THE FIRE ARCHETYPE: EVIDENTIARY LIMITS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INTERPRETATION

Abstract

The article examines the evidentiary limits of philosophical interpretation of archaeological traces of fire in fifth- to tenth-century contexts located mainly within present-day Ukraine. Ovens, hearths, charcoal, burnt clay, slag, calcined bones, and destruction horizons directly attest to thermal impact but do not provide a ready-made explanation of its ritual or religious meaning. The study aims to justify a procedure for moving from material fact to symbolic hypothesis and to conceptualise the fire archetype without reducing it to a fixed set of images. The methodology combines contextual and comparative analysis, criticism of archaeological analogy, ritualisation theory, a hierarchy-of-sources principle, and negative-case analysis. The empirical comparison includes domestic contexts from Belz-22 and Kyiv Podil, domestic and productive materials from Sverdlovske-1, the destruction horizon at Zymne, cremation collections from Shestovytsia, and burial and ritualised features of the Plisnesk complex. A sixlevel model is proposed: material fact, reconstructed action, functional context, indicators of ritualisation, symbolic hypothesis, and philosophical generalisation. Oven repairs, repeated firing, a particular fuel species, slag, or calcined bones are shown not to constitute self-sufficient markers of sacredness. Ritual interpretation becomes stronger only through a cumulative combination of spatial differentiation, recurrent actions, unusual treatment of remains, specialised selection of objects, and the absence of convincing domestic, productive, or destructive explanations. The destruction horizon at Zymne functions as a negative control, demonstrating that ash, charcoal, and burnt structures are non-diagnostic outside their context. The fire archetype is defined as a historically variable structure of cultural experience and fire as a material-symbolic operator of transformation capable of maintaining order, transforming matter, changing the status of the body, or destroying an established integrity. The model can be applied to academic, museum, educational, and digital reconstructions that explicitly distinguish fact, reconstruction, and hypothesis.