Material Culture of the Volga Bolgars in the Scientific Works by A.P. Smirnov

Abstract

The article considers the study of the scientific heritage of the outstanding Soviet archaeologist Aleksei Petrovich Smirnov, the founder of the scientific direction in the archaeology of the Volga-Kama region – Bulgaristics. Of particular interest are the scientific works of the researcher, which have become classic: "The Volga Bolgars" and "Essays on the ancient and medieval history of the peoples in the Middle Volga and the Kama regions" published in 1951 and 1952 respectively. In the first book, the author gives a detailed description not only of the social, economic and political events in the history of Volga Bolgaria within the formation approach, but also of the material culture of its population. The peculiarity of this part of A.P. Smirnov's research is that there is no typological classification here, although A.P. Smirnov uses its basic principles very often. The author claims that this was the result of the "Marxisation" of archaeological science carried out in the USSR in the 1930s, when the typological method was considered bourgeois and unsuitable for the Soviet history of material culture, as archaeology came to be called. A.P. Smirnov, well-versed in the typological method developed by his teacher V.A. Gorodtsov, deliberately limited its use. At the same time, he successfully applied the results of studies in the 1920s by his colleagues-archaeologists – A.V. Artsikhovsky, S.V. Kiselyov, V.V. Golmsten, and others, concerning the general analysis of the subject world in the context of social history. Smirnov, in the book "The Volga Bolgars", laid the foundations for further scientific developments of his students in the field of Bulgaristics, for example, T.A. Khlebnikova. These approaches were presented in A.P. Smirnov’s second work.

Keywords

• archaeology
• a.p. smirnov
• bolgar fortified settlement
• volga bolgaria
• the volga bolgars
• golden horde
• material culture