Historical persons in the mirror of archeology

The paper aims to determine the features of archaeological research in the field of historical studies of our predecessors. For the last quarter of the century the research ability in this field has been growing significantly. It allowed shifting the emphasis of history to "common" people rather than historical persons. The number of archaeological works on necropolises has appreciably increased since Early Modern monuments have been recognized as objects of archeology. Progress has been achieved in natural sciences, firstly, in bio-anthropology. Traditional methods using the "anthropology of things", epigraphy and other special historical disciplines are developing as well. This made the author think about the features of archaeologists' approach and their perception of historical persons. The material represents the author's observations over the area of reconstruction of characters of the past, both well-known historical persons and "common" people of "microhistory". A brief overview of these works, including characteristic features, is given as following: the epigraphic story from the gravestone of Hypsicratea, wife of Mithradates from the polis of Phanagoria; the gravestones of the 16th-17th centuries recently unearthed in Moscow (in 2010), which "repeated" the inscriptions on the slabs of foreigners in the Vysoko-Petrovsky Monastery; research on cemeteries of the 18th-19th centuries (burials of Archbishop Nikifor Feotokis and writer Nikolai Gogol in the Danilov Monastery in Moscow; professors and students of the Theological Academy in the Trinity Sergius Lavra). In addition to archaeological identification and reconstruction of biographies based on anthropological expertise, there are given examples of a person's reflection in material items (artifacts from the Resurrection Monastery in the town of New Jerusalem associated with Patriarch Nikon's activities; findings of the 14th century from the Alekseevsky Monastery, indicating its connection to St. Alexei the Metropolitan) and others. The conclusions are formulated as a series of theses, pointing to features of "archaeological persons" as fragmentary ones and, at the same time, closely related to the research context, to methods used by a researcher and to history of research. "Archaeology of a person" appears, mainly, as a supplier of new written and visual evidence (epigraphic, numismatic, sphragistic, iconic and, more rarely, epistolary, for example, in a form of birch bark letters). Yet this is not its most exclusive part. A more important fact is that archeology is responsible for a critical analysis of the item's context, its dating and preliminary criticism of the text itself. The main property of an archaeological person is its difference from a traditional historical and psychological portrait. This person is fragmentary, but firmly inscribed into the context. It is always a part of a material structure, from its natural environment to the world of artifacts. It is reflected in items, structures and bio-anthropological analyses, which form one's individual and social "portrait". Due to this, genealogy and prosopography elements appear even among nameless graves (most graves up to the 20th century are nameless Russia). Another important feature of an "archaeological person" is that after detection and identification, it becomes a kind of their imprint. Moreover, sometimes a characteristic of such "personality" is limited only by this specific source. However, if the same research is applied to a well-known historical person, it can form an important addition to one's biography, and even become a bright part of one's posthumous life (Dante Alighieri, Nikolai Gogol and many others).

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