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By Root 281 0

that some items of dress were used as emblems of identity and alterity – of belonging and exclusion – we need the human voice of the past to tell us which items communicated that sense of identity and how they did so. As we have seen, the only human voice that exists for our late antique barbarians is that of an interpretatio romana which is as alien to the barbarian perspective as we are ourselves. For that reason, we cannot be confident that our archaeological cultures really do represent something other than our own selection of dead remains – that they do in fact identify some sense of cultural identity that living contemporaries might have recognized. In consequence, we risk investing the material evidence with a historical significance it does not intrinsically possess. That is to say, we risk turning an abstract set of material markers, which we have ourselves selected, into a historically real group of humans to which we then attribute a collective identity or ascribe collective actions. These intrinsic risks are only exacerbated when we draw a connection between an archaeological culture and a historical group named in our sources.

The Goths and the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov Culture

It is, of course, sometimes possible to draw a legitimate connection between the material evidence and the barbarians named in our Greek and Roman authorities. If a well-dated material culture is widely present in a region in which our sources locate a named ethnic group over a substantial period of time, then we can say with some certainty that the named ethnic group used that material culture. The correspondence is never absolute, however. All of the archaeological culture zones that we know extend over regions in which the literary sources describe more than one ethnic or political grouping. In other words, a material culture is never identical with a particular ethnic grouping we find in the written sources. The single best illustration of this theoretical position is, as it happens, the Goths themselves. We know that Goths first appear in contemporary literary sources in the early decades of the third century and that, in the company of various other named groups, they posed a threat to the peace of the empire from bases in the region to the north and west of the Black Sea. As we shall see in the next chapter, by the earlier fourth century the Goths had unquestionably become the most powerful group in that region. In that same region – roughly between Volhynia in the north, the Carpathians in the west, the Danube and Black Sea to the south and the Donets to the east – a single archaeological culture is visible from the late third until the early fifth century. This archaeological culture is known as the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture and is reasonably well dated on archaeological grounds. That is to say, the region in which the Goths were dominant fell within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultural zone. This means that we can use the socio-historical evidence of that material culture to help describe fourth-century Gothic social structures and economic relations – as we will in the next chapter.

Gothic Migration in the Archaeological Evidence

But does the identification allow us to do more than that? For instance, does the identification of the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture with fourth-century Goths allow us to find Goths elsewhere? Many archaeologists and historians would answer yes. The argument has been made most explicitly by Volker Bierbrauer: the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov archaeological culture is Gothic; some of its characteristics – particular brooch and ceramic types, a tendency not to place weapons in graves – are similar to those of the Wielbark culture, which was centred on the Vistula river and lasted from the first to the fourth century A.D.; the Wielbark culture must therefore also be Gothic. Also, because the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture is Gothic, and because some artefacts associated with it appear inside the frontiers of the Roman empire, these artefacts must represent