did not seek explanations for any novelties in the migrations. Simply, the fact was recognized that peoples moved in the past and the ethnic frontiers changed. Elsewhere, these searches have been called “submigrationist” (Klejn 1994).

The interests of these students were mainly in the problems of ethnogenesis. They opposed the autochthonism of the stadialists and the ultrapatriotic autochthonism of the state glorifiers; nor did they believe in the necessity of “archaeological right”—of the deep antiquity of habitation that was necessary to substantiate the right of a people to live where they did. Their reconstructed migrations, therefore, were a kind of challenge to the then-dominate doctrine—and to official politics.

However, their position did have some scholarly basis. In order to study culture-historical processes correctly, one needs first to establish the channel by which the development proceeded, and such a channel does not necessarily occur only in the cultures of one country. Cultural traditions are transferred, not through the earth, but through human contacts. From time to time, the human masses begin to move themselves, sometimes by jerks and sometimes for great distances.

Scientism

The scientific and technical revolution in archaeology did not occur in Russia until the post-Stalin period, later than in the West. Chemical, metallographic, and petrographic analyses, and the techniques of scientific dating, began to be used more intensively in archaeological research, and many archaeologists started to look to these methods for clues to the solutions to the main problems of archaeology. It was believed that it was possible to separate archaeological cultures and epochs by material attributes that could be more easily discovered with scientific methods and technological analyses and to search for evolution and hereditary continuity in this way.

However, the founder of the functionalist-traceological method (the investigation of implement traces with a binocular microscope) in the 1930s to 1950s, Semenov, proposed his method of typology (i.e., the determination of the function of an implement by its form) as the proper scientific method. Later on, the baton of this method passed to the archaeologists who utilized mathematical methods in the service of archaeology—especially statistics and combinatorial mathematics—Yakov Sher, Boris Marshak, Vera Kovalevskaya, the German Fedorov-Davydov, and Igor Kameneckiy. In the main, they developed methods that had already been developed in the West, but the first attempts of this kind emerged in Russian archaeology in the work of Efimenko and Gryaznov in the 1930s, even earlier than in the West.

Computers began to be used by Russian archaeologists much later than they began to be used in the West, but some decades earlier Russian archaeologists, observing computerization in the West and trying to keep up with it with the help of perforated cards, had grasped that computerization demands a theoretical restructuring of all of archaeology. More measuring, more exactness in descriptions, a strictness of determinations, and an elaboration of algorithms is needed. Descriptive archaeology became the phrase used by Kameneckiy, Marshak, and Sher and the Gening school in Kiev.

Relativist Subjectivism

After Marxism was discredited, and with it objectivist optimism in general, the dizzying successes of science and the superb perfectness of computer programs led archaeologists to believe that research implements were all important and that research results were completely dependent on those who possessed those implements. The crisis of positivist and postpositivist methodology pushed researchers to the opposite extreme—to the absolute freedom of the researcher’s intelligence in the interpretation of sources and to an exaggeration of the role of the subjective factor in the reconstruction of the past. In addition, the recent cases of Soviet and Nazi scholarship have shown how dependent the inferences of archaeologists and historians are on social conditions and the position of the scholar is on his subjective bias. By contrast, the Marxist type of sociological analysis, which became very influential in archaeology in the West (“the critical theory”), provided the basis of the