The problem of ethnicity of Cherniakhiv archeological culture in the scientific heritage of Mykhailo Braichevskyi

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to determine the viewpoints of a famous archeologist, historian of the ethnic development of Eastern Slavdom Mykhailo Braichevskyi (1924 – 2001) on the ethnicity of Cherniakhiv archeological culture. The methodology of research includes a comparative historical approach (comparison of the historical concepts of Mykhailo Braichevskyi and other historians), biographical approach (analysis of Mykhailo Braichevskyi’s life and career), method of historiographic analysis (specific content of the research papers of Mykhailo Braichevskyi and other Cherniakhiv culture historians) and historiographic synthesis (the formation of the general image of Cherniakhiv culture in the legacy of Mykhailo Braichevskyi). The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that for the first time Mykhailo Braichevskyi’s concept of the ethnicity of Cherniakhiv culture is reconstructed and the factors that have defined it are stated. Conclusions. As far back as in Soviet times, Mykhailo Braichevskyi developed a framework for the ethnic history of East Slavs staring from the 1st and till the beginning of the 2nd millennium AD, with the concept of Cherniakhiv population as the Slavs-Antes. The last were regarded by the scientist as the predecessors of the South Western ethnic group of Eastern Slavdom (a conglomerate of six «tribes» called the Polianians) that started to adopt features of the Ukrainian ethnic community in the social and political conditions of the second half of the 1st – the beginning of the 2nd century. While in Soviet times the idea of Cherniakhiv population as the actual Pre-Ukrainians was concealed in terms of a comparatively politically «neutral» historical concept of the ethnic development of Eastern Slavdom, since the beginning of the 1990s, due to the disappearance of government control over historical studies, it has been openly promoted in his research papers.