Počiatky poľského štátu v najnovších archeologických a historických výskumoch
The Beginnings of the Polish State on the Basis of the Most Recent Archaeological and Historical Research

Summary/Abstract: Views of most Polish archaeologists and some historians on the beginnings of the Polish state have been radically changed within the last twenty-five years. Therefore, it is possible to speak about an emergence of the new model which can explain the formation process of the state of the first Piasts better. Progress in the archaeological research have contributed to this change as well as enabled not only to distinguish new and for the early Piast period also significant sites and objects, but also to reanalyse already known material. The most crucial factor which has revolutionary influenced the knowledge concerning this period has been a wide application of the absolute dating (by dendrochronology as well as radiocarbon dating) which has enabled to verify – mostly negatively – older hypotheses as well as to provide more reliable grounds for those more recent ones. The older model of the Polish State emergence was created in the 1950s and 1960s, in the period of so-called millennial research which had been generously supported by the contemporary state power. A basic methodological directive was an acceptance of a gradual and evolutionary concept of the social development in Polish lands. Current Polish research on this issue has created a basis for an almost general consensus with an overall view on the issue. At the same time, there are many various solutions as far as individual questions are concerned. However, I suppose that this consensus is grounded on two false assumptions: that the state emergence should be equated with an abrupt development of fortified settlements building and secondly, that the Piast power domain had been centralized and ruled by a single ruler since its beginnings. A rejection of bases of the older "millennial" concept is currently only illusory as even newer opinions refer to the evolutionary vision of a social structures´ development. The difference is that these views perceive mechanisms and speed of this evolution in the first millennium of our era in a different manner.

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