Moving On: Archaeological Perspectives on Mobility and Migration

Abstract

Even if archaeological explanations and theoretical interests have shied away from migration with the advent of the New, Processual and Post-Processual archaeologies, the reality remains that migration was in all likelihood as common, recurrent and widespread a phenomenon in the ancient and distant past as it is today and has been recorded historically in recent periods. By way of introduction to this thematic issue on Mobility & Migration, this paper offers a brief survey of intellectual developments and signals recent trends.

Keywords:

• Migration
• mobility
• archaeological perspectives

Migration has long been a major topic in archaeology and as long as culture history has framed archaeological understanding of material culture and past societies, migrations have been seen as the stuff that (pre)history was made of: Gordon Childe’s Prehistoric Migrations in Europe (1950) is as much a towering landmark as it is a defining benchmark of that era and perspective. As New, Processual and Post-Processual perspectives steered attention of at least Anglophone archaeologists elsewhere in recent decades, migration as a research topic and matter of interest has rapidly receded into the disciplinary shadows. A lack of interest among contemporary archaeologists does not mean, however, that people in the past did not migrate; since migration is arguably a fundamental part of being human (Cabana and Clark 2011b: 3; Greenblatt 2010), it need not cause surprise if we see the topic finding its way back onto archaeological agendas, while in certain fields of the discipline and in other academic traditions migration has remained a topic at the heart of research efforts.

Regardless whether migration was recovered as a matter of interest or had remained a going concern all along, as it is returning to become an increasingly visible research topic, thinking about and approaches to migration have inevitably changed, simply because the archaeology as a discipline has become much more theoretically diverse and sophisticated. This ‘revival’, as we might cautiously refer to the trend is captured by a handful of recent books like Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migration (Cabana and Clark 2011a) and Roman Diasporas: Archaeological Approaches to Mobility and Diversity in the Roman Empire (Eckardt 2010) and journal articles that explore new approaches (e.g. Cameron 2013) or rethink long-standing views on migration (e.g. Russell 2009; Knapp 2009; Yassur-Landau 2010).

It is against this backdrop that the overall aim of this World Archaeology issue dedicated to Mobility & Migration is to gauge these recent developments and to do so at a global scale, not only across regions and periods but also across disciplinary traditions. Given the practical limits of this journal issue, however, this can never be an exhaustive overview and the present issue should therefore be seen as an academic snap-shot that signals intellectual perspectives and trends rather than an extensive survey that traces and evaluates them in depth.

Archaeological perspectives and approaches

The various definitions of migration that have been proposed over the years by archaeologists signal the intellectual trends particularly well. For Childe, migration was not so much a research topic in its own right as one of the means to address the questions that really mattered, namely how to characterize archaeological cultures and, especially, how to account for cultural changes over time (Cherry and Leppard 2014). Given the close conceptual connections assumed by cultural historians between material culture and society, the actual movement of people offered a key explanation of cultural change. Childe (1950: 8) noted indeed that ‘[w]hen a whole culture replaces another we are quite clearly dealing with a migration’ (Jones 1997: 15–26; Anthony 1990: 896–97; Hakenbeck 2008: 11–13; Cabana 2011: 18–19).

With the advent of the New and Processual archaeologies, explanations of cultural change shifted towards internal social dynamics, drawing on for instance systems theory, which in turn resulted in what Adams and colleagues termed (1978) a ‘retreat from migrationism’ and what Anthony in an oft-quoted paper described as the ‘migrationist baby’ being thrown out with the bathwater (1990: 896; see also Cabana 2011: 19–21). While mainstream English-speaking archaeologists have largely ignored migration as a research topic ever since, one of the few fields in which migration continued to be explored was the prehistoric Caribbean. Here, Irving Rouse assiduously investigated when and how the islands were first occupied and how later ‘invading groups’ replaced the first inhabitants. He defined these prehistoric ‘population movements’ as caused by ‘people of one area expand[ing] into another area [and] replacing the latter’s population’ (Rouse 1986: 13; 176). An earlier and somewhat terse definition of migration as ‘movement of individuals, with their ethnic systems, from one area to another’ (Rouse 1972: 283) makes it clear that the link between people and culture (‘ethnic systems’) and thus between population movement and culture change remained firmly in place.

The Caribbean emphasis on the first occupation of islands and the new focus on large-scale processes were matched by similar concerns in the Pacific and inspired comparative studies between these regions (e.g. Rouse 1986). These led in turn to the adoption of an explicitly comparative and biogeographical perspective on migration to explore ‘cultural patterning’ on the basis of ecological explanations and mathematical models (MacArthur and Wilson 1967; Evans 1973; Rainbird 2007; see also this issue and below).

Another field in which migration has always remained a defining research topic is Late Antique and Early Medieval North-West Europe. Better known as the Migration Era, this period is dominated by historical accounts of large-scale violent invasions and migrations that included Huns, Celts, Visigoths, Angles and Saxons to name just the famous ones. Archaeologists have long grappled with both the historical and archaeological records of this period to understand what was happening on the ground in the various regions of NW and central Europe but there has been little or no follow-up to a call for a ‘theoretical understanding of migration as an element of cultural behavior’ (Burmeister 2000: 540).

Post-processual archaeologists have so far had little or nothing to say about, let alone add to, the study of ancient migration and it is indeed ironic, as Cabana (2011: 24) rightly notes, that recent advances rely on quantitative and scientific methods that are more readily associated with processual approaches (see below). As a result, archaeological migration studies are by and large still defined by a default, if often implicit, conceptualization of migration as ‘invasion’ and ‘large-scale population movement’ (but see Rainbird 1999; 2007). There also remains a strong concern with demonstrating that migration did take place and that people actually moved, to the extent that there has been very little consideration of the implications of migration. While this may be seen in the light of (post-)processual skepsis about migration, the consequence is that an archaeological understanding of migration as a ‘multilayered process’ is practically non-existent (Burmeister 2000: 553; Anthony 1997).

Beyond population movement

This situation has now begun to change, however, and as migration is slowly making its way back onto the mainstream agenda, different questions may be asked and new approaches taken. One reason for the budding comeback may be found in scientific advances in physical anthropology: new bioarchaeological and biogeoarchaeological methods using stable isotope, DNA and biodistance analyses measure specific physical, chemical or molecular features of human remains and enable archaeologists to estimate the degree or lack of affinity between individuals and/or groups, and to associate them with particular geochemically defined regions (Bentley 2006; see also Eckardt et al., this issue). As a result, archaeologists now have more scope than ever to demonstrate rather than plausibly argue that people migrated in the past. Even if much scientific work tends to be content with this conclusion, however, in certain situations, like prehistoric NW Europe and the pre-Columbian Americas, the accumulating evidence that migration was a common fact of life in the past has begun to raise new questions and to draw attention to the nature of migration itself and its role in society (e.g. Vander Linden 2007; Cameron 2013).

In other fields, like Mediterranean, Classical and historical archaeology, migration has long been a matter of limited or no concern, because the abundant historical, archaeological and epigraphic evidence made it very clear that people moved over considerable distances and migrated in notable numbers, whether voluntarily or forcibly. The state-organized migration of Roman settlers to specifically created new towns (coloniae) and newly defined land allotments (centuriationes), the foundation of Greek and Phoenician colonial settlements in the Mediterranean coastlands, and the forced migration of laborers to the European plantations of the colonial Caribbean are perhaps the most obvious cases in point, as the considerable scholarship on these topics has paid little or no attention to the process of migration itself and its consequences for both host societies and those of origin (van Dommelen 2012; Moatti 2013). The emerging interest in migration in these fields is accordingly not so much inspired by scientific advances, although they play a role (Eckardt et al. 2010), but is emerging on the back of a broader range of interests in connectivity, colonial studies, postcolonial perspectives and entangled situations (Horden and Purcell 2000; van Dommelen and Knapp 2010).

In tandem with these specifically archaeological developments, there is also a much wider trend in the social sciences and humanities at large to understand mobility in a broad sense that cuts across the former two. Perhaps best exemplified by the Cultural Mobility Manifesto published by Stephen Greenblatt and colleagues (2010), there is a growing awareness that mobility in the broadest sense of the term is not a particularly modern, let alone post-modern, phenomenon, as is often assumed in migration studies (e.g. Papastergiadis 2000). Instead, cultural mobility is argued to represent ‘a key constituent element of human life in virtually all periods’ (Greenblatt 2010: i).

If anything has come out of recent work it must therefore be that the question for archaeological migration studies is not so much whether people migrated – because they clearly did.

The aim of this issue is accordingly to look beyond the mere observation that migration occurred and to examine not only the reasons that motivated people to migrate but also the consequences for both migrants and their host and origin societies. This issue is therefore not so much about finding ‘hard evidence’ of actual migrants and migrations, although that is certainly part of the equation, but it rather represents an endeavor to explore the diversity and complexity of mobility and migration in the past, both recent and distant, and to investigate the many dimensions of these broad processes. The emphasis of the issue thus falls on local actors, practices, contexts and networks that sustained migrations and that enabled mobility of, within and between communities in order to highlight the social and economic dimensions of mobility and migration.

This issue

The nine essays that make up this issue represent the trends described above in a variety of ways. They share a concern with understanding migration as a process that may be multi-layered, large-scale or fractured, perhaps even cyclical, while at the same time they address a very wide range of specific cases of migration or, more generally, mobility.

The opening paper by Thomas Leppard addresses a fundamental question of migration that takes us immediately well beyond conventional concerns by exploring the multiple and interlocking scales of mobility and migration: how did local communities and small-scale mobile practices relate or even add up to long-term and long-distance movements? His case study in the Aegean Neolithic nicely dovetails with Natalie Abell’s paper, in which she examines what we might call ‘corporate mobility’ and knowledge transfer in the Bronze Age Aegean. Michael Smith, too, focuses on the local scale by foregrounding peasant households and communities and insists on mobility as a common and normal fact of life in Aztec-period Mexico. Mike Carson and Hsiao-chun Hung adopt by contrast a much larger-scale perspective to migration into prehistoric Taiwan, and propose a formal model to understand the process of migration, drawing on geographical perspectives. Helga Eckardt and her colleagues have turned to the biogeoarchaeological methods of isotope analysis to gain an insight into migration patterns in Roman Britain, which they interpret in terms of a diaspora.

The prominent role of the prehistoric Caribbean in migration studies is underscored by the two papers in this issue that are dedicated to this region, while the different approaches taken by their authors reflect the lively debates in the field. While Christina Giovas and Scott Fitzpatrick propose a formal model to understand migration in the later prehistoric West Indies that is explicitly grounded in ecological principles, Corinne Hofman and colleagues return to the importance of scale to examine four instances of migration of the colonial-period Caribbean. The final two papers delve into the conceptual complexities and representational alternatives of mobility and migration. Juan Carlos Moreno García investigates the pastoral lifestyles of Libyan communities in the Egyptian Western Desert and highlights their close connections with Pharaonic Egypt, while Louise Hitchcock and Aren Maeir recast the marauding Sea Peoples of the Late Bronze Age Levant as highly mobile communities that may be interpreted as pirates and buccaneers.

While these papers neither represent a coherent innovative perspective on migration nor cover the entire gamut of approaches to the topic, I hope that this issue succeeds to demonstrate that archaeological migration studies are not only back on track but are also engaging in a range of lively and promising debates.

Acknowledgements

This ‘snapshot’ of current trends and perspectives has benefitted much from the readings and discussions in the graduate seminar on Migration and Trade in the Ancient West Mediterranean that I taught at the Joukowsky Institute of Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University in the spring of 2014, while editing this World Archaeology issue, and I thank all students involved for their active contributions.