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 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 (ex ...

, 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 cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, technolo ...

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criticized by the processualists in the 1960s and 1970s, leading to a new mainstream which rejected "migrationism" as outdated.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 specimen ...

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

ancient DNA Ancient DNA (aDNA) is DNA isolated from ancient specimens. Due to degradation processes (including cross-linking, deamination and fragmentation) ancient DNA is more degraded in comparison with contemporary genetic material. Even under the bes ...

. Kristiansen (1989) argued that the reasons for embracing "immobilism" during the

Cold War era The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of Geopolitics, geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term ''Cold war (term), co ...

were ideological and derived from an emphasis on political solutions displacing military action.

History

Diffusionism 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 cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, tec ...

", 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 paral ...

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

Marxist archaeology Marxist archaeology is an archaeological theory that interprets archaeological information within the framework of Marxism. Although neither Karl Marx nor Friedrich Engels described how archaeology could be understood in a Marxist conception of ...

, going back to V. Gordon Childe, who during the

interwar period In the history of the 20th century, the interwar period lasted from 11 November 1918 to 1 September 1939 (20 years, 9 months, 21 days), the end of the World War I, First World War to the beginning of the World War II, Second World War. The in ...

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

9th 9 (nine) is the natural number following and preceding . Evolution of the Arabic digit In the beginning, various Indians wrote a digit 9 similar in shape to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot. The Kshatrapa, Andhra and ...

century" 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 Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation. Gunn 2004, p. 9, "The ''Concise Oxford Dictionary'' says that creationism is 'th ...

" 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 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, or the (First) Agricultural Revolution, was the wide-scale transition of many human cultures during the Neolithic period from a lifestyle of hunting and gathering to one of agriculture and settlement, making an incre ...

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 soci ...

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 ''Der Spiegel (online)'' is a German news website. Before the renaming in January 2020, the website's name was ''Spiegel Online'' (short ''SPON''). It was founded in 1994 as the online offshoot of the German news magazine, ''Der Spiegel'', wit ...

'' (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 were hypothesized migrations of Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) speakers, and subsequent migrations of people speaking derived Indo-European languages, which took place approx. 4000 to 1000 BCE, potentially expla ...

, it was estimated that the people of the

Yamnaya culture The Yamnaya culture or the Yamna culture (russian: Ямная культура, ua, Ямна культура literal translation, lit. 'culture of pits'), also known as the Pit Grave culture or Ochre Grave culture, was a late Copper Age to ea ...

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 ca. 3000 BC – 2350 BC, thus from the late Neolithic, through the Copper Age, and ending in the early Bronze Age. Corded Ware culture encompassed a v ...

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 debate between "migrationism" and "immobilism" has notably played out in reference to the example of the

Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is the process which changed the language and culture of most of what became England from Romano-British to Germanic peoples, Germanic. The Germanic-speakers in Britain, themselves of diverse origins, ev ...

. The traditional view of the process, broadly supported by the available textual evidence, 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. In the latter half of the 20th century, archaeologists pushed back against that view and allowed for only the movement of a small Anglo-Saxon "warrior elite", which gradually acculturated the Romano-Britons. In recent years, however, a combination of factors (including present-day genetic studies of British populations and observable migrations), 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 the Internet Archive, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, California. Created in 1996 and launched to the public in 2001, it allows the user to go "back in time" and see ...

.Stuart Brookes and Susan Harrington, ''The Kingdom and People of Kent, AD 400-1066'', p. 24

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

External links

Razib Khan Razib Khan (রাজীব খান ''Razyb Khan'') is a Bangladeshi-American writer in population genetics and consumer genomics. Life and education Khan was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh but moved to the United States at the age of five. His fa ...

,
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

History

See also

References

External links