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The Goths migrated over vast distances in the late Roman period, plundering the towns and farmsteads of the declining Empire.
Gothic identity
A study of human remains from two cemeteries in Bulgaria, all buried with distinctively ‘Gothic’ jewellery, brooches, and belt buckles, suggests that the ancient Goths were ethnically diverse and not a single homogeneous community.
The findings were published as a pre-print paper on the bioRxiv server (https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.03.03.709317), so have not yet been peer-reviewed. The research is based on the analysis of ancient DNA from 38 individuals, and critics have said that this is too small and localised to draw broad conclusions about the Goths as a whole. Even so, the genomes sequenced by the team led by Svetoslav Stamov, of the Institute for Balkan Studies in Bulgaria, seemingly show just how varied was the ancestry of those whose burials indicated Gothic affiliation. Diverse biological ancestry was represented by the remains of people from northern Europe, the Caucasus, the Levant, Anatolia (modern Turkey), Egypt, East Asia (modern Mongolia), and sub-Saharan Africa.
Some of the burials came from a necropolis dating from AD 350 to 489 linked to the Palace of Omurtag, in north-eastern Bulgaria. The church within the palace complex has been identified as the seat of the 4th-century Bishop Ulfilas, a preacher of Cappadocian Greek descent known as ‘the apostle to the Goths’ for his translation of the Bible into the Gothic language. Samples also came from the Aquae Calidae spa and necropolis (AD 320 to 375), where one of the women was found to have an elongated skull, a kind of artificial cranial deformation typical of Gothic nobility.
The history of the Goths is still far from clear. Bishop Ulfilas’ Bible translation indicates that their language was related to those spoken in the Baltic region and northern Germany. The idea that the Goths were a single biological lineage of Scandinavian origin is based on a history of the Goths, written in AD 551 by a chronicler called Jordanes. Along with the Alans, Vandals, Huns, and Lombards, they are one of the groups that migrated over vast distances in the late Roman period, plundering the towns and farmsteads of the declining Roman Empire as they travelled.
The Goths eventually found a more permanent home in the Black Sea region, before splitting into two groups. The Visigoths (Western Goths), led by Alaric, sacked Rome in AD 410 and then established a kingdom in Spain, with Toledo as their capital. The Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths) ruled Italy for 33 years (AD 493-526) under Theodoric the Great, who was viceroy to Eastern Emperor Anastasius.
People on the move
It is likely that many of the other communities of the Migration Period will prove to be more diverse that has been considered in the past. Simple stories about the invasion and conquest of territory by organised groups of closely related migrants are now regularly challenged by contrary evidence. A paper published in Medieval Archaeology in December 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1080/00766097.2025.2583016) called into question the traditional idea that eastern England was invaded in the 5th and 6th centuries by large numbers of militaristic Angles, Jutes, and Saxons who imposed their language and Germanic fashions in housing, dress, and jewellery on a cowed and subservient native population.
The study brought together all the available isotopic and genetic evidence from human remains in a ‘big data’ approach to understanding mobility in the period AD 400 to 1100. The authors concluded that migration fluctuated chronologically but was not limited to the 5th and 6th centuries, the period of the supposed ‘Adventus Saxonum’ or the ‘Coming of the Saxons’, chronicled by Bede. Further significant activity was evident in the 7th and 8th centuries, and the scale of settlement varied by region, with some areas having higher proportions of incomers than others – contrary to traditional narratives of discrete events involving mass migration and large-scale territorial conquest.
Migrants came from various parts of the Continent, possibly including the Mediterranean, not just from Bede’s ‘three very powerful tribes of Germania’ and there was internal migration into East Anglia from elsewhere in Britain and Ireland, contrary to the historical narrative of native Britons being pushed by bellicose incomers further and further westwards.
Male migrants appear more prominent, although there is notable female mobility, with ‘non-local’ women most apparent in Kent, Wessex, and the north-east, implying that some migrants might have arrived in family groups rather than as male-dominated warrior gangs.
Overall, the creation and negotiation of identities seen in the funerary archaeology of this period was highly adaptable and not merely imported directly from homelands. These were practices and costumes defined by communities in England made up of people from multiple origins, and not dictated by biological kinship, descent, or place of origin.
In the light of this more complex picture, the authors – Sam Leggett (Lecturer in Biomolecular and Medieval Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh), Susanne Hakenbeck (Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge), and Tamsin O’Connell (University Reader in the Cambridge Department of Archaeology) – make a plea for ‘a serious rethink of the oversimplified traditional narratives of migration and cross-cultural contact in post-Roman Britain’.
Chroniclers and historians like dates and decisive battles between people sharply divided along ethnic grounds. The introduction of biomolecular data teaches us that the cultural and linguistic shifts that characterise the migration period took place over a protracted period of time and are the result of complex and dynamic interactions between communities on both sides of the North Sea and beyond – a very different story from the one enshrined in history books, museum displays, and popular archaeology books and TV programmes.
Mesolithic Doggerland
Prior to the formation of the present-day North Sea, Britain and the Continent were connected through the Doggerland landmass, so named by archaeologists from the medieval Dutch word for the fishing boats that in turn gave their name to Dogger Bank, a submerged sandbank that has been a favoured cod-fishing ground for many centuries.
In a new study of this drowned landscape, a team led by researchers at the University of Warwick have shown that Doggerland was forested at an earlier date than the land masses of the adjacent parts of north-western Europe, which remained frozen and inhospitable.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2508402123), the study analysed the sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) from 252 samples from 41 cores spanning the length of Doggerland’s Southern River system. One aim of the study was to assess how secure this evidence might be, given the turbulence of sea currents over many millennia. They concluded that 95-98% of sedaDNA signals found in silty and fine sand deposits were ‘secure’, having originated from local deposition, but coarse sands and gravels are insecure, with 60-70% of the sedaDNA associated with mixed signals from reworked sediments.
Secure sediments were used to reconstruct the ecology of the river system, revealing the presence of several temperate tree genera, such as Quercus (oak), Ulmus (elm), and Corylus (hazel) over 16,000 years ago. The temperature-sensitive Tilia (lime) was present several thousand years earlier than has been recorded for surrounding European areas. They also detected the presence of Pterocarya (wingnut), a tree considered to have become extinct in the region 40,000 years previously.
The findings show that the North Sea formed later than previously thought as well: parts of the Doggerland landscape remained above water as late as 7,000 years ago, having survived major flooding events, including the Storegga tsunami of around 8,150 years ago.
The study supports growing evidence that small-scale refuges allowed temperate plant species to survive northern Europe’s Ice Age conditions, helping to explain how trees recolonised the region so rapidly after the last Ice Age retreated. Professor Robin Allaby, the study’s lead author, said: ‘this is the best evidence that Doggerland’s wooded environment could have supported early Mesolithic communities prior to flooding and may help explain why relatively little early Mesolithic evidence survives on mainland Britain today’.
Co-author Professor Vincent Gaffney, at the University of Bradford, said: ‘Doggerland is often described as a land bridge – only significant as a route for prehistoric settlement of the British Isles from the Continent. Today, we understand that Doggerland may have provided a refuge for plants and animals and acted as a fulcrum for how prehistoric communities settled and resettled northern Europe over millennia’.
Chris Catling is an archaeologist and writer, fascinated by the off-beat and the eccentric in the heritage world.
