The ancient Goths were an ethnically diverse group

The Goths were a multi-ethnic society, according to a study of the DNA of Gothic tombs. The people buried there had ancestors from places as far away as Scandinavia, modern-day Turkey and North Africa.

These findings run counter to a long-held idea about the Goths: They were Scandinavian people who moved south to the eastern Mediterranean. “If the Gothic identity was primarily a biological lineage descending from Scandinavia, we wouldn’t see this,” says Svetoslav Stamov of the National History Museum of Bulgaria.

The Goths lived in Eastern Europe at least as early as the 3rd century AD and remained there for centuries. The Goths often lived near the borders of the Roman Empire, sometimes fighting for the empire, sometimes against it. A Gothic group, the Visigoths, sacked the city of Rome in 410 AD, contributing to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

However, the Goths are one of the most misunderstood groups in history. Much of our information about them comes from Roman sources, which may be unreliable. Roman writers often used labels such as “Goths”, “Celts”, and “Scythians” to describe neighboring groups about whom they knew little.

To learn more about who the Goths were, Stamov and his colleagues sequenced the genomes of 38 people from two sites in Bulgaria. They say both can be identified as Gothic by characteristic beads and jewelry, burial practices, and skull modifications.

Near a palace called Aul of Khan Omurtag, there was a necropolis which appears to have been part of the ecclesiastical seat of a Gothic bishop, dating from around 350 to 489 AD. The site has been tentatively linked to an early Gothic Christian bishop called Wulfila or Ulfilas.

They also took samples from an older site, the Aquae Calidae Necropolis, dating from around 320 to 375. It was a Roman healing center and baths, not a cemetery, but several bodies were buried there. “One of the samples had an artificial deformation of the skull, which is not typical for Roman times and testifies to a different culture,” says Stamov.

The people at the two sites were genetically very different, but both groups had a mixture of ancestry. The peoples were descended from populations as far apart as Scandinavia, the Caucasus, the Levant, Anatolia (modern Turkey), East Asia (modern Mongolia), Egypt, and sub-Saharan Africa. “It’s an extremely diverse community,” Stamov says.

A key factor may have been the importance of Arianism, an early version of Christianity. “It’s very welcoming for everyone,” says Todor Chobanov, a team member at the Institute of Balkan Studies and Theralogy Center in Sofia, Bulgaria. “Anyone can be an Arian Christian.”

The idea that the Goths were “complex and diverse” and that “people did not have a direct link between ancestry and ethnic identity” is a good one, says James Harland of the University of Bonn in Germany. However, he says the team didn’t sequence enough genomes to get good sampling. He also argues that one cannot reliably infer a person’s ethnicity from their artifacts. Therefore, the presence of apparently Gothic artifacts does not mean that the people in the tombs were actually Goths.

Harland says the Roman Empire may have been a key factor in the formation of Gothic identity, as people worked in various ways with and against the empire. “It is this process of engagement with the empire that allows these groups to form cohesive units,” he says.

“The various Gothic tribes lived on the borders of the Roman Empire for several centuries, and they were gradually increasingly influenced by the Roman Empire in many ways, including the style of their clothing. [and] their pottery,” explains Chobanov.

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