Mapmaker's Rant

A most frustrating thing is finding information about European tribes - their ethnicity, location, name, etc.
Why?
Because every page and every book gives different data depending on who writes it.
The celtic tribes site names every European tribe as Celts. Dacian, Thracian, German tribes, they're all celts.
The german tribes listings have every tribe listed as German, with only exception of french Gauls and some Britons, but even not all of them.
The Dacians, according to the Dacian history sites, would spread over all Balkans, all the way to Macedon.
The Scythians according to Scythian historians, cover entire coast of Black Sea, including most of Dacia and parts of Thracia.
As for Central Europe - Poland, Czech and Hungary - this is as complicated as it gets, since every single of millions of nations that lived in this area for more than ten years claims that their ancestors lived here since antiquity. The Lugians are Slavs for Slavic historians, Vandals for German historians, Celts for celtic historians and Scyths or Sarmatians for Scythian or Sarmatian historians. Bohaemia was either inhabited by Celts for the most of its history (according to Celt historians), or the Boii lived there only for a short while - enough to give the region its name - and then they were gone, replaced by Germans. Of course, there's also a theory that Boii were German all along. Or maybe Scythian, Dacian, Thracian, Hindu or Chinese??
And it's of course all for the same period of time, to make it harder. It would be easy if all these data covered different centuries - first scythians, then came celts, then came germans... no, they were all there at the same time, they were all called the same!
Make up your mind, people!!

Thank you for listening, I just had to vent this after another whole day of trying to figure out who the hell really lived in eastern Pannonia.

U want to know who lived in Pannonia at 270 bc?

Norici west , Boii north , Tagrisci east and south......

This is where you use primary sources as much as possible. Use Roman and Greek sources, they're far better than anything else. The Romans didn't have an agenda with regards to Romanizing land, because they thought that conquering barbarians was a duty. In any case, try to use polybius.

The sources? Right. Don't make me laugh. To the Greeks, everyone nomadic was Scythian, everyone settled was German, and north of Carpathian there is Terra Incognita inhabited by cannibals. Romans are no better, they have no idea who is living where and when until 1 c. BC. The problem is not with names - I could take Ptolemy and get a hundred of names of tribes - it's determining who lives whre, when, who are they and where they came from...
Anyway, I got it pretty much settled by now , got all the info, just wanted to vent my frustration from gathering it :)

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This is where you use primary sources as much as possible. Use Roman and Greek sources, they're far better than anything else. The Romans didn't have an agenda with regards to Romanizing land, because they thought that conquering barbarians was a duty. In any case, try to use polybius.

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I disagree. They couldn't tell anyone apart from each other, and it was almost pure hersey what they said. Or it was written hundreds of years after the fast.
And eadingas, I think you need a hug for putting up with all of this work. Here. ~:grouphug:

Polybius is generally pretty unbiased (at least as unbiased as a 'civilized' ancient could be).

That's ancient history for you. :)

It's all investigative work and educated guesses. And of course everyone has their own pet theories and interpretations in depicting life at the time which aren't necessarily any more or less valid than the conflicting ones. There's some merit to picking one set of conventions and sticking with them if only for the sake of consistency.

Of course tribes spread out and overlapped, I guess what is important is not finding the extent of their boundaries, but the concentration of their culture