Aspar
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The Romans and the Latin speaking populations lived in the cities. All the rest who weren't latinised nor called themselves Romans were rural and became ancestors to people such as the Albanians.I'm not saying that all of them died out, but it looks they had a bad survival rate and were completely assimilated. Not just were they socially and economically worse adapted, but their sense of ethnosocial identity was also weakened.
As for Vlachs, the Vlachs are exactly what I described before, the people which became specialised herders, pastoralists, of the mountains and valleys and, to a large degree, lost the other aspects of Balkan Romance life and identity. You can also follow that by many of their agricultural terms being Slavic. Why so? Because they had given up on some of the most basic aspects of settled life from a more developed sedentary culture.
The expansion of Vlachs being clearly associated with the transhumance and specialised pastoralism in many regions of their later appearance.
We also have accounts of some of the original Romance population, which, when first encountering the Slavs, tried to impress them by telling the newcomers that they are "Roman citizens", for which these tribals had just laughs. The Romans caught in the open, if the tribals let them live, usually had to become subordinates. We have similar accounts from the Rhenish area by the way.
So the only people with a strong sense of identity were also more clan and tribal oriented pastoralists and at least the core, even if not all of them, are likely to have lived that way for longer. Which also explains the relative founder event of the surviving Romance core.
But we might get a better understanding with more ancient DNA, I would like to get the earliest Vlach remains available from different regions to get sampled and to compare them against each other and different neighbours. This might help to identify a potential core and founder population of the kind I have it in mind, around which other people and small Romance groups from other areas might have grouped.
Why would a fully Latinised population call8ng themselves Romans live in the mountains far from the cities even way before the Avars and the Slavs?
Yes, the city populations did have a bad survival rate and that's why you will find that all Eastern Romance populations have a common ancestors that started expanding not earlier than 900 AD.
So it was a small group that escaped or for some other unknown circumstances was spared from destruction.
Do we know what was the main economical activity of the Balkan Romans in the late antiquity?
I somehow doubt that was the agricultural activity.
On the other hand the Vlachs have only Latin inherited vocabulary for metals, mining and domestic animals hence I think their ancestors were more involved in mining and animal husbandry than agriculture.
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