, and in providing security for lands and herds. In the tumultuous period when the historically known Slavs first appeared tribes had become less important than large multiethnic confederacies open to any warrior bands who wished to join them. Furthermore central and eastern Europe, on the edge of the great central steppe lands crossed for ages by tribes of mobile warriors and nomads from the time of the Pit Grave culture and before, were a meeting place of peoples from all over a vast region. For this reason the idea that groups there, living in periods some 4,000 years apart from one another, had any beyond the faintest of links is highly improbable.
Part of the problem in identifying the first Slavs lies in the great simplicity of their material remains. Their pottery especially is so plain and simple in shape that it provides few easily read distinguishing characteristics.
The earliest claimed Slavic pottery, called the Korchak type, is actually quite similar to pottery made earlier over a wide region of central and eastern Europe, in places where there is no reason to believe Slavs lived at the time. This has made finding an original homeland of the Slavs an extremely difficult and contentious issue. Tracking the emergence and development of Slavic culture by using pottery has by necessity been an esoteric pursuit carried out by specialists. And here nationalist agendas, endemic among Slavs of different countries for centuries because of their long and troubled histories, can find a foothold. For it is all too easy for claimed affinities between different pottery assemblages found in different areas to be "in the eye of the beholder"—a scholar with the agenda to claim his country as the original homeland of the Slavs, for example, may see his pottery assemblage as more closely related to Korchak pottery than that from another country. Problems of dating also have plagued archaeological studies of Slavic material.
The archaeological remains of the earliest Slavs have been identified by excavating areas where the earliest of written sources place them—along the Danube in the sixth century CE and somewhat later in the Balkans. There is linguistic evidence that early Slavs may have lived in Moravia (modern Slovakia) and Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic), Ukraine, and other areas, and these places have been excavated as well. The material found in all of these regions shows enough similarity to assume, tentatively, that the Slavs at this time had "crystallized" into a group with a consciously shared ethnicity based on language, a common material culture, and possibly a shared ideology and religion. Before this period the existence of a distinctively Slavic ethnic group becomes a matter of increasingly tentative speculation.
The crystallization of Slavic identity may have taken place in the context of the conquest of the
Goths, a German-led multiethnic confederacy north of the Lower Danube and the Black Sea, and by the
Huns, a Turkic steppe people, in the fifth century. It is thought that part of the process of forging a Slavic identity involved the Huns. The latter's disruption of the previous Gothic power structure may have opened opportunities for the first Slavs; some among them very probably joined the Hunnic forces, learning from them how to fight on horseback and thus becoming formidable and mobile warriors. Slavs may first have entered the Middle Danube region to the west, where they later lived, as part of the Hunnic hordes. The Huns' example may have served the Slavs well as they began in the sixth century to spread quickly over a wide area of eastern and central Europe into most of the countries where Slavic peoples live today.
This expansion was probably not a wholesale migration, because there is little evidence of depopulation in the areas inhabited by the earliest Slavs, nor of a reason why large groups would travel to lands far distant to settle. More likely, small bands of young Slavic warriors made such journeys into lands formerly held by Germanic elites, such as the
Vandals and
Lombards, who had departed to take advantage of the crumbling of Roman power in the south and west. These Slavic warriors may have been followed by small farming groups who were taking advantage of lands vacated by migrating Germanics and others.
