The article presents the main theoretical and methodological ideas about the early history of the Slavs in the first half of the 1st millennium CE. On the basis of archaeological sources, it outlines the current view of the formation of the Slavs and summarizes the major archaeological perspectives on the ancestral home of the Slavs. The article also presents and characterizes the archaeological cultures associated with the ethnogenesis of the Slavs from the Zarubintsy culture through the Kiev,…