Neglected barbarians / edited by Florin Curta.

Includes bibliographical references.

Introduction/ Florin Curta -- The Backcountry Balts (Aesti) and the 'Northern God' in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages/ Audrone Bliujiene -- The mysterious barbarians of Mazuria: the riddle of the Olsztyn Group/ Wojciech Nowakowski -- The Antes: eastern 'brothers' of the Sclavenes?/ Bartlomiej Szymon Szmoniewski -- Bosporus, the Tetraxite Goths, and the northern Caucasus region during the second half of the fifth and the sixth centuries/ Igor O. Gavritukhin and Mihcel Kazanski -- A Hun-age burial with male skeleton and horse bones found in Budapest/ Margit Nagy -- A fifth-century burial from Old Buda (Budapest)/ Agnes B. Toth -- Where did all the Gepids go? A sixth- to seventh - century cemetery in Bratei (Romania)/ Radu Harhoiu -- Gepids in the Balkans: a survey of the archaeological evidence/ Anna Kharalambieva -- Bohemian barbarians: Bohemia in Late Antiquity/ Jaroslav Jirik -- The Herules: Fragments of a history/ Roland Steinacher -- The Justinianic Herules: from allied barbarians to Roman provincials/ Alexander Sarantis -- Still waiting for the barbarians? The making of the Slavs in 'Dark-Age' Greece/ Florin Curta -- Astures, Cantabri, and Vascones: the peoples of the Spanish North during the Late and Post-Roman period/ Santiago Castellanos -- Suevic coins and Suevic kings (418-456): The Visigothic Connection/ Fernando Lopez Sanchez -- Hidden tracks: on the vandal's paths to an African kingdom/ Guido M. Berndt -- The Frexes: Late Roman barbarians in the shadow of the vandal kingdom/ Philipp Von Rummel -- Afterward: Neglecting the barbarian/ Peter Heather.

"Although barbarians in history is a topic of perennial interest, most studies have addressed a small number of groups for which continuous narratives can be constructed such as the Franks, Goths and Anglo-Saxons. This volume examines groups less accessible in the literary and archaeological evidence. Scholars from thirteen countries examine the history and archaeology of groups for who literary evidence is too scant to contribute to current theoretical debates about ethnicity. Ranging from the Baltic and northern Caucasus to Spain and North Africa and over a time period from 300 to 900, the essays address three main themes. Why is a given barbarian group neglected? How much can we know about a group and in what ways can we bring up this information? What sorts of future research are necessary to extend or fill out our understanding? Some papers threat these questions organically. Others use case studies to establish what we know and how we can advance. Drawing on those separate lines of research, the conclusion proposes an alternative reading of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, viewed not from the 'centre' of the privileged but from the 'periphery' of the neglected groups. Neglected Barbarians covers a longer time span than similar studies of this kind, while its frequent use of the newest archaeological evidence has no parallel in any book so far published in any language." -- Back cover.