[gothic-l] Re: Era of Great Migration

[faltin2001]

--- In gothic-l at y..., "malmqvist52" <malmqvist52 at y...> wrote:
> Dirk,
> I think Bertil's question is a legitimate one.


Hi Anders,

I agree and I refered to the relevant sources, because I don't want
to repeat this discussion.




> Wasn't it You btw that wrote that Bierbrauer has been criticised
for
> asserting that Wielbark culture=the Goths?


Yes, but this is an over-simplification, why it is important to read
the text I refered to.





> In front of me I have Barry Cunliffe's  The Oxford illustrated
> history of prehistoric Europe.
>
>
> "In eastern Europe too, there were movements of population and
> shifts in the political geography of the Germanic peoples and their
> nomad and semi- nomad neighbours.
> From late in the second century, contacts had been developing
between
> the population of the Vistula basin and the mixed peoples of the
> Black Sea hinterland and the steppe fringes. A major migration of
> people to the south-east probably *did not occur* ( my emphasis),
but
> it is clear that war bands did enter the Black Sea littoral, there
> gathering allies and resources which were to enable them to attack
> the eastern Roman world. These new groups were referred to by Roman
> writers as 'Goths', a term which embraced a wide range of ethnic
> elements and which bestows a spurious air of unity upon a
> heterogenous congeries of tribes, war bands, and other groups. The
> power base wich arose north of the Black Sea in the third century
> was thus culturally extremely mixed, bringing together various
> nomadic peoples, eastern Germans, and the populations based in and
> around the old Greek and Roman citties of the Black Sea shore. In
> such circumstances, we need not look for any distinctively 'Gothic'
> culture, for it did not exist. The military threat posed to Asia
> Minor and the Balkans by this emergent power, however, was real
> enough. From 238 onward, Gothic armies harried the lower Danube
lands
> with considerable success. Under the recourceful leadership of
their
> king Kniva, they won a resounding victory over a Roman army at
> Abrittus in 251 killing the Roman emperor and extracting huge
> payments of money from his successor. Later the range of gothic
> assaults was widend to include Asia Minor, which had known no major
> warfare for centuries., and the Aegean. These attacks were
> necessarily mounted from fleets, a new departure for barbarian
> raiders, and the resulting devastation was widespread. An invation
of
> Greece by several gothic forces in 257 marked the high point of
their
> successs at this period. It was beaten off eventually and
thereafter
> the series of invations ended quite suddenly. Relations between the
> Goths and Rome were given stabilityby a traty of 332, which
provided
> annual payments to the barbarians in return for manpower, military
> service, commerce: the Goths as federates of the Empire had
arrived."
>
> From this I conclude that there perhaps was no ethnogenesis of the
> goths as they consisted of many peoples bunched together by the
Roman
> writers.


I would read this differently and argue that there were several
ethnogeneses of the Goths.





> And if there was any ethnogenesis in spite of this it was around
Dnepr
> and not in present-day Poland.
>


I think most authors would agree that a first ethnogenesis of the
Goths took place in modern north Poland, in the area of the
Willenberg culture.





> I sent in this quote to another list and if I may very briefly
> summarize the answer I got it sounded like that the Wielbark
culture
> spread progressively southeastwards into  today's
> Volynian region of Ukraine and that there was an intermediate
> Wielbark-Cerniakhov phase also.
> Is this correct?



This is my understanding as well.

cheers,
Dirk



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