METAARCHAEOLOGY

The present study represents a condensation of much of the theoretical thinking in archaeology by Leo Klejn of St. Petersburg over the past half century. It has in itself been underway for a decade or two in step with the timid opening, later the fall of the Soviet Union and the rebirth of Russia.
The volume is the result of the collaboration between the general editor and the author, helped towards the end by enthusiastic assistants, and supported by the European Union (INTAS) as well as by Acta Archaeologica.
Much of Leo Klejn's work has hitherto only been known sporadically in a Western language and little of it in a comprehensive form. It is hoped that the reader will savour this novel and logically consequent, almost neo-modernist perspective on archaeology, as well as its high spirits.
K.R.     

THE “ROUTINE‐SCAPE” AND SOCIAL STRUCTURALIZATION IN THE FORMATION OF JAPANESE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES

Recent archaeo‐botanical research has suggested that the introduction of farming did not immediately cause a sufficient shift in subsistence strategy to form an agrarian society but that the process took as long as hundreds of years. It is therefore suggested that it was not the farming technique in itself but the establishment of routinized day‐to‐day activity patterns and world views associated with farming that eventually led to the formation of a new social structure. The holistic concept of a dynamic day‐today routine and its associated physical and conceptual landscape is termed routine‐scape through which the process of agrarian society formation in Japan is examined around 1000–500 bce when paddy rice farming was introduced from China to Japan. A new crop storage system of a raised‐floor granary was also adopted as a part of the rice‐farming routine, which resulted in changing the Japanese routine‐scape. The community leaders increasingly associated the granary with both symbolic and practical significance; alongside controlling the storage‐related routine they finally gained centralized power. This paper indicates that agriculture brought along a new range of routine activities and their dynamic interactions with landscape produced new social structures.     

Paul’s Euripides,Greek tragedy and Hebrew antiquity in Paradise Regain’d

ABSTRACT

The exchange between Satan and Jesus in Book IV of Paradise Regained is the first substantial account of tragedy in John Milton’s 1671 volume. In his response to Satan’s Athenian temptation, Jesus offers an alternative to the more familiar defence of tragedy in the preface to Samson Agonistes. Here, Jesus invokes the Hebrew prehistory of Attic tragedy, expanding Milton’s tragic archive beyond the antique Athenians themselves, drawing instead upon Clement of Alexandria and Socrates of Constantinople – both of whom support Milton’s idiosyncratic belief that Paul quoted Euripides at I Corinthians 15:33. And where Clement and Socrates support this tragic provenance, they also address the vexed relationship between Christian faith and heathen learning. Far from showing contempt for Athenian art or erudition, Milton invokes these Patristic sources to enable readers to locate Jesus’ critical response in a dynamic relationship to the relevant preface to Samson Agonistes.     

Archaeology of the 1980s through the objectives of the 1970s.

In the author's view the contemporary detente and the spirit of Helsinki may spread historical optimism like that established after the end of World War I. The likeness of mentality leads to a retreat in fashion everywhere, and archaeology will hardly be an exception. Like some others the author also predicts an archaeological structuralism and considers its possible realization with respect to the ‘damned question’ of archaeology ‐ the change of cultures. There has here been sounded an unexpected call to dig less, and one more expected ‐ to theorize more.     

THE STEPPE HYPOTHESIS OF INDO‐EUROPEAN ORIGINS REMAINS TO BE PROVEN

Recent genetic studies have claimed to reveal a massive migration of the bearers of the Yamnaya culture (Pit‐grave culture) to the Central and Northern Europe. This migration has supposedly lead to the formation of the Corded Ware cultures and thereby to the dispersal of Indo‐European languages in Europe. The article is a summary presentation of available archaeological, linguistic, genetic and cultural data that demonstrates many discrepancies in the suggested scenario for the transformations caused by the Yamnaya “invasion” some 5000 years ago.