The Indigenous under the Stećci?

The phenomenon of the burials under the stećci, in spite of the long history of research, still deserves additional attention of scholars. These are interments of the deceased in the context of the monumental funerary markers (stećci), highly prominent in the landscape, typical for the period between the 12th and the 16th centuries. This funerary practice is most intense during the 14th and 15th centuries, and there are indications that it occurs even after the 16th century. In the region of the Western Balkans, more than 72 000 monuments have been registered, mainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina. During the 20th century, when these monuments were interpreted in the culture-historical archaeological key, researchers aimed at identifying a single religious or ethnic group intrinsically linked to this burial practice. Some of the solutions for the attribution of stećci were their ascription to the Bosnian Church, or to the Mediaeval Vlachs. The dedicated researchers, such as Šefik Bešlagić, recognized even under the traditional paradigmatic framework that the phenomenon of stećci is highly complex and that exclusive attribution to one ethnic/religious group is not highly plausible. Subsequently, with the interpretations of Dubravko Lovrenović in the beginning of the 21st century, stećci are interpreted as an interconfessional phenomenon.  While the exclusive attribution to the Bosnian Church is easily refuted on the base of the inscriptions mentioning other confessions, the issue of the Vlachs as the conveyors of this material culture has remained unresolved in certain ways. The solution was sought for in the domain of physical anthropology. Starting from the 1970s, in the papers on the skeletal remains recovered from the necropolises with the stećci, the interpretation is offered that these are homogenous communities, with dominantly brachycranial characteristics, identified as the Dinaric anthropological type. The next interpretive step was to link them to the allegedly autochthonous Medieval non-Slavic Vlachs, understood as an ethnic group deriving from Antiquity or praehistory. The aim of the present paper is to critically reconsider the methodological core of the argument that the people buried under the stećci were of the Dinaric type, seen as the indigenous population, from the point of view of the history of Yugoslav archaeology.