THE POLISH LAND 35
be Gothic in origin. The Przeworsk Culture of Silesia (from 400 to
c. AD 600) brings Polish archaeology to the dawn of historical times.
Needless to say, the task of matching archaeological cultures to the ethnic
groups which have survived in the historical records is very tricky indeed. Polish
researchers of the twentieth century have been as eager to prove that the earli-
est settlers of the present Polish lands were Poles, as their German predecessors
were to show that they were Germanic. To the neutral observer, however, the
ethnogenetic hunt for the praslowianie or 'protoslavs' smacks of chauvinism no
less than the earlier hunt for the Fruhostgermanen. Given a mass of conflicting
evidence, the sceptical enquirer must remain as confused about the origin of the
Slavs in general, as of the Poles in particular.
Polish prehistorians of the so-called 'Autochthonous School' have consis-
tently maintained that the ancestral homeland of the Slavs lay in the valleys of
the Odra and the Vistula. Starting with J. Kostrzewski writing in 1913, they
have included anthropoligists such as J. Czekanowski, philologists such as
T. Lehr-Splawinski, and a long line of archaeologists such as L. Kozlowski,
T. Sulimirski, and Konrad Jazdzewski. They have presupposed a direct line of
Slavonic descent from the Lusatian People of the Bronze Age, through the shad-
owy Venedii of Roman times, to the known Polish tribes of the tenth century.
According to this hypothesis, the modern Polish nation is descended from a
uniquely tenacious group of Protoslavs who, whilst their kinfolk migrated to the
west, east, or south obstinately remained on their native soil. The Poles are seen
as 'autochtones', as 'permanent residents', and as 'the native population'; all
other peoples of the area are relegated to the status of 'aliens', 'transients', or
'invaders'. It is an unusual situation to say the least. At a period when the pop-
ulation was in flux in every other part of Europe, and in every other part of
Slavdom, the forefathers of the Poles were planted at a stroke and with extraor-
dinary precision in the one spot of God's earth where they could rest
indefinitely. There may be a long prehistory of England before the English, of
France before the French, of Bohemia before the Czechs, of Hungary before the
Hungarians, even of Russia before the Russians, but not it seems, of Poland
before the Poles. Among the foreign scholars of note who have accepted the
Polish viewpoint, Father Dvornik has written categorically: 'Only the tribes
belonging to the Polish branch (of the Slavs) clung to their original habitat.'^1
(See Map 3a.)
Opponents of the Polish School prefer to place the Slavonic homeland in a
more easterly zone, on the forest-steppe which stretches along the northern
slopes of the Carpathians between the middle Vistula and the lower Dnieper.
This location was first selected in 1902 by one of the pioneers of Slavonic archae-
ology, Lubor Nederle, and has recently received convincing if not conclusive,
confirmation. According to Marija Gimbutas, an American scholar of
Lithuanian origin, the elaborate attempt to identify Lusatian Culture with
proto-slavic settlement has been quite 'unnecessary'. The so-called Venedian
Culture of the Protoslavs must be set aside as yet another red herring. In their