Od etničkog determinizma do epistemičkog optimizma: kritička istorija nedavne prošlosti srpske arheologije
From Ethnic Determinism to Epistemic Optimism: A Critical History of the Recent Past of Serbian Archaeology

Summary/Abstract: Although the history of Serbian archaeology has recently been a vivid field ofstudy from various standpoints, the focus of this research has mainly been uponthe early phases of the discipline, while the last thirty years have rarely been discussed.Additionally, the more extreme abuses of archaeological practice for politicalpurposes, although minority positions, but still evident in the recent past,are mainly avoided. Therefore, this paper presents a critical discursive analysis ofthe recent history of Serbian archaeology in the context of the wars and crises ofthe 1990s and the post-conflict circumstances. The issue is raised of the transitionachieved by Serbian archaeology from the dominance of ethnic determinism, apparentin the majority of archaeological interpretations, to the state of epistemicoptimism, as a possible characterisation of the current state.The idea of “the Serbian gromile”, penned by Đorđe Janković, is taken as thecase study, focusing on the explanatory mechanisms supporting it. The emergenceof this idea is contextualized in the situation of social crisis, war, andtrauma, and interpreted on the other hand as a continuation of the tradition of theSlavic archaeology, adhering in Yugoslavia to the culture-historical approach.The interpretation of “the Serbian gromile” offered here is thus specific in arguingthat it is not an exception, but the tip of an iceberg – a part of the generaltendency of Serbian archaeology in the traditional key.The analysis has revealed that the explanatory mechanism, serving as a scaffoldto the interpretation offered by Janković in his search for the early Medieval“Serbian gromile”, was in fact the abuse of interdisciplinarity. Namely,the relationships with ethnology and physical anthropology were problematicin Serbian archaeology under the culture-historical framework, since they werenot theoretically explicated and therefore prone to political appropriation. Thedark shadow of interdisciplinary unity can only be avoided through the explicationof approaches of individual fields of research and their integration, fromthe research design to the final interpretation. In its new iteration, incorporatingsocial anthropology and bioarchaeology, interdisciplinarity in Serbian archaeologyfostered new perspectives in the spirit of epistemic optimism.

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