Kosko A. (ed.) Beyond Balkanization

Poznań: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, 1998. — 172 p. — (Baltic-Pontic Studies, vol. 5). — ISBN: 83-86094-04-4.This volume contains the majority of the papers presented during a conference that took place on 16th-21st May, 1997 in Łódź, Poland. The conference was organized by the Institute of Archaeology, University of Łódź and Departement d'anthropologie, Universite de Montreal (Canada). The conference was funded by the University of Łódź and by IREX (International Research & Exchanges Board), which also supported this publication. The publication was partly founded by the University of Łódź and by the Foundation of Adam Mickiewicz University, too.
The major questions of the conference were, 1) what is the current evidence for eastern or southern influences in the development of eastern European Mesolithic and Neolithic populations, and 2) to what extent are current political trends, especially the reassertion or, in some cases, the creation of ethnic and national identities, influencing our interpretations of the prehistoric data.
The idea for such a conference came into being through the co-organizers' long-term studies of the development of those prehistoric human populations which inhabited the vast region stretching north and east from the Oder river and Carpathian Mountains to the foothills of the Urals. In a tradition established in modern times by Gordon Childe, virtually all of the transformations of Eastern Europe's Neolithic Age human landscape have been assumed to be responses to prior developments in the Balkan peninsula and Danube basin. We think that a body of new evidence requires a renewed analysis of the distributions of cultural products, peoples, and ideas across Eastern Europe during the Mesolithic through the Early Metal Age within a much wider geographic context than previously has been the case. This includes giving adequate attention to the far-ranging interactions of communities between the Pontic and Baltic area with those located in both the Caucasus and the Aralo-Caspian regions.Editors' foreword
Ken Jacobs, Lucyna Domańska, "Beyond Balkanization" - an outline program for a discussion
Pavel M. Dolukhanov, The Neolithic with a human face or dividing lines in Neolithic Europe?
Richard W. Lindstrom, History and politics in the development ethnogenetic models in soviet anthropology
Philip L. Kohl, National identity and the use of the remote past in the Caucasus
Vladimir L Timofeev, The East — West relations in the late Mesolithic and neolithic in the Baltic Region
Ilze Loze, The adoption of agriculture in the area of present-day Latvia (The Lake Lubana Basin)
Dmitriy Telegin, Mesolithic cultural-ethnographic entities in Southern Ukraine: Genesis and role in neolithization of the region
Dmitriy Nuzhnyi, The Ukrainian Steppe as a region of intercultural contacts between Atlantic
and Mediterranean zones of European mesolithic
Leonid Zaliznyak, The late mesolithic subbase of the Ukrainian neolithic
Aleksander A. Yanevich, The Neolithic of the mountainous Crimea
Nadezhda S. Kotova, The role of eastern impulse in development of the neolithic cultures of Ukraine
Alice Marie Haeussler, Ukraine mesolithic cemeteries: Dental anthropological analysis
Inna D. Potekhina, South-Eastern influences on the formation of the Mesolithic to early Eneolithic populations of the North Pontic region: The evidence from anthropology
Leiu Heapost, Genetic heterogeneity of finno-ugrians (on the basis of estonian modern and archaeological material)
Valeriy L Khartanovich, New craniological material on the Saami from the Kola peninsulaList of Authors