Negotiating Migrations: The Archaeology and Politics of Mobility

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 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.