these raids. In 180, the emperor Commodus, whose reign lasted from 180 to 192, is recorded as having admitted 12,000 "neighbouring Daci", who had been driven out of their own territory by hostile tribes, for settlement in the Roman province. Some scholars believe that the presence of the free Dacians is attested by the Puchov Culture in Slovakia and of the Lipiţa culture to the northeast of the Carpathians. However, the identification of these cultures with ethnic Dacians is controversial, as mainstream scholarship considers Puchov as a Celtic culture. Other scholars have identified Lipiţa as Celtic, Germanic or Slavic. In any case, according to modern archaeological theory, material cultures cannot reliably prove ethnicity. However, the identification of the Costoboci and Carpi as ethnic Dacian is far from secure. Unlike the Dacians proper, neither group is attested in Moldavia before Ptolemy (i.e. before about. 140). The Costoboci are, according to Mommsen, classified as a Sarmatian tribe by Pliny the Elder, who locates them near the river Tanais (southern river Don) in ca. AD 60, in the Sarmatian heartland of modern-day southern Russia, far to the east of Moldavia. The ethno-linguistic affiliation of the Carpi is uncertain. It has also been variously suggested that they were a Sarmatian, Germanic or Proto-Slavic group. The contemporaneous existence, alongside Dacicus Maximus, of the victory-title Carpicus Maximus - claimed by the emperors Philip the Arab (247), Aurelian (273), Diocletian (297) and Constantine I (317/8) - suggests that the Carpi may have been considered ethnically distinct from the Free Dacians by the Romans. The traditional paradigm is also open to challenge in other respects. There is no evidence that the peoples outside the province were Romanised to any greater extent than their non-Dacian neighbours, since the archaeological remains of their putative zone of occupation show no greater Roman influence than do other Chernyakhov culture sites elsewhere in the northern Pontic region; nor that the Free Dacians gave up their native tongue and became Latin-speakers. In 271-5, when the Roman emperor Aurelian decided to evacuate Roman Dacia, its Roman residents are reported by ancient sources to have been deported en masse to the province of Moesia Inferior, a Roman territory south of the Danube. These reports have been challenged by some modern scholars who, based primarily on archaeological finds, argue that many rural inhabitants of the Roman province, and even part of the urban population, with few links