Getae and Dacians? Are they the same? Or is this unknowable?

[Alanus]

Germans were Germans is not a postulate? :wink:
However Guy Halsall, Michael Kulikowski and John Matthews are actually scholars and many other scholars and students care about their arguments, whether you agree with them or not.

Yes, I was over-trying to hammer a point. :wink:
But John Matthews is more of a "pop" author than he is a scholar, and Michael Kulikowski has overdone guest appearances on the History Channel, a medium that has turned "history" into a silly word. If other scholars and students swallow their arguments, it's fine with me. I used to be gullible before I became an old fart. :lol:

AD 100: The Roxolani begin moving through Iron Gate Pass and up onto the Hungarian Steppe. The Taifali follow behind the Roxolani and take Walachia as their pasturage.
AD 150: The Goths move down into S. Ukraine and Moldova, cleaving the Taifali from the major Alannic host in the Crimea and eastward.
AD 200: For trade and mutual peace, the Taifali enter an informal foedus with the Tyrfingi Goths.

I know of no contemporary source attesting Taifali or Goths on the lower Danube before 200 CE.

These migrations took some time. The Goths and Taifals just didn't come screaming into Moldova and Walachia at a hundred miles per hour. I described the movements over a realistic period of two centuries. Even though the Gothic-Taifali bond does not show up in the sources until 248, the migrations are based on the observations of Janos Harmatta, not from ancient authors. The Roxolani were already mixing into the Iazyage ethnos before AD 100. The Roxolani's subsequent "neighbors" had to be the Goths and Taifali. From Harmatta-- "It is equally important that in the archaeological remains there appeared a large number of traces bearing Germanic influence, but in all probability the influence not of the Vandals... but of Goths or Taifals."

"Contemporary" sources also brought us the Huns coming from NOWHERE. It's the archaeology that informed us where they really came from.

Whatever nit-picking you and I are doing isn't going to change the fact that the Goths extended from a Germanic ethos, and that they kept that Germanic ethnos in their hierarcy until trounced by the Moors in 710. 8)