From Goths to Huns: Shifting identities in the Lower Danube area during the 5th century AD

Identity is a complex and contextual concept, typical to human behaviour and throughout the life course of an individual, it is negotiated, acquired, inherited or even crafted employing different techniques of self-representation. Identity is inherent to different relations of power and social inequality, and therefore one should identify and study the potential material remains and/or spatial patterns accounting for such practices. Being a multifaceted concept, social identity changes by means of cultural encounters as well as during periods of great turmoil, social discontinuity or reorganization as was the case with the Lower Danube area during the 5th century AD.By reading the archaeological discoveries belonging to this chronological framework in this interpretative key, we intend to tackle the mortuary contexts discovered in this area. We intend to use two-way analysis combining the anthropological and archaeological data in order to set the ground for a debate concerning the multiple facets (biological, cultural, social, economic, ethnic etc.) of this self-representation construct referred to as “identity”.After thorough scrutiny of the archaeological record, one should focus upon the complicated relations between the various communities inhabiting this area, especially since both the archaeological data and the ancient historical sources account for the existence of different groups in the Lower Danube area. Of great importance would be to understand both the impact as well as the nature of the relations between the newly arrived Huns and these diverse communities that they encountered upon their arrival.In the Romanian scholarly milieu was clearly exaggerated, the apocalyptic impact that the Huns have had upon this region. A reality that gave us a good reason for readdressing the above-mentioned topics based on the hypothesis about the of an archaeological culture must be related to an exact date in the time given by various military conflicts recorded in the ancient sources