Negotiating Migrations: The Archaeology and Politics of Mobility (Debates in Archaeology)

As a species, we have always been mobile and migration was a habitual feature of prehistoric life.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.While much archaeological scholarship, using isotopes and aDNA, focuses on migrations as large-scale phenomena and crisis responses, this book offers a new approach by exploring how moving on was embedded in social practice.This book offers a novel reinterpretation of how the political aspects of migration shaped past people’s worlds in Europe and beyond, drawing on archaeological, historical, linguistic and aDNA evidence.Overall, the conclusion is that a bottom-up approach can help us to