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

[Rumo]

If other scholars and students swallow their arguments, it's fine with me. I used to be gullible before I became an old fart.

Let's check the arguments then and see if only the gullible swallow them.
Diegis' quotations come from a Wiki article. Avoiding the potentially biased Wiki editors, checking the "Matthews" reference we find a well-known book co-authored by John Matthews and Peter Heather, The Goths in the Fourth Century (1991)
In Chapter 3, "The Sîntana de Mure?-?ernjachov Culture", we find that most these arguments come actually from archaeologists doing fieldwork in the area, the authors making "an attempt to bring the Sîntana de Mure?/?ernjachov culture before a wider audience".
While admitting for this archaeological culture "Germanic connections" (parallels with Central and Northern Europe: combs, few hand-made pottery types, some fibulae, pendants, runic inscriptions, etc.) there are also significant parallels with early indigenous cultures: sunken huts, wheel-made pottery (which is the single most common artefact in sites and cemeteries), some hand-made pottery types (the so-called "Dacian mug"), several cases of cranial deformation (specific to earlier steppe cultures), etc. It also should be noted that most ?ernjachov cemeteries are bi-ritual suggesting a mixture of people with - at least - different beliefs in afterlife.

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

The origin of Huns is controversial.

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.

But there was no "Germanic ethnos". There were Germanic languages and archaeology cannot detect languages. Ethnicity and linguistic idenitity are not the same thing (Attila the Hun had an apparent Germanic name).

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."

Can Harmatta or any other scholar list the unequivocal differences between "Vandalic", "Taifalic" and "Gothic" material cultures around 100 CE? Can they even unequivocally differentiate "Germanic" from "Celtic" or other cultures of Central Europe? I have strong doubts they can.

Also why should we assume a large-scale migration coming from far away? Because Jordanes said so?

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.

Halsall and Kulikowski are indeed scholars, but Matthews is the 'odd one out'. I'm surprised tht you don't know that - Matthews writes books about the Arthurian legend, but he is no historian or archaeologist, but rather better described as a mythologist and a writer of popular books.

He's a very nice guy, I have interviewed him.

Do we talk about the same guy? http://www.yale.edu/classics/faculty/matthews_j.html