Panskoye I is the site of an ancient rural settlement named after a lake on the north-western coast of the Crimean peninsula. The volume under review publishes the results of the excavations which the Soviet Academy of Sciences conducted in the cemetery of Panskoye I from 1969 to 1986. It aims to present the material in an emphatically impartial manner, describing all the 151 investigated graves and their contents. The bulk of the text consists of a detailed gazetteer of the burials and a separate catalogue of objects, listing the grave offerings in typological order. The documentation is superb, with copious line drawings and photographs of each complex. The sample of excavated structures, estimated by the authors to represent about one-third of the ancient cemetery, consists of kurgan and flat ground burials spread over an area of approximately 3.5 hectares and encompassing the entire period of the settlement's habitation, from the late fifth century to c. 270 b.c. Together with the monumental complex U6 published in the first instalment of the present series, the finds provide insight into the everyday and mortuary organisation of a rural community – a rare opportunity which no student of ancient households and agriculture can afford to ignore. The authors must be thanked for making this well-preserved material available with such exemplary diligence.
The publication was realised as part of the collaborative fieldwork projects in Olbia and the western Crimea financed by INTAS and the Danish Research Foundation (http://www.pontos.dk/field_projects). While the results of these investigations are of immense importance for Black Sea archaeology, the lavish nature of the present series poses some general questions regarding the scope and limitations of archaeological publication. Multi-volume monographical site volumes were not a typical feature of Soviet archaeology, not because its practitioners were less industrious than their western colleagues (who, at any rate, embraced this format only after Mediterranean provenance countries had begun to curtail the pilfering of classical sites) but because their research framework set greater store by interim reports in journals and congresses, syntheses in popular books and the centralised management of excavation records in archives catering to academic study. In the age of digitisation, the Soviet legacy of archaeological archives could conceivably have provided a testing-ground for novel forms of dissemination: i.e. an electronic database giving access to archival records in relatively unmitigated form and expressly designed to facilitate interpretative work on the material. Such an approach would in my opinion have been preferable to print publication, for both practical and empirical reasons.
To start with, the reader should keep in mind that the two monumental buildings included in this series (U6 in Volume 1, and U7 due to appear in Volume 3) represent only a fraction of the structures explored by the Soviet team. In Panskoye I alone, at least four other buildings (U2, U10, U13, U14) have been excavated. And Panskoye I is itself only one of a series of rural sites investigated in the region, alongside the isolated farmsteads Panskoye II, III and IV. To apprehend the regional context and enormous scale of the operations carried out at the sites, one has to revert to the maps and the introduction by A.N. Shcheglov in the first volume of the series. Given that the funding by the western partner institutions is about to come to an end, it is difficult to see how this vast backlog of data can ever be processed without the adoption of a radically new approach to publication.
It seems somewhat unfortunate that the traditional format of the site volume is exported to an independent context of academic practice exactly when the assumptions underpinning that format are being challenged. One does not have to be a post-processualist hardliner to recognise the weakness of a system of representation predicated on the idea that description is an innocent pursuit, in no need of an explanation of the factors deciding what is being described and how it is described. The research goals that determined how the material in this volume had been recovered and analysed were apparently so self-evident to the researchers as to preclude the need for discussion. The reader must infer them from the appraisal on the back cover of the volume: ‘The tomb structures and burial rites as well as anthropological data strongly suggest that the population of this settlement was of a complex and mixed character, which, along with the Greek peasants, is likely to have included Scythian and Taurian components’. The more or less implicit agenda of ethnic identification explains why the most substantial non-descriptive chapter of the text (Chapter 5) is devoted to placing the Panskoye I necropolis in the comparative context of northern Black Sea burial traditions, and why the analysis of human remains in this volume (Appendix 1) focuses on the anthropometric classification of five well-preserved skulls. While the chapter on burial customs provides a very helpful survey of cemetery archaeology in the region, the fundamental issue of what archaeological comparison can and cannot reveal about ethnicity is never addressed. Furthermore, the preoccupation with ethnicity meant that many other possible approaches were marginalised or ignored. For instance, the paleodemographic study of the burials, though highly suggestive, is limited to a ‘preliminary characterisation of the evidence’ (p. 53). The authors identify several family groups from well-documented burial sequences in seventeen kurgans and three multiple inhumations in flat grave burials. These suspected kin groups seem to reveal a tendency towards nuclear and multiple conjugal families of an average size of six to seven individuals. Similar household structures have previously been documented by J. Hjarl Petersen (Cultural Interactions and Social Strategies on the Pontic Shores [2010], pp. 155–97), in an interesting study using a database to trace statistically prominent correlations between burial type, age and sex of the deceased, and the selection of burial offerings. She stressed the relative lack of status distinction of women and children in relation to men, which she plausibly argued to reflect the priorities of a small-scale agrarian community as opposed to a polis society with clearly differentiated public and private gender roles.
Chapter 4 outlines the chronology of the cemetery based on imported Attic pottery as well as amphorae and amphora stamps. S. proposes to divide the burials into three phases, characterised by shifts in the spatial arrangement of the structures and trends in the choice of burial types, grave offerings and markers, and the treatment of children. Other authors arrived at different periodisations (see p. 66 n. 13), and S. admits that his proposed phases are less clear-cut than he wanted them to be. The disappointment stems from the fact that the excavators have been trying to tie the material development of the site to the historical narrative set out on the back cover of volume I: ‘The settlement was founded by Olbia … Half a century later the fortress was destroyed and the settlement taken over by another Greek city, Chersonesos Taurica’. While the similarities of building U6 to the contemporary farmsteads near Chersonesus are undeniable, the expectation that archaeology should be translatable into event-based history distracts the reader from the very local rootedness and internal organisation of the Panskoye I community to which the finds from the cemetery and houses attest. Ultimately, the urge to connect Panskoye I to one or another Greek chora is a function of a broader urge to distinguish between Greek and Scythian spheres of influence among the cultural legacies of the northern Black Sea region, and hence to integrate archaeology with the overarching accounts of civilisation originally introduced by Herodotus and recounted in the magisterial syntheses of early twentieth-century historiography.
The present volume offers an excellent illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of its genre. It provides a standard reference work, expertly crafted and reliable in its application of formal typologies. But owing to its underlying adherence to traditional accounts of the northern Black Sea region, the volume risks obscuring the opportunities which the material from Panskoye I affords for exposing and complicating the agendas of literary representations of culture.
