Hi Veeky Forums

I see.
But what I gather is that either people from Yamnaya culture moved westward before the Scythians came or those two peoples blended together and then moved west. Or there is a third option that they were identical people known under different names.

Indo-Europeans that hung around the original Urheimat for longer then the other groups. Their language was influenced by Germanics and Indo-Iranians at an early stage. Slavic languages are a small, innovative part of the Balto-Slavic group that rapidly expanded.

t. Slav

Yamnaya is a name given by the researchers to a certain set of material objects found together. "Yama" in Russian means "a hole"; I suppose the reason why they have chosen this specific name is because they bury their dead in holes beneath a mound. As far as I know it had not survived the literate cultures of Europe, so the people who buried their dead in this specific way north of the Black sea were not described by the ancient authors. We have no idea whether those people were speaking the same language, whether they had the exact same culture, if they were one ethnos. That's why it's only an archaeological culture. We have examples of polyethnic archaeological cultures, the Chernyahovo-Suntana de Mures culture, which most likely consisted of native Daco-Romans, Goths and Sauromatians.
I don't know if that makes it clear. Just have in mind that it's very difficult to reconstruct the immaterial culture and the thoughts of the people who have made the pots we study today.

>We have no idea whether those people were speaking the same language, whether they had the exact same culture, if they were one ethnos.
Ah, I see now. Thanks.
So history of Slavs can be (somewhat) reliably tracked since 5th century CE. From what I read they already inhabited eastern and parts of central Europe at that time.

The middle of the 5th century most likely is the time when the Slavs as ethnos appeared in the area north of the Carpathians. The problem of tracing back a people's etnogenesis in time is that you cannot catch the exact moment of the creation of an ethnos by the material culture only. You have the pots of a certain group, and then you have entirely different pots.

What we can trace is the migration of the people who made the pots in pic related, or the Prague-Korchak culture, interpreted as the material culture of the early Slavs. This pottery, the specific sunken houses, and the cremations suddenly appear in the territory of modern day Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Eastern Germany, Western Ukraine and parts of Hungary and Romania around the middle of the sixth century. Bear in mind that around that time most of the characteristic Germanic settlements for this part of Europe stop existing (don't forget 568 is the year the Lombards invaded Italy) and the Prague-Korchak settlements appear. If you read Russian I can send you some literature.

at some point the great migration was dying down all the major players either settled conquered parts of west europe or were allready being christianised, or went conquering intonorth africa, some gots and avars were still trouble here and there

this left a fuckload of smaller subpopulations in eastern europe that were either allready there to begin with or followed the mass migration

on larger such population were some group of peoples we today call slavs, and slavic culture and language spread rapidly, and the rest they seem to have conquered or made contracts with, and a important part of that culture other than language and religion were things like assimilation and integration, making alliances and federations and so on a basic thing, the identity was thus always a little generic, but always basicaly slavic

then these peoples formed federations of tribes and moved into central and southern europe, and wherever they went they would usualy take some rather generic name and name their land that, 8 times out of 10 it was either a toponimic name or just a generic word for slav or simply the tribal name if it was a larger people

so then they did all sorts of shenennigans and fought with bisantium and for bisantium and with the franks and for the franks, then lost some land to germans then went trough all sorts of wars and scandinavian conquests and influence, they eventualy got christianised and started becoming standard midieval european fiefdoms, with the hungarians jumping in at some point and just going trough the same process, wars of succesion every where and that standard story

and other than some manichean heresies and a few crusades thats pretty much that till the mongols and ottomans come

Thank you, but I think I grasped the concept.

This is interesting. Can you tell me more about Slavic wars? Were they any successful?

>slavs are a social construct

obviously they were succesful, since they conquered it all and are still there

where they werent succesful later on is today east germany and hungary

but these are a good 1400+ years of separate histories of whole peoples and regions so...

Honestly this is AskHistorians-tier good

Incidentally, this semester I'm attending Medieval archaeology and history lectures and I had the opportunity to listen to 4 lectures on Slavic archaeology. Thank you for your reply, I'm glad I'm not wasting my time.

...

Anyone read this?