REVIEW BY MS
Migrations are back. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, large-scale population movements were frequently the go-to explanation for the appearance in the archaeological record of new ways of doing things – be it novel building styles, burials, or household goods. This was an era when it was believed that ‘pots equal people’, with shifts in material culture serving as a proxy for shifts in populations. In the second half of the 20th century, though, the penchant for citing migration or invasion as the explanation for such changes fell out of vogue. While migration never truly disappeared from the archaeological narrative, in many cases it was sidelined by an increased interest in trade as a way for goods and ideas to circulate. The link between pots and people was broken.
Today, a whole new set of data are available to tackle this subject. As we enter what has been styled the ‘Third Science Revolution in Archaeology’, techniques such as ancient DNA and isotope analysis are providing stunning insights into the lineages of individuals and the regions where they spent their formative years. The fruits of this work are a level of detail that just a few decades ago seemed entirely out of reach of archaeological methods. The volume under review capitalises on these advances in bioarchaeology by integrating them with more traditional archaeological evidence, while also mixing in anthropological and theoretical perspectives. The result is not simply a return to one-size-fits-all interpretations of pots and people. Instead, the new narratives presented here illustrate the extraordinary complexity of human migration.
Readers are left in no doubt about the significance of such movement to understanding the ebbs and flows of our past. ‘People move’, the text declares at the outset, before going on to observe that ‘the journey of humankind is one of three million years of emigration and immigration. In a way, we could classify the human being as Homo migrans, at least from a long-term perspective.’ Of that journey, this volume focuses on Eurasia during the last 3,000 years BC. The contents consist of individual chapters penned by respected specialists, who tackle topics as varied as ‘Bronze Age travellers’ and ‘marriage, motherhood, and mobility in Bronze and Iron Age central Europe’. These subjects – and many more – are covered in a scholarly style, and the reader will benefit from some pre-existing knowledge of the groups and methods under discussion. Even so, the volume successfully makes a massive body of fresh information available to a wide audience. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the knowledge being opened up by new scientific approaches or in this critical phase in the development of Europe.
Rock to the rescue