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This open-access volume uses archaeological case studies mainly from the European Neolithic, but also from the Pacific, the US Southwest, the medieval Migration Period and the historical Great Lakes, to discuss how a focus on small-scale inter-personal relations - on the power struggles, negotiations and choices that people make in everyday settings - can help us understand migration events in archaeology. As a species, we have always been mobile and migration was a habitual feature of prehistoric life. While most scholarship focuses on migrations that took place (using isotopes and aDNA) due to environmental depletion or wars, abduction or being ''given in marriage'' or overpopulation, this book offers a new approach by exploring ideas about why they happened. To show the potential of these insights, this book offers a novel reinterpretation of how the political aspects of migration shape the European Neolithic, using case studies that cover different scales: migrations at the large scale, when Denmark, Britain and Ireland were first settled by farmers; how household migration and mobility helped settle the Alpine region; and how migrant individuals may have facilitated processes like linguistic change. Overall, the conclusion is that a bottom-up approach examining small-scale decisions can help us to understand the archaeological record at a variety of scales, in many different regions of the world. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo.
About the author
Daniela Hofmann is Professor in Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Her research focuses on integrating archaeology and the natural sciences to address migration, kinship and social relations in the past.Catherine J. Frieman is Associate Professor of European Archaeology at the Australian National University, Australia. She specialises in material culture and technology studies. Her research interests include the nature of archaeological enquiry, patterns of innovation and resistance, the role of aDNA for modelling past societies, and Neolithic and Bronze Age flint daggers. Her books include An Archaeology of Innovation (2021).Martin Furholt is Professor of Prehistoric and Social Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. His research focuses on social and political organisation of Neolithic Europe, with a special interest in mobility and social change as well as the impact of aDNA analyses on the field.Stefan Burmeister is the Director of the Varusschlacht Archaeological Museum, Germany. His research interest is in European migration during the Iron Age and Roman period. He has published extensively on the possibilities of identifying migration archaeologically, as well as on archaeological approaches to ethnicity.Niels Nørkjær Johannsen is Associate Professor of Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark. His main research focus is on the Neolithic of northern and central Europe. He has published on cognitive approaches to material culture and on the development and impact of wheeled vehicle technology in prehistoric Europe.
