New Perspectives on the Early Slavs and the Rise of Slavic

Contact and Migrations. Edited by Tomás Klír, Vít Bocek and Nicolas Jansens.

Twelve contributions interpret new methodological and empirical findings from several fields of study, not only from the traditional triad of linguistics, archaeology, and historiography, but also from adjacent disciplines such as religious studies, cultural anthropology, archaeogenetics, and others. The unifying thread is that the question of the relations between Slavic language, ethnicity, and material culture has differing answers in different geographical and political contexts. The volume addresses the extremely fast expansion of the Slavic language across great parts of Europe in the Early Middle Ages. Traditionalists explain the spread of proto-Slavic as a result of migrations in the 6th/7th century and associate that with a specific material culture and with early mentions of ethnic Slavs in written sources. Alternative hypotheses attribute the same evidence to linguistically and genetically quite varied communities and associate the later spread of proto-Slavic with its status as a lingua franca or koiné. 353 Seiten mit 61 Abb., gebunden (Empirie und Theorie der Sprachwissenschaft; Band 6/Universitätsverlag Winter 2020)