ABSTRACT
Ever since the 1970s, a key concern for archaeologists in Eastern Germany was to study the relations between the local, Germanic population(s) and the early Slavs, and thus to establish the date of the latter’s arrival into the lands between the Elbe and the Oder rivers. Ivana Pleinerová had excavated two separate settlements that had been occupied at different moments in time. At that point, in order to maintain an early date for the arrival of the Slavs to the Czech lands, Jirí Zeman abandoned the thesis of co-existence in Brezno, and focused instead on finds of pottery supposedly of the Prague type in burial assemblages attributed to the Germanic population. There is little evidence to substantiate the idea that the early Slavs came to Bohemia from southwestern Ukraine and/or southern Poland. As a matter of fact, very few pots in the ceramic repertoire of 7th-century Bohemia match any of the classifications so far advanced for the so-called Prague pottery.
