heredity and continuity with innovations. Some western scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stated ideas about the importance of joining various traditions together. The French historian Tarde defined invention as “logical copulation.” The German ethnologist Leo Frobenius described cultural creation as the “coupling of cultures.” In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the English anthropologist augustus pitt rivers clearly believed that new cultural elements emerged as a result of the fusion and crossing of the old elements of culture.

In Russian archaeology at the turn of the century, Kondakov, who moved from the University of New Russia in Odessa to St. Petersburg and studied ancient art on the basis of archaeological records, advanced the idea that anything new in art emerged out of the crossing of old forms. For instance, he stated that ancient Russian art was the result of a fusion of Byzantine, nomad, and local elements. In the first decades of the twentieth century, his methodological ideas were further developed by his pupils—Rostovcev on the example of the Bosporus and Scythia and Farmakovsky on the materials of the archaic culture of the Caucasus. In the first case, the Iranian ethnic element crossed with the Greek one; in the second, the Ionian crossed with the Oriental. After the Russian Revolution, Kondakov and Rostovcev emigrated. Another pupil of Kondakov, Zhebelev, remained in Soviet Russia and managed to publish Rovtovcev’s Scythia and Bosporus, in Leningrad in 1932. Rostovcev became a widely known specialist in the economic history of Hellenistic culture.

The ideas of the Russian combinationists influenced the development of stadialism. The idea of cultures crossing was adapted by Soviet archaeologists from the linguistics school of Marr (see below). The impact of this approach in archaeology was first made by Kondakov and Rostovcev. It was based on combinationism and a broad trend of Euro-Asianism that became very popular among Russian emigrants abroad. They believed that the Russian people were the result of a crossing of European and Asian cultures. However this trend was even more popular in history than in archaeology.

Stadialism

In the first decades of the Soviet period, the director of RAIMK/GAIMK, the main archaeological institution of the country, was Academician Nikolay Marr, a linguist and orientalist. In the middle of the 1920s he formulated his “new learning on language” (Japhetic theory), which completely rejected the concept of an Indo-European Ursprache (“ancestor language”), a concept that had been well elaborated by many generations of linguists, and explained the close similarity of languages, not by affiliation (common origin), but by their mixing and crossing. This theory depicted the history of speech as a series of language revolutions within the melting pot of one language family that are instantly transformed into languages with quite another structure and substance without any alien intrusion. There was no serious substantiation of these assumptions, but the revolutionary phraseology and defaming of Indo-European studies as “bourgeois” gained Marr the support of Communist Party ideologists.

This linguistic theory was picked up by some young archaeologists, especially those of the Leningrad school (such as Ravdonikas, Krichevsky, and Okladnikov), and transformed into an archaeological theory—that of stadial development. Ethnic cultures were placed under languages, and the whole of their history was depicted as a series of leaps from one stage to another—leaps in which the ethnic nature of the culture was instantly transformed. The theory resolved some of the most difficult problems of ethnogenesis as it became possible to derive any culture from any other. Such a large role was assigned to the interaction of cultures that the question of roots, of ancestors, simply no longer arose. All peoples appeared mixed, the ancestors of all of them being similar and, to some extent, common. All had behind them the various and finely crumbled mixture out of which modern peoples were formed by gradual junctions or crossings and mainly by sudden stadial transformations.

The first observable realization of this theory was Ravdonikas’s work “The Cave Towns of Crimea and the Goths Problem in Connection with Stadial Development of the Northern