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Hermunduri. When people move, they often bring large parts of their native culture with them, however transformed it may be when transplanted into a new environment: one need only look at any large immigrant neighbourhood in the U.S. or Britain to see the truth of this fact. What is more, the conquest of one region by people from another can profoundly alter the culture of a conquered region, with or without massive population shifts: the expansion of the Roman empire is history’s best illustration of this. Each of these points contradicts the more extreme statements of radical diffusionist theory, but it is unfortunate that this kind of overstatement has given comfort to those who would rather think solely in terms of migration and conquest. The truth of the matter, as so often, lies in the middle ground. Massive cultural changes can take place without much movement of population; by the same token, large-scale movements of population have obviously taken place in the past, which means that some massive cultural changes should indeed be explicable in terms of migration. Neither migration nor diffusion will suit every case, neither can be denied in every case, and we should always have a reason for asserting one explanation over the other in any given instance.

The deep attachment to migration theories in the case of the Goths – and the reading of connections between Wielbark and Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultures in terms of Gothic migration – can be explained without any deep engagement with archaeological theory. The reading of both Wielbark and Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultures is what we might call ‘text-hindered’ and Jordanes is the culprit.[50] His migration story takes the Goths from Scandinavia to the Baltic and then to the Black Sea. Archaeologists have therefore been called upon not to read the material evidence on its own terms, but rather to prove or disprove the authenticity of Jordanes’ text. In 1970, Rolf Hachmann disproved the Scandinavian connection on archaeological grounds, thereby making necessary new theories of ethnogenesis such as we have looked at earlier.[51] But the question has remained the same for the Baltic–Black Sea sequence: can one prove or disprove Jordanes? For an archaeologist of the Goths like Michel Kazanski, this is not even a question: the text of Jordanes tells us the Goths were at the Baltic, then in the Ukraine; therefore the material culture of both regions must be Gothic and we should study it as such.[52] That is precisely what we mean when we say the topic is text-hindered: consciously or not, the archaeological question is always structured by Jordanes, hence an insistence on drawing out the material similarities between the Wielbark and the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultures.

If we did not have Jordanes, that connection would not seem self-evident. Taken on purely archaeological grounds, without reference to our one piece of textual evidence, there is no reason to interpret the Wielbark and the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov cultures as close cousins. The Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture represents an intermingling of many different earlier material cultures, some native to its zone, others not. One might argue, as most do, that the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture came into being because of a migration out of the Wielbark regions, but one might equally argue that it was an indigenous development of local Pontic, Carpic and Dacian cultures or of the migration of steppe nomads from the east meeting Przeworsk-culture warriors from the west. In purely archaeological terms, each of these interpretations is equally possible, for as we have seen, Wielbark cultural elements are no more numerous in the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov culture than are the many other cultural traditions that make it up. It is only the text of Jordanes that leads scholars to privilege the Wielbark connection. Indeed, if Jordanes did not exist and we were dealing with truly prehistoric cultures, it is highly unlikely that anyone would draw the same connection.

How the Sântana-de-Mureş/Černjachov