The ancient Goths were an ethnically diverse group

An artist’s impression of what Visigothic warriors may have looked like in the 6th century

The Creative Assembly (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

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

The findings contradict a long-standing idea about the Goths: that they were Scandinavian peoples who moved south to the eastern Mediterranean. “If Gothic identity was primarily a biological lineage stemming from Scandinavia, we wouldn’t see this,” says Svetoslav Stamov of the National Museum of History in Bulgaria.

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

However, the Goths are one of the least understood groups in history. Much of our information about them comes from Roman sources, which may not be reliable. Roman writers often used labels such as “Goths”, “Celts” and “Scythians” to describe neighboring groups about which they knew little.

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

Near a palace called the Aul of Khan Omurtag, there was a necropolis that appears to have been part of a Gothic bishop’s see, dating from about 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, from around 320 to 375. This was a Roman healing center and bathhouse, not a cemetery, but there were several bodies buried there. “One of the samples had artificial skull deformation, which is not typical for the Roman period and speaks of a different culture,” says Stamov.

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

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

The ideas that the Goths were “complex and diverse” and that “people did not have a one-to-one link between ancestry and ethnic identity” are good, says James Harland at the University of Bonn in Germany. However, he says the team has not sequenced enough genomes to have a good sampling. He also argues that you cannot reliably infer a person’s ethnicity from their artifacts, so the presence of apparently Gothic artifacts does not mean that the people in the tombs were truly Goths.

Harland says the Roman Empire may have been a key factor in the formation of Goth identity, as people variously worked with and against the empire. “It’s the process of engaging with empire that brings these groups together as cohesive entities,” he says.

“The various Gothic tribes lived for several centuries on the border of the Roman Empire, and they gradually became more and more influenced by the Roman Empire in many ways, including the style of their clothing (and) their pottery,” says Chobanov.