He next work, Rome's Gothic Wars, was published in 2006, and is an introductory textbook on the relations between Goths and the Roman Empire in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.
[7] In his review, Bryan Ward-Perkins described it as a "sensible, clear and uncontroversial introduction to the subject, which deserves to be included on any student reading-list" (alongside Peter Heather's "different take on the same events") which "does indeed introduce the reader to the problems of evidence, and, above all, to the essence of modern debate".
[4] He considers all archaeological, linguistic and literary evidence used to propose such earlier histories of the Goths to be completely dependent upon the 6th-century Getica by Jordanes, and therefore of little value.
Critics such as Ward-Perkins find this description exaggerated, because it implies the Romans manipulated the ethnic identity of their neighbours, which he believes to be impossible.
[3] He labels previous works on the Goths by Peter Heather, Herwig Wolfram, and Volker Bierbrauer as "extreme", "neo-romantic", "bizarre" and "outlandish", and believes they "lack theoretical rigour".
[18][19][20] Kulikowski also disagrees with Heather in the assumption that the Huns caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire, describing this idea as "simple, elegant and wrong".
[14][22] On the other hand, he has written that the Viennese theory "has undoubtedly killed off essentialist views of barbarian tribal identity, an excellent result".