Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
In the aftermath of Rome’s fall, various kingdoms and polities cropped up in the intervening chaos. While we know a great deal about a few of these, we know significantly less than we would like about many of the others. One of those mysterious kingdoms, which arose in central Europe in the late fifth century, was the Kingdom of Thuringia
Our surviving sources for this short-lived state are fairly sparse, leading to the primary use of archaeology in its study. The remarkable thing about this kingdom is that it may possibly have had either an elite drawn from the Huns, or an elite which utlized Hunnic traditions, including cranial deformation.
SOURCES:
Barbarian Migrations & the Roman West, Halsall
'Hunnic' modified skulls: physical appearance, identity, and the transformative nature of migrations, Hakenbek
Artificially deformed crania from the Hun-Germanic Period (5th-6th century AD) in northeastern Hungary: historical and morphological analysis, Monar et al
In the aftermath of Rome’s fall, various kingdoms and polities cropped up in the intervening chaos. While we know a great deal about a few of these, we know significantly less than we would like about many of the others. One of those mysterious kingdoms, which arose in central Europe in the late fifth century, was the Kingdom of Thuringia
Our surviving sources for this short-lived state are fairly sparse, leading to the primary use of archaeology in its study. The remarkable thing about this kingdom is that it may possibly have had either an elite drawn from the Huns, or an elite which utlized Hunnic traditions, including cranial deformation.
SOURCES:
Barbarian Migrations & the Roman West, Halsall
'Hunnic' modified skulls: physical appearance, identity, and the transformative nature of migrations, Hakenbek
Artificially deformed crania from the Hun-Germanic Period (5th-6th century AD) in northeastern Hungary: historical and morphological analysis, Monar et al
