The ideas of Great and White Croatia differ not only as the historical and typological ones, they do not mean the same geographical place. This conclusion is based on the direct indications of Constantine himself compared with the other sources. If one can surely put White Croatia with its White Croats on the Upper Elbe and the Upper Vistula, the land of Great Croatia, the historical pre-motherland for the Croats must be looked for to the East of the Carpathians and may be in Transcarpathia.
The ancient Croats cannot be connected with tribes of the Ants' group, representatives of the Penkovo archaeological culture only. The region the Croats lived in covers the Sclavenian area of the Prague-Corchak archaeological culture including the Smaller Poland. This testifies the Croatian union having formed in the epoch preceding the first reliable Slavonic archaeological cultures — in the Chemyachovo time.
The earliest written evidence of the name connected directly with the ethnonym "Croats" in the form of the anthroponym "Croat" is seen in the inscriptions dated back to the 1–2 c. found in the ancient Greek city of Tanais in the mouth of the Don. The anthroponym "Croat", probably, belonged to the members of the Alanian-Sarmathian tribe living in this region. Their leaders had certain position in the town community of Tanais. The fact, that Croats belonged to the Sarmathian-speaking environment is shown by the morphological similarity of the names: Sarmatae and Croats (slav. horvatü, Lat. Chroates) .
Still there are no traces of the Croats living to the West of the Don river in the first centuries A. D. This situation could have changed only in the process of the Great Migration. The ethnonym Crоates seems to be slavonized, as well as its first bearers, after the tremendous ethnic processes had taken place during the Huns' invasion.
In all probability, the Croats' appearance in Central Europe and in the Balkans was connected with the Avars' invasion. According to the archaeological and linguistic data the Croats had been already slavonized that time. It means that the Slavs had taken the name of Croats earlier. Since the greater part of the Alans who took part in the Huns' conquest broke off and moved to the West together with the Goths and other German tribes in the beginning of the 5th c., the proposed contacts of the Alans and the Slavs of South-Western Europe and the Carpathian region particularly could have taken place in the beginning of the Huns expansion only, therefore they could not be long.
