Florin Curta

Theories Being inspired by Reinhard Wenskus and the Vienna School of History, Curta's work since The Making of the Slavs: History and Archaeology of the Lower Danube Region (2001) is known for his usage of post-processual and post-structuralist approach in explaining Slavic ethnogenesis and migrations (especially regarding Slavic migrations to the Balkans), arguing against the mainstream view and primordial culture-historical approach in archaeology and historiography. Curta advances an alternative, "revisionist" hypothesis which considers the Slavs as an "ethno-political category" invented by the Byzantines, which was formed by political instrumentation and interaction on the Roman Danubian frontier where barbarian elite culture flourished. He considers that the Slavic language was not an ethnolect, but a koiné language and lingua franca which formed by interaction of different languages and cultures and did not spread with the migration of a distinctive ethnic group of speakers. As such, the identity of Slavs was formed and spread by communities speaking the koiné language through language shift. According to Curta, questions of identity and ethnicity are modern social constructs, imposed externally. Curta therefore argues against theories of Slavic mass expansion from the Slavic Urheimat and denies the existence of the Slavic Urheimat. His work rejects ideas of Slavic languages as the unifying element of the Slavs or the adducing of Prague-type ceramics as an archaeological cultural expression of the Early Slavs.

Archaeogenetic research confirmed a common genetic heritage of the Slavs, a putative existence and location of their Urheimat, a large movement of people, connection with the Slavic archaeological cultures and spread of the Slavic languages in Europe, but Curta dismisses them, saying in 2024 there's "no class of evidence attests to the existence of any migration across the territory of Romania. Migration is certainly not the mechanism responsible for the spread of Slavic [language]", and 2025 that "were there migrations? Sure, there were plenty [...] but how do you identify one in particular as Slavic? It's an arbitrary choice".

Criticism Curta's hypotheses were met with substantial disagreement and "severe criticism in general and in detail" It was ignored by most of Polish allochthonists, and negated by some neo-autochthonists. and "relativistic" cultural model inadequately explained the emergence and spread of the Slavs, Slavic culture and language. Alan Timberlake suggests "that Curta's meticulous quantitative argument shows the opposite: it demonstrates that there is significant similarity of Slavic pottery at different times and in different locales, so that there really is similarity and continuity of [Slavic] tradition". Michel Kazanski stated that the "archaeologists researching Slavic antiquities do not accept the ideas produced by the 'diffusionists,' because most of the champions of the diffusion model know the specific archaeological materials poorly, so their works leave room for a number of arbitrary interpretations".

Curta's claim that the Common Slavic is "an artificial, scholarly construct not attested by any piece of hard evidence" (2015 ) was criticized by Jouko Lindstedt that "only shows his ignorance of the historical-comparative method. The existence of a protolanguage that is only about 1,500 years old and has more than a dozen closely-related daughters, several of them with early written sources, is attested by very hard evidence indeed". Lindstedt also noted, as other linguists have already asserted, the Late Proto-Slavic/Common Slavic complex morphological and accentological system "shows no trace of a possible lingua-franca function".

Some also criticized what they saw as Curta's lack of critical evaluation of his own theorization and analysis while refuting old ideas in literature. inadequate argumentation and contradicting information given by ancient Byzantine historiographers such as Theophylact Simocatta, claims which Curta denied.

The renewed version of the hypothesis published as Slavs in the Making: History, Linguistics, and Archaeology in Eastern Europe (ca. 500-ca. 700) (2020) was criticized to "still does not appear more convincing". Although Curta's work found partial support by those who use a similar approach, like Walter Pohl and Danijel Džino, and sparked new scientific debate (with some importance for archaeology