Negotiating Migrations: The Archaeology and Politics of Mobility

(Hardback)

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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.

Author Bio

Daniela Hofmann is Associate Professor in Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Bergen, Norway. Stefan Burmeister is the Director of the Varusschlacht Archaeological Museum, Germany. Catherine J. Frieman is Associate Professor of European Archaeology at the Australian National University, Australia. Martin Furholt is Professor of Prehistoric and Social Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany. Niels Nrkjr Johannsen is Associate Professor of Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark.