The term migrationism, in the history of

archaeological theory Archaeological theory refers to the various intellectual frameworks through which archaeology, archaeologists interpret archaeological data. Archaeological theory functions as the application of philosophy of science to archaeology, and is occasion ...

, was opposed to the term diffusionism (or "immobilism") as a means of distinguishing two approaches to explaining the spread of prehistoric

archaeological culture An archaeological culture is a recurring assemblage of types of artifacts, buildings and monuments from a specific period and region that may constitute the material culture remains of a particular past human society. The connection between thes ...

s and innovations in artefact. Migrationism explains cultural change in terms of

human migration Human migration is the movement of people from one place to another, with intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily, at a new location (geographic region). The movement often occurs over long distances and from one country to another ( ...

, while diffusionism relies on explanations based on

trans-cultural diffusion In cultural anthropology and cultural geography, cultural diffusion, as conceptualized by Leo Frobenius in his 1897/98 publication ''Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis'', is the spread of culture, cultural items—such as ideas, fashion, styles, rel ...

of ideas rather than populations (''pots, not people''). Western archaeology the first half of the 20th century relied on the assumption of migration and invasion as driving cultural change. That was criticized by the processualists in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to a new mainstream which rejected "migrationism" as outdated. Since the 1990s, there has been renewed interest in "migrationist" scenarios, as archaeologists attempted the archaeological reflexes of migrations known to have occurred historically. Since the 2000s, the developments in

archaeogenetics Archaeogenetics is the study of ancient DNA using various molecular genetic methods and DNA resources. This form of genetic analysis can be applied to human, animal, and plant specimens. Ancient DNA can be extracted from various fossilized spec ...

have opened a new avenue for investigation, based on the analysis of

ancient DNA Ancient DNA (aDNA) is DNA isolated from ancient sources (typically Biological specimen, specimens, but also environmental DNA). Due to degradation processes (including Crosslinking of DNA, cross-linking, deamination and DNA fragmentation, fragme ...

. Kristiansen (1989) argued that the reasons for embracing "immobilism" during the Cold War era were ideological and derived from an emphasis on political solutions displacing military action.

History

" Diffusionism", in its original use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, did not preclude migration or invasion. It was rather the term for assumption of ''any'' spread of cultural innovation, including by migration or invasion, as opposed "evolutionism", assuming the independent appearance of cultural innovation in a process of

parallel evolution Parallel evolution is the similar development of a trait in distinct species that are not closely related, but share a similar original trait in response to similar evolutionary pressure.Zhang, J. and Kumar, S. 1997Detection of convergent and pa ...

, termed "cultural evolutionism". Opposition to migrationism as argued in the 1970s had an ideological component of

anti-nationalism Nationalism is an idea or movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: Theory, Id ...

derived from

Marxist archaeology Marxist archaeology is an archaeological theory that interprets archaeological information using the framework of dialectical materialism, which is often short-handed as Marxism. Although neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels specifically an ...

, going back to

V. Gordon Childe Vere Gordon Childe (14 April 189219 October 1957) was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and ...

, who during the

interwar period In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period, also known as the interbellum (), lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days) – from the end of World War I (WWI) to the beginning of World War II ( ...

combined "evolutionism" and "diffusionism" and argued an intermediate position that each society developed in its own way but was strongly influenced by the spread of ideas from elsewhere. In contrast to Childe's moderate position, which allowed the diffusion of ideas and even moderate migration, Soviet archaeology adhered to a form of extreme evolutionism, which explained all cultural change from the class tensions internal to prehistoric societies. "Migrationism" fell from favour in mainstream western archeology in the 1970s. Adams (1978:483f.) described migrationism an "ad hoc explanation for cultural, linguistic, and racial change in such an extraordinary number of individual cases that to speak of a migrationist school of explanation seems wholly appropriate". Adams (p. 484) argued that the predominance of migrationism "down to the middle of the last 9thcentury" could be explained because it "was and is the only explanation for culture change that can comfortably be reconciled with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament", and as such representing an outdated " creationist" view of prehistory, now to be challenged by "nonscriptural, anticreationist" views. Adams (p. 489) accepts only as "inescapable" migrationist scenarios that concern the first peopling of a region, such the first settlement of the Americas "by means of one or more migrations across the Bering land bridge" and "successive sweeps of Dorset and of Thule peoples across the Canadian Arctic". While Adams criticized the migration of identifiable "peoples" or "tribes" was deconstructed as a "creationist" legacy based in biblical literalism, Smith (1966) had made a similar argument deconstructing the idea of "nations" or "tribes" as a "primordalistic" misconception based in modern nationalism. Historian

Alex Woolf Alex Woolf (born 12 July 1963) is a British medieval historian and academic. He specialises in the history of Britain and Ireland and to a lesser extent Scandinavia in the Early Middle Ages, with a particular emphasis on interaction and comp ...

notes that "in the minds of some scholars, immobilism was charged with a left-wing caché ; those who showed too much interest in the ethnic or racial origin of the people they studied were, it was hinted, guilty of racist tendencies." While mainstream western archaeology maintained moderate scenarios of migrationism in spite of such criticism, it did move away from "invasionism". The mainstream view came to depict prehistoric cultural change as the result of gradual, limited migration of a small population that would consequently become influential in spreading new ideas but would contribute little to the succeeding culture's biological ancestry. Thus, the mainstream position on the

Neolithic Revolution The Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period in Afro-Eurasia from a lifestyle of hunter-gatherer, hunting and gathering to one of a ...

in Europe as developed (notably by the German archaeologist Jens Lüning) since the 1980s, posits that "a small group of immigrants inducted the established inhabitants of Central Europe into sowing and milking" in a process spreading "in swift pace, in a spirit of 'peaceful cooperation'" Migration was generally seen as being a slow process, involving family groups moving into new areas and settling amongst the native population, described as "demic diffusion" or "wave of advance", in which population would be essentially

sedentary Sedentary lifestyle is a lifestyle type, in which one is physically inactive and does little or no physical movement and/or exercise. A person living a sedentary lifestyle is often sitting or lying down while engaged in an activity like soc ...

but expand by the colonisation of new territory by succeeding generations. The question remained intractable until the arrival of

since the 1990s. The new field's rapid development since the 2000s has resulted in an increasing number of studies presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario (in the case of the

in Europe Matthias Schulz
Neolithic Immigration: How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe
''

Spiegel Online ' () is a German news website. It was established in 1994 as ''Spiegel Online'' as a content mirror of the magazine ''Der Spiegel''. In 1995, the site began producing original stories and it introduced ''Spiegel Online International'' for artic ...

'' (2010).) or at least suggested that the extent of prehistoric migration had been underestimated (e.g. in the context of

Indo-European expansion The Indo-European migrations are hypothesized migrations of peoples who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and the derived Indo-European languages, which took place from around 4000 to 1000 BCE, potentially explaining how these related languages ...

, it was estimated that the people of the

Yamnaya culture The Yamnaya ( ) or Yamna culture ( ), also known as the Pit Grave culture or Ochre Grave culture, is a late Copper Age to early Bronze Age archaeological culture of the region between the Southern Bug, Dniester, and Ural rivers (the Pontic–C ...

in Eastern Europe contributed to 73% of the ancestry of individuals pertaining to the

Corded Ware culture The Corded Ware culture comprises a broad archaeological horizon of Europe between – 2350 BC, thus from the Late Neolithic, through the Copper Age, and ending in the early Bronze Age. Corded Ware culture encompassed a vast area, from t ...

in Germany, and to about 40–54% to the ancestry of modern Central & Northern Europeans."Nomadic herders left a strong genetic mark on Europeans and Asians"
10 June 2015, By Ann Gibbons, Science (AAAS)) In British archaeology, the

Anglo-Saxon migration debate The historiography on the Anglo-Saxon migration into Britain has tried to explain how there was a widespread change from Romano-British to Anglo-Saxon cultures in the area roughly corresponding to present-day England between the Fall of the Western ...

has notably pitted the two schools against each other on the subject of the

Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain The settlement of Great Britain by Germanic peoples from continental Europe led to the development of an Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Saxon cultural identity and a shared Germanic language—Old English—whose closest known relative is Old Frisian, s ...

. The traditional

Anglo-Saxon migrationist The term migrationism, in the history of archaeological theory, was opposed to the term diffusionism (or "immobilism") as a means of distinguishing two approaches to explaining the spread of prehistoric archaeological cultures and innovations in a ...

view was that of a mass invasion in which the Anglo-Saxon incomers drove the native Romano-British inhabitants to the western fringes of the island. This was challenged in the latter half of the 20th century with the hypothesis that only a small Anglo-Saxon "warrior elite" migrated who gradually acculturated the

Romano-Britons The Romano-British culture arose in Britain under the Roman Empire following the Roman conquest in AD 43 and the creation of the province of Britannia. It arose as a fusion of the imported Roman culture with that of the indigenous Britons, ...

. This has moderated recently partly due to genetic studies of British populations with most scholars in Britain have returned to a more migrationist perspective and noted that the scale of both the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons and the survival of the Romano-Britons likely varied regionally.Härke, Heinrich
"Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis"
''Medieval Archaeology'' 55.1 (2011): 1–28
Archived
26 September 2021 at the

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

References

* *John Chapman, Helena Hamerow, (eds.), ''Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation'', Archaeopress, 1997, . *Kleinschmidt, Harald. ''People on the Move: Attitudes toward and Perceptions of Migration in Medieval and Modern Europe''. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Print. *Heinrich Härke, ''Archaeologists and Migrations'', Current Anthropology Vol. 39, No. 1 (February 1998), pp. 19–46. * *{{cite journal, title=Research History Relating to the Adoption and Expansion of Agrarian Practices and Societies, journal=Acta Archaeologica, date=2014, volume=85, issue=1, pages=11–29, doi=10.1111/j.1600-0390.2014.00922.x, url=http://xerxes.calstate.edu/fullerton/ebsco/record?id=aph-99451552, accessdate=1 March 2015, url-access=subscription

External links

* Razib Khan,
Völkerwanderung back with a vengeance
' (review of

Peter Heather Peter John Heather (born 8 June 1960) is a British historian of late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Heather is Chair of the Medieval History Department and Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He specialises in the fall ...

, ''Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe'', 2010), Discover Magazine, 17 October 2010. Archived fro
the original
on 3 January 2011. Philosophy of archaeology Archaeological theory Anthropology Human migration Archaeological controversies

History

See also

References

External links