Mobility & Migration

Edited by Peter van Dommelen

Contents

page
477 Moving On: Archaeological Perspectives on Mobility and Migration
Peter van Dommelen

484 Mobility and migration in the Early Neolithic of the Mediterranean: questions of motivation and
mechanism
Thomas P. Leppard
502 Semiconductor theory in migration: population receivers, homelands and gateways in Taiwan and
Island Southeast Asia
Mike T. Carson and Hsiao-chun Hung
516 Peasant mobility, local migration and premodern urbanization
Michael E. Smith
534 People on the move in Roman Britain
Hella Eckardt, Gundula Mldner and Mary Lewis

551 Migration, mobility and craftspeople in the Aegean Bronze Age: a case study from Ayia Irini on
the island of Kea
Natalie Abell

569 Prehistoric migration in the Caribbean: past perspectives, new models and the ideal free
distribution of West Indian colonization
Christina M. Giovas and Scott M. Fitzpatrick
590 Stage of encounters: migration, mobility and interaction in the pre-colonial and early colonial
Caribbean
Corinne Hofman, Angus Mol, Menno Hoogland and Roberto Valcrcel Rojas
610 Invaders or just herders? Libyans in Egypt in the third and second millennia BCE
Juan Carlos Moreno Garca
624 Yo-ho, yo-ho, a serens life for me!
Louise A. Hitchcock and Aren M. Maeir

Cover: Figures with feathered headdresses from an ivory box (Fig. 1a) and a conical seal
(Fig. 1b), both from Enkomi. Adapted from Dothan (1982, 277, gs 1314).
 Moving On: Archaeological Perspectives
on Mobility and Migration

Peter van Dommelen

Abstract
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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 Childes Prehistoric Migrations in Europe
(1950) is as much a towering landmark as it is a dening 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 nding its way back onto archaeological agendas,
while in certain elds 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

World Archaeology Vol. 46(4): 477483 Mobility & Migration

2014 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2014.933359
 478 Peter van Dommelen

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.
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Archaeological perspectives and approaches

The various denitions 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: 1526; Anthony
1990: 89697; Hakenbeck 2008: 1113; Cabana 2011: 1819).
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: 1921). While mainstream English-
speaking archaeologists have largely ignored migration as a research topic ever since, one of
the few elds in which migration continued to be explored was the prehistoric Caribbean.
Here, Irving Rouse assiduously investigated when and how the islands were rst occupied
and how later invading groups replaced the rst inhabitants. He dened these prehistoric
population movements as caused by people of one area expand[ing] into another area
[and] replacing the latters population (Rouse 1986: 13; 176). An earlier and somewhat
terse denition 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 rmly in place.
The Caribbean emphasis on the rst occupation of islands and the new focus on large-scale
processes were matched by similar concerns in the Pacic 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
 Moving On 479

the basis of ecological explanations and mathematical models (MacArthur and Wilson 1967;
Evans 1973; Rainbird 2007; see also this issue and below).
Another eld in which migration has always remained a dening 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 scientic methods that are more readily associated with
processual approaches (see below). As a result, archaeological migration studies are by and
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large still dened 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 scientic advances in physical anthro-
pology: new bioarchaeological and biogeoarchaeological methods using stable isotope, DNA
and biodistance analyses measure specic physical, chemical or molecular features of human
remains and enable archaeologists to estimate the degree or lack of afnity between individuals
and/or groups, and to associate them with particular geochemically dened 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
scientic 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 elds, 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 specically created new towns (coloniae) and newly dened land allotments
(centuriationes), the foundation of Greek and Phoenician colonial settlements in the
 480 Peter van Dommelen

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 elds is accordingly not so much inspired by
scientic 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 specically 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 exemplied 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,
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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 nding 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 specic 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 Abells 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
 Moving On 481

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 migra-
tion 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 reect the lively debates in the eld. 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 nal two papers delve into the conceptual complexities and representational alternatives of
mobility and migration. Juan Carlos Moreno Garca 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
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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 benetted 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.

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