ABSTRACT
In the 1960s and ’70s German scholarship played an important role in shaping and propagating an approach to the later prehistory of the Balkans that focused on chronology, cultural history and diffusion of culture, and lay greater emphasis on pottery than on other types of finds. As I shall argue, this approach has been responsible for many of the problems that have impaired the investigation of this field until today (Novaković 2012). Hopefully the contributions to this volume will contribute new theoretical perspectives to the still much under-theorized field of Balkan prehistory. It is particularly opportune that the volume covers the entire region – from the northern fringe of the Carpathian Basin to the Aegean and Anatolia in the south – as this is the only manner in which to counter the still prevalent tendency to regard the borders of the area’s modern nation states as suitable frames of reference not only for archaeological research, but also for the definition of Balkan cultural groups, whose distribution is often presumed to stop at the respective boundaries of a country (Tsirtsoni 2006).
