Marisia - Maros Megyei Múzeum Évkönyve 33/4. (2013)
Articles
Churchyards in the Transylvanian Basin from the IIth to the first half of the 13th centuries 183 Churchyard Weight of jewellery items Weight of jewellery items according to ______________________________ according to tombs burials which contained precious metals Dábáca-Castle Area IV 0.16 grams (577 graves) 1.62 grams (59 graves) Cluj-Napoca-Mänäpur 1-11 0.91 grams (141 graves) 3.91 grams (33 graves) Fig. 36. Jewellery statistics 13.3. The ‘ethnicity’ of the population in the churchyards from Transylvanian Basin (Fig. 37) From the beginning of the 20th century on, culture and ethnic identity were interpreted according to the widely accepted theory of Gustav Kossina, who stated that geographical units are characterized by unified cultures and these indicate ethnic entities .187 Later the Central- and Eastern European scholars who adopted Kossina’s original theory debased it to a vulgar level .188 It is also dangerous that in many cases a particular ethnicity is considered a biological or linguistic formation and not as the sociological construction of a historical-chronological problem. It is also telling that our archaeologists hardly paid any attention to the rethinking the theory of ethnicity.189 From the Kossina’s theory archaeological 187 Kossina 1936, 315; Kossina 1911. 188 It has been said in lots of studies from the 60s to these days that ‘necropola aparpnea populapei proto-romäne p se dateazá in secolele V-VII...’. A good analysis on the documentational foundation of these ‘theories’, see Harhoiu 2004, 149-167. 189 The issue of ethnos has been discussed both in Hungarian and in Romanian archeology: Niculescu 1997,63-69; Curta 2004, 5-25; Bálint 2006, 277-347; Läzärescu 2008, 55-77; Niculescu 2011, 5-24. cultures have grown, whose counterparts are the modern national cultures, which were developed during the construction of nations in the 19th century. This way a modern concept has been thrust upon population structures which have nothing to do with it (mainly because of the chronology of their development). So when experts talked about the elements of the Glina or Cojofeni cultures bringing back to our mind the 20th century Romanian national-political unity, mentally they had in mind the institutional structures of the modern state because they meant by this term all the elements of the material culture that were common in this area. This way of thinking makes it possible for the archaeologist to reach different people who lived long ago. Based on these elements of an archaeological culture, different migrations and international relations can be reconstructed and at the same time the process of the ethnogenesis of various people can be understood. However, the unity of an archaeological culture is not Kossina’s ‘invention’, but the mental construction of the 19th century, and it was only ‘developed’ by Kossina, behind which a modern myth, the myth of national unity, is lurking .190 * * 190 Boia 1999, 157.
