1 Draft version, to appear in a volume on Language and Ethnic Identity Caucasian Albanian and the Question of Language and Ethnicity Wolfgang Schulze (2017) How do we excavate ethnicity? (Gocha Tsetskhladze 2014) Language cannot be used as an objective definition of ethnic identity. (Jonathan M. Hall 1997) 1. Introduction In book VI of his Historia naturalis (77 AD), Plinius the Elder addresses (among others) ethnographical topics of the regions of Western Asia. In Chapter 15, he talks about peoples living at the banks of the „Caspian and Hyrcanian Sea“, which roughly corresponds to the region of eastern Transcaucasia. Here, he states (38-39): [38] (...) ab introitu dextra mucronem ipsum faucium tenent Vdini, Scytharum populus, dein per oram Albani, ut ferunt, ab Iasone orti, unde quod mare ibi est Albanum nominatur. [39] haec gens superfusa montibus Caucasis ad Cyrum amnem, Armeniae confinium atque Hiberiae, descendit, ut dictum est. supra maritima eius Vdinorumque gentem Sarmatae, Vti, Aorsi, Aroteres praetenduntur, quorum a tergo indicatae iam Amazones Sauromatides. 1 In this section, Plinius mentions several groups of people (Udini, Sarmatæ, Uti, Aorsi, Aroteres, and Albani), one of them (the Udini) being explicitly described as a populus of the Scythians. However, Plinius does not mention any defining parameters he would have applied in order to delimit these groups from each other (or from others). In other words: What had been those social or ethnic features that marked off the concepts underlying terms like Udini, Aorsi and so on? And: Did Plinius’ terms reflect patterns of ethnicity (in which sense so ever) from the internal view of the given people or just from an external view? All we can safely state for many such terms (e.g. Aorsi, Aroteres, just to mention two of them) is that they are seemingly grounded in the construction of ethnicity on the basis of some real or fictitious features unknown to us. We cannot even be sure that the corresponding term actually represents an entity related to modern concepts of ethnicity. Starting from many of the Classical sources we might 1 “At the entrance, on the right hand side, dwell the Udini, a Scythian tribe, at the very angle of the mouth. Then along the coast there are the Albani, the descendants of Jason, as people say; that part of the sea which lies in front of them, bears the name ‘Albanian.’ This nation, which lies along the