Slavic Prehistory

I'm fascinated by Indo-Europeans and all their descendant peoples. But y'know, there's a limit. In Razib's interview with Peter Nimitz, imagine listening to this as a podcast on narrow rainy roads at night when you have no real chance to change to a different podcast, or even pull over and try to look at the transcript to look at the spelling of all these cultures that are mentioned to see if they look at all familiar. You have to have had 6 credits in Slavic prehistory to even tell what the names are. 

I'm not even sure I got them all. I actually know what a very few of these cultures are, and recognised a few more. I usually feel I can enter just about any conversation as a listener and ask a decent question or two, but I have no confidence I could even form an intelligent query.  

Enjoy. 

 ...the back flow from the Corded Ware people who had first conquered, like Poland and Germany and then migrated back, kind of swept over both some of the Yamnaya people, like their more northerly realm, which had kind of spread up into the Volga and the Kama River basins and what's nowadays, Central Russia, as well as some of the hunter gatherer societies like the Volosovo culture, which were further north in the kind of forest region. So we know that, like that third of the Corded Ware world, roughly from Belarus to Udmurtia to Tartarstan is where this Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic proto population was living. And the Soviet historians actually did know that the Eastern, like the very far eastern part, was where the Indo-Iranians were. That's like the Sintashta culture they come out of, like the Abashevo culture. And there was were they looked back at the metal work and the pottery that was being made by these different cultures in kind of the eastern part of European Russia, and they were able to see that, you know, these were the groups that spread in the Central Asia. They were definitely the Indo Iranians. They were not the Baltic Slavs...

 There were a lot the Fatyanovo-Balanovo groups that were kind of around, like modern Pskov area, just south of St Petersburg, east of Estonia. They do appear to be Indo-Iranian like groups that would eventually contribute to the Iranians, rather than the Balto Slavic groups...

 ...you do see these kind of post Yamnaya cultures, like the Catacomb that are still dominating a lot of the steppe region - which is a much better place to live than modern Russia, north of the forest line. So these kind of pre/proto Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian groups, they're living in fairly marginal territory for Corded Ware people.

They overrun the early European farmers, the Globular Amphora culture, the Funnel Beaker culture and stuff. There are some farmer groups in kind of interior places, like Kuyavia, which is in kind of like Northeastern Poland, thereabouts. And then you have, like the surviving Baltic Hunter Gatherers that are hanging out in the Baltic that kind of like coexist with them. So 2500 BC, there's the introduction of the Bell Beaker culture...

 ...these Abashevo culture people in the Far East...

 those people definitely have some sort of link to the slot, because those two populations that kind of descend from that mixed like Bell Beaker, you know Netherlands Indo European group that migrated to the east and forms the Trzciniec culture. The cultures they produce, the Komarov culture...

 Finnic speaking people, are pushing out of the Northern Urals and kind of like sweeping across and  eventually, like the most common Y chromosome, a lineage of modern day Lithuania Latvia, is N1c-n3a you know, whichever N3a, like the whichever nomenclature.

 as well as these Baltic Corded Ware people with these populations who are genetically known to have spoken Indo-Iranian, almost certainly…

we would expect, expect to see, like isoglosses, from Albanian, from Greek, Tocharian, which we really don't see. So that's why I lean more towards like this, Iwno culture, Rzucewo culture, this North Belarusian culture…

I think there's a lot of stuff showing that they were linked in with the Srubnaya Indo-Iranian people, who were kind of dominating the Western steppe at the time. So I think they were kind of dragged into these conflicts in the same way that they were when the Persians invaded a couple centuries later, where Herodotus talks about how you have all these tribes that are presumably Slavic or para Slavic, who are getting dragged into fighting Persians on behalf of their Scythian overlords. I think there's something like this for Sosnitsa culture Slavs, they get dragged into these kind of, like collapsing Srubnaya conflicts and the result is their population is devastated. A lot of their sites start to disappear. It was definitely not a good time to be them. So you actually see the rise of this, I think it's the Lebedovskaya culture…

There's this Stamped Ware complex that emerges out of modern day Romania. And they just go and expand everywhere, like they drive into Germany, some of them, like, drive into Greece. You know, some of them go into Bulgaria, where they come the historical Thracians. The one that's relevant for the Slavs is the Chernoles culture. The Chernoles, they're on the north side of the Carpathian Mountains. They start off on the Dniester River and they expand into the Dnieper river. But they kind of colonize both the steppe region as well as kind of the fore steppe  region. They don't really penetrate into kind of the Lebadovskaya culture core territories, and the kind of Pripet marshes and southern Belarus. So this Chernoles culture, they're pretty militarized…

 Like, finally these refugee populations contact the Chernoles, and they're being separated by these first Scythians and the Sarmatians, and eventually these Germanic migrants who kind of cut through at the beginning of the first millennium AD

So the Milogrod culture, they're fairly primitive. A lot of their survival seems to be they would just hang out in the swamps. Archeologists, they have these things called bog forts, where it looks like they were kind of temporary refugues, refugues for these Milograd culture people, if something bad happened, if they're like, kind of main farmstead on the Dnieper or the Desna, or whatever kind of overrun by the Cimmerians, they would kind of flee to these bogs …

And eventually the Cimmerians, they get swept off by the Scythians…

So he discusses the Budini and the Gelonians were the two important ones. The Budini are described as a great populous nation. They're all - they have blue and gray eyes and red hair. And the Gelonians, they have, like no resemblance to the Budinian complexion or general appearance…

 So when the Goths storm in from the West, rather than the east, they're incredibly destructive. They go and they dominate the entire steppe. The Zarubinets it's culture basically implodes. It actually fragments into like multiple cultural traditions. So whatever, like unity the Zarubinets had, and they were, I would assume, kind of like a loose Federation...

 the fringes of the Desna river,  and, of course in the Pripet marshes as well. These fragments still cause the Goths a lot of problems. Jordanes mentions that just before the arrival of the Huns, the Goths from this kingdom of Oium...

 I think there's two finds of Slavs in Iberia, in a Visigothic or Vandal context. So at least some of them did accompany, like the Eastern Germanic groups as they were migrating across Europe. I don't think it was like a full - I mean, there's no evidence to suggest, at least there was, like political movement. These were probably just like random Slavic subjects who had been recruited for the armies and decided to drive west with the rest of the people. You're completely correct, the Slavs themselves did not really play a role in this stage of the migration period. It would have to be a later period, with the arrival of the Avars...