A social history of the Avars: Historical and archaeological perspectives

Abstract

The Avars have been recently been of some interest to historians, but only from a political point of view, given that the written sources cover almost exclusively only the first century of Avar history. Comparatively less attention has so far been paid to the social organization of the Avar qaganate. Archaeologists, on the other hands, are now in a privileged position, as the quantity of material culture evidence has grown exponentially over the last decades or so. However, even the archaeological approach to social history is marred by serious problems deriving from the slavish application of a model of analysis first promoted by Gyula László. That model is based on dubious ethnographic parallels and does not account for the variety of situations within the Avar qaganate either in chronological or in geographical terms. Most archaeologists concerned with the analysis of cemetery sites (which produced the bulk of the evidence under discussion) still maintain that Avar society was divided into lords, middle class and commoners. New excavations, but especially new techniques (such as those associated with bioarchaeology) have slowly, but steadily eroded the simplistic model advanced by László and his students. A review of the most recent archaeological literature reveals a shift towards an intepretation that takes into account the staged representation of status in death, and therefore privileges the symbolism of the artifacts associated with social rank. “Princely burials” are now regarded as a sign of political and social crisis, and weapon burials have by now received a much more sophisticated interpretation largely inspired by gender archaeology.