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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 June 2008
The title of the Round Table at the 2007 EAA meetings in Zadar triggered a déjà vu, taking me back to 1984 when archaeologists in the then Yugoslavia, at the occasion of the 12th Congress of the Association of Yugoslav Archaeological Societies in Novi Sad, organized a discussion with a very similar topic centred around two principal questions – ‘does Yugoslav archaeology exist?’ and ‘what is Yugoslav archaeology?’. One may argue that the context, political and national, differs much from the context in which the EAA's Round Table was organized, but the core dilemma remains the same – can we speak of a united or integrated discipline of archaeology in a multinational and multiethnic political framework, and what are the perspectives of such a discipline under the actual social and historical conditions in Europe?
1 Modus tollens: if there were a Yugoslav nation then there would also be a Yugoslav archaeology; there was no Yugoslav nation so there is no Yugoslav archaeology either.
2 Indeed, the opening lecture at the Inaugural Meeting of the EAA in Ljubljana 1994, by Colin Renfrew, repeatedly stressed this notion.
3 The case of a Mousterien flute found in 1995 in the cave site of Divje Babe, in Slovenia, is quite illustrative in this sense. In spite of several radiocarbon dates, which according to all modern standards in archaeology proved the late Neandarthal age of this artefact, and of the stratigraphic context in which the flute was found together with some Middle Palaeolithic tools, many ‘Western’ authors who reacted to this find were quite reluctant to accept the excavator's interpretation. The counterarguments were far more speculative and much less substantiated in empirical evidence. For this discussion see more in Kavur (2000).
