as far west as Walcheren. In stark contrast, George Vernadsky believed that the khagan had his headquarters in the eastern part of the Crimea or in the Taman Peninsula and that the island described by Ibn Rustah was most likely situated in the estuary of the Kuban River. Neither of these theories has won many adherents, as archaeologists have uncovered no traces of a Slavic-Norse settlement in the Crimea region in the 9th century and there are no Norse sources documenting "khagans" in Scandinavia. Etymological issues Rhos and Rus' The Russian anti-Normanist Stepan Gedeonov (1876) was the first historian to suggest that the Rhos ambassadors mentioned in the Annales Bertiniani sub anno 839 were Swedes in the diplomatic service of a Rusʹ (Rhos) khagan (chacanus), and thus that there was Rus' khaganate, and that these Rus' people were Slavic. Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen (1877) instead concluded "that Rhos was the Greek designation for the Scandinavians or Northmen, who in this case happened to be Swedes." According to Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky (1904), the Rhos envoys were "northern Germanic", but in the service of a "Rus' khagan", that was to be identified as the Slavic Rus' prince of Kiev. Vasil’evskii (1915) thought the Rhos were an indigenous people living near the mouth of the Dnieper into the Black Sea, and that the khagan was their Khazar master. Still others presume a Rus' khagan reigning over a state, or a cluster of city-states, set up by Rus' people somewhere in what is today European Russia and Ukraine as a chronological predecessor to the Rurik dynasty and Kievan Rusʹ. The region's population at that time was composed of Slavs, Turkic, Baltic, Finnic, Hungarian and Norse peoples. The region was also a place of operations for Varangians, eastern Scandinavian adventurers, merchants, and pirates. Although since the 19th century various writers (some expressing anti-Normanist views) have asserted the Rus' (Rhos) mentioned in the Annales Bertiniani and the other sources possibly mentioning a Rus' khagan were Slavic, the modern scholarly consensus is that the Rus' people originated in Scandinavia, possibly Sweden. According to the prevalent theory, the name Rus, like the Proto-Finnic name for Sweden (*Ruotsi), is derived from an Old Norse term for "the men who row" (rods-) as rowing was the main method of navigating the rivers of Eastern Europe, and that it could be linked to the Swedish coastal area of Roslagen (Rus-law)