Rethinking migrations in late prehistoric Eurasia

Rethinking migrations in late prehistoric Eurasia

People move. Whether at an individual or group level, migrations have been a constant and fundamental component of the human journey from its very beginnings to the present. To paraphrase the French scholar Jean-Paul Demoule, the story of humankind is one of three million years of emigration and immigration. While news about migrations have become a daily feature in the media, discussions concerning the regulation of the flow of people across countries and continents represent a key issue in current political discourse. Due to its time depth, archaeology is in an advantageous position to provide long-term insights on the topic. Thus, a deep history approach can counteract isolationist narratives, show the complexity of human mobility in the past and present, and illustrate the challenges and opportunities that can arise.

Over the last few decades, archaeologists have made enormous progress in the study of past migrations. This is largely due to the development of new, and the improvement of existing, biomolecular scientific methods that are revolutionising our knowledge of past mobility.Ancient DNA and stable isotope analyses are particularly important in this regard, although their results need to be interpreted in combination with theoretically-informed approaches and a good understanding of the archaeological record. This requires a truly interdisciplinary approach, incorporating the humanities, and social and natural sciences.

Humans have always been mobile. Even travelling to foreign lands in order to stay there for a long period of time (a more permanent migration) has been part of human existence over the millennia. However, the scales, rhythms, motivations, and characteristics of these migrations can take very different forms. Where bioarchaeological approaches have been applied, they have contributed to identifying previously unimagined scales of mobility, but sometimes also to uncovering subtle nuances at a local, even individual level. A good example is the study carried out by Philipp Stockhammer and Ken Massy in the Lech Valley (southern Germany). Their comprehensive bioarchaeological analysis of graves dating from the 3^rd and early 2^nd millennia BCE has allowed the identification of several female individuals of non-local origin, as well as the determining of the biological relatedness of the people buried in the cemeteries. While this represents an example of a very detailed study of a microregion, on the other end of the spectrum we have Volker Heyd’s contribution analysing several large-scale migratory processes of the 3^rd millennium BCE at a European scale. This was a period of significant population mobility, which the author compares with the historical Migration Period of the 4^th to 6^th centuries AD. Bioarchaeology does not only allow these sorts of prehistoric migrations to be traced, but can also shed light on other aspects such as marriage and motherhood, as Katharina Rebay-Salisbury explores.

When we move into the 1^st millennium BCE, the increasing availability of written sources allows fruitful comparisons between archaeology and texts. While this task is not without challenges, it can offer new perspectives on topics such as the ‘Celtic’ migrations to Italy. The latter are addressed by Peter Wells in a paper that also includes comparisons with later historical population movements, including the Early Medieval Anglo-Saxon migrations to Britain and the Early Modern migrations of Puritan English to New England. Demographic fluctuations and migratory processes could sometimes be the result of aggressive policies by expanding imperial powers, illustrated by Nico Roymans and Diederick Habermehl’s work on the impact of Rome on the Lower Rhine frontier region in the period from Caesar to Augustus.

The selection of examples mentioned above clearly demonstrate the potential of archaeology to contribute to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of past migrations. Although lookingat the past, in itself, does not necessarily guarantee the right answers to current global challenges, it at least allows us to place debates into perspective, helping to counteract simplistic approaches and modern political misuses.

_{Featured image by Klearchos Kapoutsis via Flickr.}

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