Rome's Gothic Wars_ From the Third Century to Alaric - Michael Kulikowski [33]
For one thing, the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture is extremely diverse. As we shall see in the next chapter, the artefacts, construction techniques, and burial practices found within the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone have parallels with earlier cultural traditions within the zone itself, with Roman provincial culture, with the Wielbark and Przeworsk cultures to the north and west, and with the steppe cultures of the east. The Wielbark elements in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture are no more numerous than other elements, so there is no archaeological reason to privilege them over others. Even if Wielbark artefacts were dominant in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zone, they would not necessarily signify the same thing in both places: artefacts that are emblematic of one thing in one place may change meaning radically if transposed to another. More importantly still, the closeness of the artefactual connections between the two cultures is not as great as is usually asserted. Indeed, their chief point of intersection is not particular artefacts, but the fact that weapon burials are absent from the Wielbark and rare in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov zones. In purely logical terms, a negative characteristic is less convincing proof of similarity than a positive one, and the fact that weapon burials are commonest where archaeological investigation has been most intensive suggests that our evidentiary base is anything but representative. Given this, why should the Wielbark–Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov connection seem so self-evident to so many scholars? One answer is an old methodology that seeks to explain changes in material culture by reference to migration. The other is Jordanes.
Migration v. Diffusion Theories
The methodological problem is of long standing. In the early years of archaeology’s development as a scientific discipline, it was normal to understand cultural changes as the result of one tribe or people conquering or displacing another and replacing the previous material culture with a new one of their own. This interpretative paradigm goes back in part to the nationalist scholarship of the Volk at which we have already looked, in part to the preoccupation of our ancient historical sources with invasion, migration and conquest, and in part to Kossinna’s ascription of fixed and defined material cultures to ethnopolitical groupings. In the 1970s and 1980s, some archaeological theorists reacted radically against such migration theories. Working from the simple and obvious observation that the material culture of a place can change radically without the population of that place changing much at all, these archaeologists sought to explain change in archaeological cultures by reference to the diffusion of materials and ideas rather than migration. Diffusionist theory became and remains the norm, particularly amongst British archaeologists.
On the other hand, diffusionist theory, like any theory, can be pushed to unrealistic extremes. It is, after all, a simple fact that people move and have always done so, sometimes over long distances – a fine example from our period is the Sarmatian Iazyges, who moved en masse from the vicinity of the Dnieper and Dniester rivers, where Strabo places them at the beginning of the first century A.D., to the Alföld between the Danube and Tisza, where Pliny places them in the 70s A.D., having come at the request of the Quadic king Vannius for aid against the