Fifty years of the Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences [antikvár]

PrefaceCsanád BálintThe fiftieth year is only celebrated as a round anniversary in European cultures using the decimal system. In Inner Asia and in the Far East, time is traditionally measured in twelve-year cycles. The number itself is unimportant - much more important is our attitude to the past which, though unawares, we define and redefine anew each and every day. This shifting perspective does not simply call for an assessment of the achievements and changes of the past decades; obviously, there was far less to assess on the occasion of the Institute's tenth anniversary than now, upon reaching the fifty-year milestone. Our greatest advantage is the opportunity of looking back with a perhaps greater degree of objectivity brought by the passing of time, coupled with an awareness of the changing priorities in research objectives, as well of the constantly improving techniques employed in archaeological work - this, then, is the perspective from which we can examine the activities of the Archaeological Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences during the past fifty years. The major events and achievements of the period are evoked in two studies written by László Török in the first part of the present volume. The evocation of our predecessors and a review of our own work is not simply an excuse for celebration: the present can hardly be understood without a thorough knowledge of the past, and neither can the future be planned without an awareness of both past and present. We all know that today's world calls for careful planning.The creation of the Archaeological Research Group, focusing predominantly on research tasks, inevitably caused an upheaval in the museum organisation which had preserved its 19th century structure and in archaeological studies conducted at the universities. The model imposed on Hungary and the other Socialist countries was undoubtedly the scientific research structure of the Stalinist Soviet Union; however, archaeology was not the single discipline to be re-organised in this manner. A number of similar research groups and research institutes were founded in the 1950s and 1960s, and there was a definite effort to ensure that as many disciplines as possible should receive broader research opportunities. In the Soviet Union, the creation of academic research institutes was undoubtedly motivated by political considerations also, such as the establishment of new research teams as antipodes to the conservative university lecturers. The fact that the academic research institutes were modelled on the Soviet system has been one of the recurring arguments of the Hungarian extreme right and extreme left since 1989 for the abolishment of these research institutes. As a matter of fact, Soviet research policies of the 1920s were modelled