Were There Vandals in Poland? – Part VI (Przeworsk)

As we have previously stated on a number of occasions we do not feel that pots & pans are determinative of ethnicity within closely existing geographic areas.  It’s one thing to compare Ming vases and Olmec sculptures and speculate who used/owned those but it’s another thing to try to tell apart a material culture of one northern barbarian tribe of Europe from another.  And, as art collectors grow to be increasingly international even the Ming/Olmec ownership distinction is unlikely to be sustained much longer.  One certainly cannot assume that every driver of a German or Japanese car is German or Japanese (in fact, one could probably assume the opposite).  Even with locally made goods export is certainly possible.

Nevertheless, a persistent theme in history has been the attempt to identify the so-called Przeworsk “culture” with one ethnicity.  Specifically, that of the Vandals.  Since the Przeworsk culture covers much of Poland, this would give the hypotheses of Vandal presence in Poland a leg to stand on. Not surprisingly, this has caused much past acrimony between German and Polish archeologists in the past.  Nevertheless, as the turbulence of past strife has, at least temporarily, receded, a “consensus” position has emerged that, indeed, Przeworsk means Vandals.  As we have seen in the past entries on this topic:

• it is not clear that there was such a group as Vandals before Dacia in the second century; and

• even if there was such a group, it is likely that it would have lived – or, more accurately, would have passed through – on its way to Dacia, areas of central Germany, rather than Poland.

We further saw that:

• there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the Lugii – who may have lived in parts of Poland – were Vandals; and

• the Silingae were a tribe that is mentioned only once before the 5th century and that in Germany, not in Silesia – and in its one and only mention from the 2nd century, it is nowhere called Vandal.

Given the lack of virtually any evidence for the existence of a Vandal tribe prior to 171 A.D. in general and the lack of any evidence for their existence in Poland, in particular, it seems perplexing that German or Polish or any historians or archeologists would identify the Vandals as the creators of the Przeworsk culture.  Nevertheless, some do.

As noted, we do not want to get into archaeology here but we do want to address this issue briefly.  To help us do that we will quote an entry from a book – in fact, the only recently published book that deals exclusively with the Vandals by the Australian scholars Andrew Merrills and Richard Miles.

The authors are academics and, being Australian, likely emotionally uninvested in this “ethnic” German versus Polish debate (or, nowadays, German-Polish versus Polish debate).  The book is, appropriately and unsurprisingly, called “The Vandals”.  Here is what the authors have to say about Przeworsk:

“While few scholars would now claim [but they do!] that the settlement of the Vandals could be mapped precisely onto the extent of the Przeworsk culture – indeed most would argue vigorously against such assumptions – the association between the prehistoric ‘people’ and their supposed material culture remains close in much scholarship… If a relationship can be assumed between the Vandili of Tacitus and Pliny and the Przeworsk material culture, if these peoples were connected to the groups who later appeared on the Danube and the Rhine, and eventually conquered Carthage, then the Vandals quite clearly had an impressive prehistory.”

“Regrettably, such assumptions cannot be sustained, and it is for this reason that the present volume begins its Vandal history where it does [i.e., in the 2nd century].  Both Tacitus and Pliny do refer to groups of Vandili, but neither does so with any geographical precision.”

[actually, as we saw, one could go further and say that neither Tacitus nor Pliny show any inclination to even try to locate the Vandals – the only thing that can be assumed here is that, in their minds, they lived (or, in Tacitus’ case, had lived) somewhere north of the Danube in Magna Germania].

“We can assume that groups go ‘Vandals’ did exist somewhere in the barbarian territories (or at least that Roman authors believed that these ‘Vandals’ existed), but we cannot say precisely where they were.  Consequently, the link to the Przeworsk culture area is far from clear, and the subsequent assumption that the expansion of this region reflected either the migration or the expanding cultural influence of the Vandals and their neighbors cannot be sustained.”

“Without this link, and the crucial assumption that the spread of this culture into the Carpathians represented a genuine migration, there is no link between the Vandili confederacies mentioned by our first-century ethnographic sources, and the ‘Hasdings’ and ‘Vandals’ who appear in historical texts of the later period.  The historians and geographers of the later Roman empire commonly employed archaic names to refer to new groups who came to their attention on the frontier.  Consequently, the fact that the warbands of the third- and fourth-century frontier bore the same name as the tribal confederations mentioned by Tacitus and Pliny several centuries earlier need not be taken as evidence for a direct connection.”

“This observation has some important implications for our understanding of the earliest stages of Vandal history.  The association with the Przeworsk culture worked on the assumption that the Vandals of pre-history were a large and influential group, and itself helped to sustain this impression.”

[i.e., the chicken and the egg problem]

“When we look at conventional archaeological maps which depict north-eastern Europe in the later iron age, the Vandals seem to occupy an impressive chunk of territory beyond the Roman frontier.  This, in turn, helps to foster the illusion that the later movement of the Vandals into the Roman empire and a devastating historical momentum, and provides a satisfying explanation for the group’s eventual conquest of North Africa.  This is not the narrative that appears in the contemporary sources.  The Vandals who first appeared on the Roman frontier in the second and third centuries do not appear to be the representatives of a vast barbarian confederacy, but a rather small and mobile group of soldiers…  They rose to power in North Africa not because of their long and proud heritage, but in spite of a history that was both short and undistinguished.   But their history – and their brief moment in the Mediterranean sun – is all the more fascinating for that.”

So what do other professors say about Vandals?  Next time.