Migration and common Slavic : critical remarks of an archaeologist

Archaeologists can rarely contribute to any discussions among linguists. However, they are in a privileged position, when it comes to identifying and delineating migrations. The paper is an attempt to assess the archaeological evidence pertaining to the supposed migration of the Slavs in the 6th century, from their original homeland to the Danube. Wherever that homeland was located, in order to reach the Lower Danube (where the northern frontier of the Empire was located in the 6th century), the Slavs had to cross the territory of present-day Romania. A special emphasis is therefore placed on the archaeological evidence of that country, particularly on those classes that have been typically associated with the early Slavs. However, no class of evidence attests to the existence of any migration across the territory of Romania. Migration is therefore not the mechanism that can explain the spread of Slavic.