At the Intersection of Cultures: Multicultural Spaces in Medieval Bosnia and Herzegovina
Stećci are medieval tombstones dispersed throughout the landscapes of Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, and particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The 1990’s Balkan war showed the region as a contested space, a result of centuries of political confrontation, economic disputes, and cultural differences: since Roman times people were moving and have been moved, making the region an extraordinary mosaic of cultures, religions, and languages. In stark contrast to the events of the recent past, stećci embody centuries of Bosnian tolerance, which evolved from long-lasting cohabitation of local, diverse ethnicities.
Traditional cultural heritage studies and the ethnic political movements tend to simplify and associate specific heritage to distinct people. Stećci do not belong to an ethnicity but to the landscape. Medieval tombstones are placed over prehistoric mounds using the Roman-sarcophagus-style burial marker; Christian or Islamic decorated headstones convey the same artistic grammar. Stećci are a product of western Balkan society; as such they reflect both the entanglement of continuously changing political and cultural systems and a stable local fashion of interacting with materiality. Stećci show that people did not move, but culture and politics did and were constantly superimposed on people. Thus today, the country of Bosnians, Serbs, and Croatians, of Muslims, Orthodox Christians and Roman Catholics holds an abundant range of cultural heritage, with stećci tombstones on the pedestal, not as contested, but shared, almost a thousand years old, plural cultural heritage.
Saša Čaval is a Marie S. Curie Fellow in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences at the University of Reading, UK. She co-authored Reconocimiento arqueológico en el sureste del estado de Campeche, México (2014) and has published widely in leading journals such as World Archaeology, PLoS ONE, Archaeological and Anthropological Science and others.
Dr. Čaval received her Ph.D. in Archaeology and Cultural Astronomy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2011. She has held positions at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Slovenia, at the Department of Anthropology and Stanford Archaeology Center at Stanford University and the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’Foscari University in Venice, Italy. Her research has been supported by grants and awards from Ad Futura, Wenner Gren Foundation, Erasmus, Slovenian Research Agency, British Library, and Horizon 2020, the EU Programme of Research and Innovation.
Dr. Čaval’s research focuses on the archaeology of religion with regional foci in Europe and the Indian Ocean. Her multidisciplinary investigation of the unique medieval stećci phenomenon provides a material lens into the Balkan’s deeper past, with the aim of exploring the long-lasting plurality expressed in this funerary custom. She also studies connections between the spiritual and social components of cultures expressed in the relationship between religious structures and landscapes of the medieval period (6th -15th C.) in south-eastern Europe. Dr. Čaval expanded her research to incorporate anthropological perspectives in a study of identity construction, using religion and religious expression by descendent communities on formerly colonized island enclaves; with Mauritius as a principle case study.