Wikipedia page states that the Chernyakhiv Archaeological Culture “territorially replaced its predecessor, the Zarubintsy culture. Both cultures were discovered by the Czech archaeologist Vikentiy Khvoyka, who conducted numerous excavations around Kyiv and its vicinity…
The Chernyakhiv Culture flourished between the 2nd and 5th centuries AD in a wide area of Eastern Europe, specifically in what is now Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, and parts of Belarus. The culture is thought to be the result of a multiethnic cultural mix of the Gothic, Geto-Dacian, and Sarmatian populations in the area at that time. Matthews and Heather stated (in 1991) that, “In the past, the association of this Chernyakhiv culture with the Goths was highly contentious, but important methodological advances have made it irresistible.” Have those advances really proved irresistible?
Soviet Academician B. Rybakov in ‘Paganism of Ancient Slavs’:
“When archaeologists discovered two phases of the ‘Urnfield’ culture in the Middle Dnieper region at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, both cultures were considered Slavic antiquities of the central Eastern European region of the Polyans-Rus. Khvoyko’s views were supported by a number of archaeologists, including the leading archaeologist and systematizer, A. A. Spitsyn.
However, just eight years after the discovery of the Chernyakhiv culture, German scientists declared this culture to be Gothic, although from the Azov region, where historical sources place the Goths of the 3rd-4th centuries, to [the villages of] Chernyakhiv and Romashki, where Khvoyka conducted his work, is over 500 km. The chronology also doesn’t match: Chernyakhiv elements appear in the 2nd century AD, while “the Goths appeared in the southern steppes only at the beginning of the 3rd century AD,” more precisely in the 230s.
Nevertheless, beginning with P. Reinecke, German archaeologists from Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Würzburg, and Leipzig have persistently sought to introduce the Gothic hypothesis as the supposedly only scientific one. The fallacy of these artificial constructions has been well proven by M. Yu. Smishko.
The Chernyakhiv culture, as an important historical phenomenon, requires a serious and comprehensive examination and generalization of all the Chernyakhiv culture materials. The current state of research (primarily for the western part of the area) is reflected in V.D. Baran’s [Chernyakhiv Culture] monograph…
A serious, comprehensive analysis of all Greek and Latin sources, taking into account the latest literature on the subject, has been carried out in recent years by V. P. Budanova [Goths in the system of ideas of Roman and Byzantine authors about barbarian peoples]. The researcher’s main conclusions are as follows: the first wave of Goths were the Visigoths, who headed toward the Danube at the end of the 2nd century and did not venture east of the Dniester. The Ostrogoths advanced somewhat later, in the first half of the 3rd century, toward Meotis [Azov Sea], and then some of them moved westward to their Danubian relatives. These Azov Goths, in alliance with other tribes, undertook naval campaigns to the eastern coast of the Black Sea. There was also a southwestern direction of the campaigns, sometimes starting from the mouth of the Dniester. Transferring V. P. Budanova’s findings to a map, we notice that the Gothic tribes did not form a continuous mass: one large group inhabited the left, northern bank of the Danube, the other was far from the first, in the Azov region, and is not precisely defined. Judging by “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” this was the northern shore of the Sea of Azov. The area between the Dniester and Dnieper, according to written sources, was not permanently inhabited by Goths; only a portion of the Goths-Ostrogoths crossed this area to join the Danubian Visigoths.
It is extremely important to note that it is precisely this stretch of the river, not inhabited by the Goths, that Jordanes allocates to the ancient Slavs-Antes:
“The Antes, the strongest of both tribes, spread from Danastr to Danapr, where the Pontic [Black] Sea forms a bend. These rivers are many marches apart.”
The mention of “many marches” indicates that the author was not referring to the distance between the mouths of the Dniester and Dnieper, which was approximately 5 days’ journey, but to the entire width of the space between the Middle Dniester and the Middle Dnieper, which exceeded 400 km.
Superimposing a summary map of all Chernyakhiv sites on a schematic map of the distribution of the Goths and Antes yields interesting results: the entire Chernyakhiv culture extends latitudinally from the Dniester basin to the Dnieper basin; on the coast of the Pontus (“where the sea forms a bend”), Chernyakhov sites dot the entire coastal strip from the mouth of the Danube to the Dnieper.
In the authentically Gothic regions, the situation is as follows: on the Lower Danube west of the Prut, where various Gothic tribes are constantly mentioned, there are almost no Chernyakhiv sites. In the Azov region, east of the Dnieper, they are completely absent.
If the Chernyakhiv culture belonged to the Goths, then it would be impossible to explain the abundance of Chernyakhiv settlements on the right, western bank of the great bend of the Dnieper and their absence on the left bank, facing Meotis, and at Meotis itself, which is constantly mentioned as a landmark of the location of the Goths (Ostrogoths)…
The Ros region and the triangle formed by the Ros, the Dnieper, and the line from the headwaters of the Ros to Kyiv have consistently been the most important, most significant, and culturally vibrant region.
Moreover, archaeological material allows us to establish a continuity between the cultures: the Late Scythian culture is “genetically” linked to the Early Zarubintsy culture, and the Chernyakhiv culture, under certain historical conditions, developed in the southern half of the Zarubintsy culture from Zarubintsy forms.
After the turbulent events of the great Slavic migration in the 5th and 6th centuries, we once again see the Ros region as the main cultural center of the “Rus’ land,” the memory of whose borders survived into the 12th century.
In conclusion, it should be said about the Chernyakhiv culture that it is first and foremost a product, a direct consequence of the rise in the development of the Black Sea region and its broad periphery, which has been observed since the 2nd century BC.
The outflow of the Sarmatians to the Middle Danube, the end of the destruction of ancient cities, the emergence in the era of Trajan of such a powerful master as Rome, interested in the economy of the barbarian agricultural world, the extensive and long-term grain trade with it, the social development of the barbarian world itself—this is the complex of those new historical conditions in which the transition took place from the primitive (involuntary) Zarubintsy forms of life to the new ones, which we conventionally call Chernyakhiv.
The Chernyakhiv culture, which developed under the strong influence of the Romans, emerged in the southern part of the Zarubintsy region in the 2nd century AD, simultaneously with the beginning of the aforementioned rise, and ceased to exist in the 4th-5th centuries AD, degenerating into more primitive forms in connection with the pan-European crisis of the 4th-5th centuries AD, which was a consequence of the invasion of the Huns and the fall of the Roman Empire as a result of barbarian conquests.
The beginning and end of the Chernyakhov stage in the development of the Middle Dnieper region coincide precisely with these major milestones in the history of Eastern Europe and Europe as a whole.”
The book “Royal Scythia, Greece, Kyiv Rus” explores the ultimate roots of ancient Rus-Ukraine.
B. Rybakov, in his other book, the most famous monograph “The Craft of Ancient Rus,” writes that one of the major protagonists of Gothis hypothesis, Swedish archaeologist and historian Ture Johnsson Arne (1879 – 1965), considering the fibulae to be Gothic, resorted to a complex system of assumptions in an effort to explain the coincidences with Scythian images. T. Arne assumed that the Goths, having found themselves in southern Rus, began excavating Scythian burial mounds and, thanks to such excavations, adopted elements of the Scythian style.
< Kyiv Radial Fibulae: Made by Rus people, not Goths
