The Black Lands

 

Fig. Typical nomadic scatter with artefacts from the Khazar period in the Black Lands
of Kalmykia (Shingiray, 2013: 192)

"The main corpus of material left behind by the nomadic people of the Northwestern Caspian consists of burial sites dispersed across the desert-steppe lowlands north of the Eastern Caucasus, such as the territory of modern Kalmykia, northern Dagestan, northeastern Chechnya, and Astrakhan Province - namely, a type of arid landscape that is often designated as the Black Lands in historical sources (see Gadlo 1979:65-660. The nomads inahabiting that territory moved around with portable felt tents; there was no need to sustain any permanent settlements or structures, nor any possibility of doing so. Therefore, the main evidence of these peoples' way of life comes from their ritual sites, mainly burials, and from small artefact scatters left behind from their ephemeral dwellings." (Shiniray 2013:189).

The case of the imperial nomadic Khazars - compared to other denizens of the Turk-Khazar polity in the wider Northwestern Caspian region - presents a valuable opportunity to study different types of material that were manifested by groups with diverse systems of values, worldviwes, ethic paradigms, and politics of representation. This kind of comparative study may be particularly revealing because the wide Khazar community and its polity underwent some dramatic transformations int he course of the second half of the first millennium AD that challenged its different groups and their values in a contrasting way. Before I turn to this investigation, I would like to contextualise the present state of knowledge about Khazar archaeology in general and that of the Khazar nomads in the Northwestern Caspian region in particular (Shingiray 2013:190).

Although this territory, namely the historical Black Lands - is consensually recognised as the land of the ethnic Khazars on the basis of primary textual sources,  the material culture of the Khazar period in this territory does not form any cohesive SMC complex that could be associated with the imperial and hypthetically settled nomads (hence the "hypothetical" nature of this eighth variant). Rather the material culture in this arid landscape is represented by modest and mixed nomadic contexts and assemblages, by largely redeposited, "disturbed", and ephemeral seasonal sites.

KHAZAR ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE "INVISIBLE COMMUNITY"

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"In the course of the twentieth century, archaeologists accumulated large quantities of material culture from the southern region of Russia, which was thought to have been under the domination of the Turk-Khazar polities. As a result, the idea of the Khazar state and "ethnic" culture, which supposedly existed as a continuous culture-historical entity with its own archaeological material cutlure (called the "Saltovo-Mayatskaya Culture" or the SMC, for short), was born as a stable historical object (see Artamonov 1962; Flerov 1983; Pletneva 1967, 1999:22-24). Naturally, all interpretations of various political, cultural, and historical dynamics of the Khazar groups were carried out within the frameworks of twentieth century paradigms, such as formal, empirical, culture-hisotrical, ethnogenetic, and unilinear-evolutionary models, and inevitably underwent drastic simplifications. Moreover, the ethnohistorical interpretations were forged strictly within boundaries outlined by the poltical science of Soviet/Russian archaeology whereby all politically incorrect aspects had to be undermined or eliminated (see more on this in Shnirelman 2002, 2006b, and this volume; also ee Kohl, this volume) (Shingiray 2013:190).

"These sites, with their minimalist materiality did not live up to Pletneva's expectations and did not impress her followers, who by and large did not interpret or publish the results of their surveys and excavations in the 'land of the Khazars'. There were none of the burials full of riches, and no urban sites or caravanserais that Pletneva had predicted would be found in her hypothetical variant of the imperial Khazars (Pletneva 1996: 144-50, 1999: 191-205)."