ABSTRACT
It was until very recently that Eastern Europe was considered as the backyard of Europe. The dramatic changes in many East European countries, and in Bulgaria in particular, in the last two decades should not delude us about the political legacy of the recent past. This is not the place to discuss the particularities of the political regimes in Bulgaria after the Second World War, but it should be made absolutely clear that the development of any professional discipline cannot be divorced from its contemporary leading ideology, if is it to be understood correctly. This is particularly valid for the social sciences and humanities, with which physical anthropology (henceforth ‘anthropology’) is affiliated by the nature of its source materials. This chapter aims to give a flavour of the development of anthropology in Bulgaria, the anthropological and archaeological practice, and provides recommendations for legislation and best practice. While in-depth analysis of the current state of Bulgarian anthropology is much needed, this chapter has the less ambitious task of presenting a short critical assessment. Anthropology in Bulgaria has a history of 136 years, a fact which is quite impressive for a
small country that only obtained its sovereignty in 1878 as a result of one of the 19th-century Russo-Turkish Wars. Not surprisingly, the first anthropologists involved with Bulgarian skeletal material (mainly skulls) were foreigners (e.g., Scheiber 1873; Virchow 1886). The first professional Bulgarian anthropologist was Krum Dronchilov (Yordanov 1999: 9) who, together with Stephan Vatev, is considered to be the founder of Bulgarian anthropology in the 1920s (Boev 1958: 153). The next 35 years saw the establishment of the new field, with attempts at theoretical advances and some measurement of the contemporary population, but with primary attention paid to the development of palaeoanthropology. The political regime established in Bulgaria after the Second World War was highly ideolo-
gical, and the imposition of politically driven agenda as research priorities in all public spheres was inevitable. For anthropology, such a priority was the linking of the ethnogenesis of the Bulgarians to the Slavs as the major component of the present anthropological type of the Bulgarian people (Boev 1958: 153). While following the official line to some extent or other in the majority of the investigations, the beneficial by-product of close examination of large amounts of skeletal material, from prehistory to the present day, cannot be underestimated. If
the ideological message is filtered, there is much useful information in terms of measurements, different anthropological types, artificial skull deformation, trepanation, etc. State-funded research and the institutionalization of Bulgarian anthropology led to diversification and the creation of sub-disciplines such as morphology (dealing with the present population), statistics, the refinement of methodologies, serology, etc. Most importantly, it guaranteed the regular publication of investigations. As Figure 8.1 demonstrates, there was a flourishing period between 1970 and 1990. A good example of the quality of the research is the monograph written by Boev (1972) who systematized chronologically and spatially all the available palaeoanthropological data found to the south of the Danube, and related it to various historical (e.g., written sources) and archaeological (e.g., figurines, tomb decorations) sources in order to reconstruct a dynamic picture of local development, along with the influences of migration and diffusion. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the decline in state funding is well reflected in the number of publications after 1990. Information about the development of anthropology in the last decade as measured by the number of publications is not easily available, a fact that clearly speaks for itself.1
