Fieldwork and Fundberichte

The earliest reports and collections focussed heavily on epigraphy, among which mortuary inscriptions featured prominently. Up until the 20^th century, ancient inscriptions were frequently incorporated into buildings such as the Ljubljana Cathedral, where it can still be seen today. They were recognised as something important, but in the beginning there was no museum in which they could be stored, hence they were displayed in prominent locations. Apart from the research of the epigraphic evidence, mortuary archaeology was of secondary importance to early Slovenian scholars due to several factors (see below). With the cultural influence of Ljubljana growing, the main archaeological discussions centred around the political significance of Emona and its geographical location. The main issues of the time were whether or not Emona was in Ljubljana itself (Müllner wrongly located it to the immediate south of Ljubljana, in a settlement called Ig), whether or not it was in Roman Italy or one of the provinces, and what its significance was to the Roman military. Cemeteries that were excavated under Karl Deschmann (alternatively Karel Dežman), the first head of the Provincial Museum of Carniola, and Müllner were only partly published in the form of notes with many illustrations lacking (Petru 1972: 7). Additionally, the documentation of several excavated sites was probably lost (as assumed on the basis of excavation diaries and notebooks by e.g. Balduin Saria, see Petru 1972: 7).

Funerary archaeology, especially at Emona, came to the forefront after two comprehensive catalogues were published in 1972, covering all excavations up until then. The majority of my data comes from these two major publications. The first is Sonja Petru’s (1972) compilation of all known excavation reports between 1635 and 1960. The material was partly sorted by Jaroslav Šašel, whom she replaced at the National Museum (Petru 1972: 7). Petru attempted to link the catalogued artefacts stored in the National Museum whose documentation was lost with the excavations during which they were unearthed. Accordingly, graves from Petru’s publication are usually referenced with the NM (Narodni muzej, i.e. National Museum) prefix in Slovenian publications. Her volume covers the work of several authors and is separated in four parts. The earliest excavations that took place between the 17^th and 19^th century where rightfully treated by Petru as amateur antiquarianism (Petru 1972: 7, 123–129). The first systematic excavations took place under Alfons Müllner in 1898 at two major sites called Graisarjev travnik (Petru 1972: 101–110) and Lenarčičev travnik (Petru 1972: 91–101), two relatively small areas alongside the main Roman road leading north from Emona. Major excavations took place under Walter Schmid, who excavated the site known as Titova cesta (a road now named Slovenska cesta in Ljubljana) that encompasses large parts of Emona’s northern cemetery (Petru 1972: 28–90). He planned to publish his finds in the form of a catalogue, but his manuscript was destroyed during World War I. His notebooks and field reports are handwritten in German and stored in Graz’s Joanneum to this day. Petru notes that several precious and promising objects seemed not to have been stored properly and are now lost (Petru 1972: 7). The last two parts of Petru’s catalogue comprise graves excavated between 1908 and 1960 (Petru 1972: 110–122). The second 1972 catalogue by Ljudmila Plesničar Gec details the material from excavations stored in the City Museum of Ljubljana (Mestni muzej). The corresponding graves are in Slovenian literature usually referenced with the MM prefix. Plesničar Gec’s catalogue covers her own excavations that took place in 1961 and 1962 at the northern cemetery of Emona. It is, somewhat misleadingly, titled The northern necropolis of Emona, which can give the false impression that all previous excavations took place on other parts of Emona’s cemeteries. In addition, there were several (comparatively) smaller publications of minor parts of Emona’s cemeteries (e.g. Plesničar Gec 1967; 1980; Slabe 1968).

The sheer number of graves unearthed at Emona—more than 3,000 and counting, as excavations are still taking place today—has made Emona’s graves a basis for material culture studies (e.g. Bertoncelj-Kučar 1979; Budja 1979; Dular 1979; Mihovilić 1979; Sagadin 1979) and for developing typologies (most notably Plesničar Gec (1977), to a lesser degree also Plesničar Gec (1974; 1976) and Petru (1974)). Excavations that were conducted more recently are mostly only published as preliminary reports (e.g. Mulh 2008; Hofman 2009; Tomažinčič 2011),³ with several papers covering a small selection of graves from individual sites (e.g. Gaspari et al. 2015; Tomažinčič 2018) or focussing on specific types of artefacts (Puhar 2016). Recently, a smaller portion of the cemetery to the north of Emona was published (61 graves in total) in comprehensive form (Miškec et al. 2020) including stratigraphy, a discussion of different groups of material culture and manner of burial, and osteological analyses which is hopefully the first stepping stone on the road to publishing the rest of the excavated areas.

The two major 1972 catalogues offer brief overviews in their introductions (Petru 1972: 7–17; Plesničar Gec 1972: 9–12), mainly concerning burial manner and grave goods. The burial manner typology in both publications is aligned with the German tradition of describing variation using a comprehensive, rigid, and complex classification framework. Despite its accuracy and the numerous interpretational possibilities that such a system offers, the main drawback is the need of constant revision in the face of new material that doesn’t fit the existing scheme if the framework is to remain accurate, and from this stem the problems of classifying data from older publications where the graves were not described in such detail (e.g. Petru 1972: 123–139). Petru and Plesničar Gec’s typology is likely an elaboration of the work of their predecessors since their two catalogues had been planned a long time in advance.

The continued reliance on German methodologies was on several occasions held against Slovenian academic archaeologists, mainly by amateur researchers who flourished in the 1980s and contended that institutional researchers were biased against Yugoslavia (Slapšak and Novaković 1996: 288). While this conclusion is certainly misplaced and exaggerated, it does perhaps contain a grain of a different truth. An example I could adduce are the ceramics from the graves of Emona. An entire book was written about the pottery from Emona’s graves (Plesničar Gec 1977), and a lot of imported ceramics had received ample attention in separate articles before as well as after the publication of this volume (e.g. Plesničar Gec 1976; 1987; 1992; Mikl Curk 1979). But there is also a numerous group of objects belonging to the so called ‘renaissance of prehistoric forms’, which mimics certain types of local prehistoric forms, mainly related to the mortuary context, that was never explored in any detail (e.g. Plesničar Gec 1977: 62–63). Even nowadays I could only find parallels for such practices in Spain (Jiménez 2008). The prevalent academic interest is certainly more biased towards ‘Roman’ types of objects and tends to deal only in passing with the more modest, yet also more numerous ‘prehistoric’ forms.

In Roman mortuary archaeology in particular, the first professional excavations systematically noted only manner of burial and grave goods. The former is typically divided into inhumation and cremation; the use of additional descriptions, particularly for special containers, seems to have been applied only when a burial was considered ‘out of the ordinary’. For example, if a cremation was covered with an amphora, this was noted, while different manners of storing the cremated remains in an upright amphora were all listed simply as amphora cremations. Similarly, multiple inhumations were noted, but the sex and age of the deceased were recorded only in a handful of cases. The major exception to this were notably rich graves, especially the case (Grave 1489 from Tavčarjeva ulica (Petru 1972: 129)) where the hair of the deceased was still preserved. It can be concluded that the excavators had a developed sense of what was an ‘ordinary grave’ and what constituted deviations, which were noted, especially if they were extreme. This does not hold for body manipulations, however, where only skull burials were noted,⁴ yet we know from modern excavations that various types of body manipulations were present in Emona’s burials, for example stones inserted into eye sockets and mouth cavities (Tomažinčič 2011).

The range of described grave goods varies considerably as well. From the earliest documented excavations, there is little or no record of grave goods (again with the exception of rich graves). A simple comparison with findings from later excavations shows that certain groups of artefacts must have simply been omitted from the documentation. An example are plates, which are almost completely absent from Petru’s 1972 dataset covering older excavations, but are rather common among Plesničar Gec’s artefacts (1972; see Figure 1).

Figure 1

Proportions of ceramic objects in Petru’s (1972) and Plesničar Gec’s (1972) catalogues (Stemberger 2018: 171).

The older documentation that served as the basis for Petru’s 1972 volume presents further challenges. Since a unified terminology was yet to evolve, the various authors of the original reports used different names for the same objects (see Table 1). Furthermore, there are no illustrations which could help clarify what exactly the early researchers were describing with a certain term. As in many other disciplines, German has exerted a significant influence on the nascent Slovenian standard language, but the two are very different in nature. German allows for very terse and descriptive compound words, whereas Slovenian requires the use of derivational affixes or qualifying adjectives. A difference in size can in Slovenian thus be expressed with diminutives (‘jar’ and ‘beaker’ for example may be expressed as lonec and lonček, with the latter diminutive). In other cases like steklenica, meaning ‘bottle’, the material is implied in the name of the form—the underlying base word steklo means ‘glass’, but bottles are not necessarily made of glass, and the absence of an additional qualifier can either mean that the bottle is in fact made of glass or simply, as with any other term, that the description refers to the form regardless of material. This is compounded by the fact that sometimes ‘atypical’ grave goods were discarded (Petru 1972: 7) and, conversely, that ‘typical’ grave goods were just not described, which pertains especially to the material Petru lists in the first two parts of her catalogue which includes the works of archaeologists such as Müllner and Deschmann (Petru 1972: 123–129). Even though Schmid voiced his plan of founding a Museum of Emona and engaging the general public (Schmid 1913: 62; Plestenjak 2013: 91), one is left with the strong impression that the reports from this period were written by a small circle of people, who knew what was being excavated, for precisely this small circle of people.

In theory

What, then, about more theoretical works on identity in Slovenian archaeology? First, one has to recognise that identity as a concept in theoretical archaeology is a relatively recent, post-2000 topic in Slovenia. I use the term identity here, as elsewhere in my writings, in its broader sense, as a ‘set of characteristics’ as defined by Tamar Hodos (2010: 3) with subsequent interaction or communication between an individual and their social environment. An individual can assert multiple roles at the same time, and these do not necessarily conflict with each other. Specifically, I aim to examine all the aspects of an individual that can be obtained or reconstructed from the archaeological record, such as social standing, cultural affiliation, employment, sex, gender, age etc. In other words, identity is thus an umbrella term for the combination of these factors. I do recognise that one identity is a relatively recent and predominantly Western concept that I am likely biased towards since I cannot relate my personal experience to other conceptions of identity such as multiple, shared, and fractal identities (see Fowler 2004: 24–25).

Few works have been produced in Slovenian archaeology to address one or more topics of identity, sometimes in name only. One such topic is social status, which has specifically been addressed by three papers. The first by Iva Mikl Curk (1985) advances interpretations of the identity of some of the people buried in the Western cemetery of Poetovio. The author provides a clear description of her methodology, including which objects form the basis of her argument and how common they are in the graves.⁵ She notes that several groups of graves were damaged, and that the excavators probably did not take into account broken pottery (Mikl Curk 1985: 170–171), a practice known from the older excavations at Emona as well (see Figure 1). The richest graves of Poetovio are described as belonging to the upper circles of Poetovio’s urban population. Most importantly, she compares a well-furnished tomb with a relatively poorly furnished veteran grave, noting that even though both graves contained the remains of individuals that would have held a high social status in life, this did not translate into the funerary context (Mikl Curk 1981: 173).

The second study dedicated to ‘status’, written by DeMaine and colleagues (1999), covers the sites of Emona, Celeia, and Šempeter, but concentrates specifically on the ‘middle classes’. The authors rely on counting grave goods to determine the status of the deceased: 5–15 objects are categorised as ‘middle class’, and 16–50 objects as ‘upper middle class’ (DeMaine et al. 1999). The study, which includes two graves from Emona, concludes that there is no substantial difference between the ‘Romanised’ middle and middle-upper classes as defined by the authors (DeMaine et al. 1999: 41–43). There are several problems with this study, the most obvious being the simple assumption that the number of grave goods translates directly into status (and even ethnicity, according to the authors). This notion was criticised at the time of publication and more broadly in recent years (e.g. Parker Pearson 1982; 2003; Pearce 2013; 2016), but was pointed out as problematic even in Slovenia before that time (e.g. Grafenauer 1951). Nevertheless, it feels like the echo of simplified socialist perspective (see Slapšak and Novaković 2002). What I find even more interesting is the terminology chosen by the authors to describe social classes. While there is no explicit mention of ‘lower classes’, it is probably safe to assume that the hundreds of graves from Emona alone without any (preserved) grave goods would fit this category. However, unlike in Mikl Curk’s 1981 study, there is no mention of any ‘upper classes’ in DeMaine and colleagues’ article (1999). At the time this study was published, Slovenia had been independent for less than eight years. The socialist past is to this day reflected in a less stratified society and there are much lesser class divides than for example in the UK or USA. Even in centuries past, Slovenia had precious little of its own aristocracy, and the political and economic elites were traditionally foreign—Austrian, Italian, Hungarian, Serbian. It is hard to overlook the analogy with the, possibly subconscious, view of Slovenian researchers that the ‘real’ Roman elites were in Rome itself or at least closer to the heartlands of the Empire, while the best Emona’s local elite could hope for was ‘upper middle class’, even though the most well-furnished grave known from Emona included in the study contained about 60 artefacts.

The third study on the topic of social standing was published in 1985 by Ljudmila Plesničar Gec. The discussion of social status is rather cursory and the main focus is in fact ethnic affiliation. The topic of ethnogenesis was prominent in Yugoslavia after World War II, especially in the fields of prehistoric and Slavic archaeology, but Slovenian academics largely avoided it (Slapšak and Novaković 1996). One of the reasons why the Yugoslav authorities didn’t promote Roman archaeology is the fact that there was a clear influx from the West of Roman items and new technologies that were missing in the pre-Roman period. Moreover, there is written evidence of migration to the area, lending support to the simplistic notion that a stark and binary divide existed between the ‘Romans’ and the ‘natives’ in Roman-period Slovenia. In the case of Emona, for example, members of trade families from Northern Italy such as the Caesernii and Barbii make a strong appearance (Šašel 1960; 1966). In Slovenian archaeology, the topic of ethnic affiliation has thus been strongly tied to the colonialist concept of Romanisation. Since the beginning of the ‘Romanisation’ debate in Slovenia, many excavations have unearthed material dating to the ‘transitional period’ from pre-Roman to Roman culture, but its potential for providing nuanced insights into what must have been complex, bidirectional interactions between the ‘indigenous’ peoples and the Roman newcomers remains largely unexplored. Typically, it is used to justify simpler preconceptions about a lopsided relationship between superior conquerors and primitive natives. A good example of this practice is a series of articles that originated from a symposium on Celts and Romanisation (Arheološki vestnik/Acta Archeologica 47, 1996). These articles present the finds and provide updated chronologies, but do not tackle any theoretical issues.

There are a few ‘niche’ works that were clearly influenced by more recent theories of the Anglo-American archaeological tradition such as concepts of bricolage like Nicola Terrenato’s (1998; e.g. Županek 2008; Sivec and Županek 2013), creolisation like Jane Webster’s (2001; e.g. Vidrih Perko and Stemberger 2015), and life course approaches centred on rites of passage (Stemberger 2013), where different age groups were discussed and identified for Emona, Šempeter, and Križišče, which was later followed by a closer examination of married and unmarried women from Emona (Stemberger 2014). The later PhD (Stemberger 2018) focussing on the older excavations of Emona⁶ and their potential for interpretations of identity in terms of social status, religious affiliation, and age and gender, is also predominantly based on life course approaches such as Oliver’s (2000) and Martin-Kilcher’s (2000) combined with ideas of fluid identities such as Antonaccio’s (2010: 44) and including modern approaches to Romanisation (e.g. Versluys 2014).

The more recent excavations at Emona were explored using a similar approach by Bernarda Županek, with an additional focus on the topic of religion (2018): the predominance of inhumation at Emona in the 3^rd and subsequent centuries AD and its assumed connection to Christianity, which has been discussed before and since (Mikl Curk 1997; Stemberger 2018; Stemberger Flegar 2020; forthcoming; Županek 2018), while Županek’s notion of the potential presence of a Jewish community at Emona demonstrates the scope for further research. On the other hand, the Norico-Pannonian costume has been at the forefront of identity debates and the introduction of new concepts in Slovenian archaeology since 2015; more specifically, Norico-Pannonian brooches have been explored in terms of the fluidity of identity and its expressions (e.g. Stemberger 2015; Mason and Županek 2018; Stemberger 2020).

However, as the reader can observe, this is predominantly the work of two researchers. In general, most discussions still revolve around the binary opposition between ‘native Celts’ and the ‘Roman newcomers’ (more in line with what has been criticised in e.g. Mattingly’s 1997 volume on Romanisation) even in relatively recent publications (e.g. Istenič 2013; Gaspari et al. 2015). This originates partly in the Yugoslav-era division between the archaeologies of different periods, which is also reflected fully in the curriculum of the University of Ljubljana: Prehistory, Roman archaeology, and the Mediaeval period are studied independently of each other, and there is little discussion or collaboration between the disciplines. Since the issue of Romanisation is by definition at the intersection of the Prehistoric and Roman periods, the frequently adopted binary opposition could be seen as a case of oversimplifying ‘external’ factors in order to focus more on the chosen subject, in this case Roman culture. Similarly, the Roman and Late Roman period are also studied separately—the latter together with the early medieval and Slavic periods, with which it coincided. However, it is self-evident that the Late Roman material is relevant to the study of Roman Slovenia in general, and studies such as Kaja Pavletič’s work on the social structures of Late Roman cemeteries (2018), where she focuses on interpretations based on Heinrich Härke (1993 and other bibliography cited by Pavletič 2018), should certainly be integrated into discussions about Roman status.

Furthermore, cultural affiliation and ethnicity are typically conflated in Slovenian archaeology. This ‘cultural-ethnic’ identity, along with various other aspects of identity such as social status or occupation, are also perceived in quite rigid and deterministic terms (Stemberger Flegar 2020), meaning that they are seen as binary ‘yes’ or ‘no’ properties. This can lead to singular interpretations (e.g. Mikl Curk 1996; Istenič and Štekar 2002) that leave no room for degrees, layered identities, ambivalent cases, fluidity over time etc. Even though Emona is known to have been located in Italy and at the same time close to the provinces of Noricum and Pannonia, we still talk about provincial archaeology, as evidenced by the titles of Petru’s 1964/1965 and Horvat’s 1999 overviews: ‘Various issues of provincial Roman archaeology in Slovenia’ and ‘Roman Provincial Archaeology in Slovenia Following the Year 1965’, respectively.

The lack of distinction between cultural and ethnic identity is particularly surprising considering that for a very long time in history, ethnic Slovenians were culturally and politically part of larger, ethnically foreign spheres of influence. Generations of our scholars were educated in Vienna in particular, all were fluent in at least two languages, and the administrative capital was geographically remote—not at all unlike what must have been the reality of many inhabitants of Roman-period Slovenia. The main difference is that the basis upon which the relatively young Slovenian national identity is built is not an ‘origin myth’, but our language (Grdina 2003).

Proverbially, we see ourselves as part of Central Europe and not the Balkans, and drawing on the Roman past enables us to align ourselves more with central European culture in terms of identity, especially since Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004. It is no wonder then that so much of the research of Roman culture has been appearing in our media (e.g. National Geographic,⁷ social media such as Facebook and Twitter). But hopefully, other aspects of our identity and past will receive more attention as we try to find our voice in the broader political and cultural landscape of Europe. With the opening of new study possibilities such as the Erasmus exchange programme, modern theories including globalisation, glocalisation, and creolisation might finally be fully adopted into Slovenian archaeological theory as their personal relevance to the researchers grows. For this to happen, archaeologists and other heritage workers will have to address problematic aspects more publicly (as for example proposed by González-Ruibal et al. 2018) and give a voice to marginalised groups as well. The Slovenian public has not been nearly as vocal as in e.g. Britain (Hanscam 2019) with debates on multiculturalism, in my opinion at least partly due to the facts that Slovenian archaeologists themselves do not frequently tackle such subjects and that archaeology is still perceived more or less as dealing with curiosities instead of topics relevant to modern everyday life, but this might change in the wake of challenges that transcend small-scale politics such as the recent refugee crisis, which sparked a host of heated, if not always constructive debates in Slovenia. In terms of opening debates on topics that very much need to be publicly debated in Slovenia, it is experts and students of the relatively new field of museology and heritology who are increasingly stepping forward (Vidrih Perko et al. 2019). The pioneering works of Verena Vidrih Perko (e.g. 2014; 2018) and her students (e.g. Furlan 2014; Jereb 2014; Fras 2016) are forging ahead in new and original ways and prioritising dialogue with local communities.

It is true that there is a genuine, pragmatic need for a framework in which non-theoretical publications can exist, where general comments can be made on what was excavated, and where, for the sake of overview, objects can be labelled on the one hand as ‘Roman’ in the sense that they were novel at the time and ‘non-Roman’ on the other hand, meaning their presence in the area can be traced further back. Not all designations of items or concepts as ‘Roman’ or ‘non-Roman’ by Slovenian researchers need to be seen as having colonialist undertones. On the other hand, it is crucial that these and other concepts not be taken at face value or simply transplanted into theoretical archaeology. On the contrary, it should be theoretical works that draw the limits of their usefulness and adequacy through extensive discussions. These should necessarily consider in detail also the broader social, cultural, and political context—both modern and historical—of the phenomena the terms describe. Equating the origin of objects with cultural or even ethnic identity is obviously misguided in a modern context: someone is not necessarily Chinese simply because objects found all over their house say they were made in China. Likewise, in Roman-period Slovenia, ‘Roman’ objects were of course made in the Roman Empire, but the reasons for choosing them could be just as varied and complex as they are today. Besides expressing cultural or ethnic identity, objects could be and were chosen—and placed into graves—for other purposes such as signalling status or religious beliefs, due to a simple personal preference for a certain type of objects, or for purely practical reasons (e.g. in burials, the food in the vessels was likely more important than the vessels themselves in most cases).

Slovenian theoretical archaeology must therefore adopt, more decisively and thoroughly, further elements of modern frameworks such as globalisation and glocalisation (e.g. Pitts and Versluys 2014) even if this could make interpretations less ‘clear cut’ or feel less ‘solid’. As noted by Versluys, the avoidance of ‘Romanisation’ leads nowhere as we just avoid one word while lacking the terminology to describe what we have in front of us. His proposal of globalisation in the sense of diversity within a single cultural framework with material culture studies (2014: 70) could generally work in Slovenian archaeology as well.