Chernyakhov culture: Encyclopedia II - Chernyakhov culture - Formation

Chernyakhov culture - Formation

The archaeological record shows that the population of the Wielbark culture had settled in the area and mixed with the previous populations of the Zarubintsy culture. This cultural movement is widely accepted as the migration of the Goths from Gothiscandza to Oium, of which the Goth scholar Jordanes wrote in the sixth century.

In the last decades of the second century, the Goths appear to have settled in Masovia, Podlachia and Volynia regions, but some of them moved to the area just north-west of the Black Sea.

A second wave of Germanic migrants arrived in the mid-third century, and most of them settled between the Dniester and the lower Dnieper, including the Cherniakhiv area.

Most of the population appears to have been Sarmatians who lived between the lower Danube and the Sea of Azov, as well as Slavs. In the west, there were some Dacians and Getae. The Sarmatians practiced inhumation while those deriving from the north, i.e., elements descended from the Zarubintsy culture, continued their urnfield practices.

In linguistic terms, it is said that this is the time and place where Slavic and Iranian borrowed lexical items from each other, and where Slavic picked up many of its Germanic loanwords.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Formation", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki