ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the culture-historical paradigm was by far more powerful, the general lines of which had been established before 1945. Medieval archaeology developed in earnest in south-eastern Europe only after the implementation of the Communist regimes under Soviet aegis. The tendency to use archaeology to illustrate what was already known from documentary history has been a salient feature of the archaeology practised in south-eastern Europe during the post-war decades. Despite earlier and tentative attempts to describe political and cultural interactions within the region, studies of medieval archaeology in south-eastern Europe have by taken different paths in different countries, with little, if any, relation to each other. The main residence of the first Bulgar rulers at Pliska, in north-eastern Bulgaria, is surrounded by embankments with a total length of 12 miles forming an irregular quadrangle of more than nine square miles.
