Cohabitation, Hybridization and Eclecticism of Archaeological Paradigms: Modern Slovene Archaeology and the Legacy of the 1980s
Cohabitation, Hybridization and Eclecticism of Archaeological Paradigms: Modern Slovene Archaeology and the Legacy of the 1980s

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents major characteristics of contemporary Slovene archaeology and explains them with reference to the developments in the 1980s. It begins with a short historical background of Slovene archaeology as a regional and later also national archaeology in the “Austrian” period (1870s–1918) and during the state of Yugoslavia (1918–1991) in infrastructural and conceptual terms, giving special attention to the modernization period (1945–1965) in which Slovene archaeology reached its maturity and became comparable to other Central European archaeologies. The 1980s marked the period of the “loss of innocence”, as new ideas and approaches from Anglo-American (processual) archaeology emerged in Slovenia among a smaller group of academics. One of the peaks of this endeavour was hosting Lewis Binford as visiting professor at the University of Ljubljana in 1986. Initially, new ideas and concepts did not have great success, and the culture-history approach remained dominant; they, nevertheless, gradually gained in importance in the 1990s, especially in the domain of methods and techniques of research (e.g., introduction of systematic surface surveys, stratigraphic excavation methods, geophysics, GIS, etc.). This situation we have termed “cohabitation” of competing paradigms. The next stage, after 2000, was that of “hybridization”, when a higher level of synergy of competing approaches developed, especially within the framework of the largest archaeological project in Slovenia’s history – preventive archaeology connected with the construction of motorways (ca. 1994–2008) – which, due to its unprecedented size, intensity and requirements demanded immediate and profound restructuring not only of archaeological practice but also of conceptual frameworks. This project was, by all means, the principal catalyst of the development of Slovene archaeology in the last decades. However, it would not have been so successful without adequate developments in archaeological theory, epistemology, and methods initiated in the 1980s and 1990s, which provided the conceptual infrastructure for the new practice. The present state-of-the-art in Slovene archaeology is an “eclectic” phase. The culture-history approach has not been replaced with processual or post-processual paradigms – they coexist, mix, and generate “hybrids.” Moreover, through practice, the very proponents of new ideas could better comprehend archaeology’s changing social and cultural environments.

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