• Standard style
• Easy Read

Principles, problems and projects

The idea of migration in prehistory, so long out of favour, is now back on the agenda.^{1Peter N. Peregrine, Ilia Peiros and Marcus Feldman (eds.), Ancient Human Migrations (2009); E. Lightfoot (ed), Movement, Mobility and Migration, Archaeological Review from Cambridge, vol. 23.2 (2008); J. Chapman and H. Hamerow (eds.), Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation, BAR International Series (1997).} Does this mean a return to an old-fashioned view of the past? Should we see history as waves of invasion by conquering armies? Undoubtedly there were invasions. Many have been recorded since man learned to write. Yet we are also familiar with the massive migrations to the New World and Australasia in the 19th century, long after those territories had been claimed by European nations. Such migrants did not see themselves as invaders. Many were fleeing from invasions or oppression in their homelands. Millions of people were taken as slaves from Africa to the Americas.

Slavery has a long and brutal history. The Roman and Greek empires ran on it. Massive numbers of Europeans and Western Asians were enslaved in the process of their conquests. The barbarians who swept over Europe as the Roman Empire crumbled also took captives into slavery. Anglo-Saxons used slave labour. The Vikings were the greatest slave traders of their day. They supplied Iceland with captured Irish, and the Islamic Empire with human booty from Viking raids.^{2James Graham-Campbell, The Viking World (2001), pp. 18, 22, 34, 88-89, 91, 108, 110.} Slavery within Europe was eventually stamped out, but between 1500 and 1800 hostilities between Muslims and Christians led to the capture of huge numbers of slaves. Some one million Muslims were enslaved in Europe and two million Christians taken into captivity in North Africa and the Near East. The feared Barbary pirates would capture ships and raid the coasts of the Mediterranean and Atlantic, in search of men, women and children to sell into slavery in North Africa.^{3Robert C. Davis, Holy War and Human Bondage: Tales of Christian-Muslim slavery in the Early-Modern Mediterranean (2009); Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (2004).}

Since some slaves were simply worked until they dropped, it has been argued that slaves would leave few, if any, descendants. The reverse is probably true. Given the pervasive nature of slavery throughout antiquity, and the habit of taking slave concubines, it seems likely that most of us has a slave or two among our countless ancestors. There are other ways too in which the culture and the genes of a conquered people could be absorbed by the conquerors. Why destroy what is useful? The Romans admired Greek learning and employed Greek tutors. The Franks and Normans took over working systems of government from their predecessors. So instead of viewing invasion as a one-way process, we should visualise a cultural and/or genetic flow in at least two directions in many cases.

That supposes that the incomers maintained a presence in their original homeland. In some cases they did not. People who are fleeing disasters may never return. More often perhaps a movement which began as an expansion of territory ended up creating separate tribes or nations, who may even become enemies in the course of time.

By now it should be clear that not all migrations are invasions. Indeed there are so many varieties of migration and mobility that it is impossible to generalise about it. Mobility is built into the lifestyle of nomads.^{4H. Barnard and W. Wendrich (eds.), Archaeology of Mobility : Old World and New World Nomadism (2008).} Human movement can have a massive impact, or a barely detectable one, on the cultural and genetic landscape of its destination. So new approaches to migration tend to ask a lot more questions than who, when and how? The impact of a migration will depend firstly on how heavily populated the destination region was beforehand. Farmers could overwhelm regions where a few hunter-gatherers roamed, since it can support so many more people to the acre. The price is being tied to the territory, at the mercy of drought, disaster and pestilence. If farming fails, then the stark choice may be migration or starvation.

However new arrivals to regions already densely settled by thriving farmers have broadly four options.

• They can look for unexploited farming, hunting, fishing, herding or mineral-extraction niches.
• They can offer labour, skills or merchandise to existing communities.
• They can depose and replace the existing leadership, leaving the farming communities in place to generate wealth.
• They can drive out entire populations to free land for their own settlers.

Only in the last case are incomers likely to completely change the culture and language of their destination. So language change is an important clue to mass migration. But the complexities are many. In some cases incomers will start off using one tactic and later switch to another, or drive the population out of one area, but rule a neighbouring one as overlord. Nothing can be taken for granted. The initial arrival of newcomers may be gradual or unobtrusive, giving little sign of a people who would become culturally dominant centuries later.

Horsemen of the steppes

Nomads play by their own rules. Nomadic horsemen can move themselves and their herds thousands of miles, and turn into instant cavalry. Settled Europe and China felt the mighty fist of Genghis Khan and his Mongol horde in the Middle Ages. Centuries earlier chronicles wailed of the depredations of the Xiongnu, the Huns and the Turkic tribes. These herders of Central Asia could travel the vast steppes from Mongolia to Ukraine looking for greener pastures. A tribal territory could change in days. When bands united under a strong leader they swept across the plains creating huge empires.

The first people to domesticate the horse had the initial advantage. The latest research points towards a region near the Ural Mountains as the home of horse-riding.^{5D.W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel and Language (2007), chap. 10; A. K. Outram et al, The Earliest Horse Harnessing and Milking, Science, vol. 323. no. 5919 (6 March 2009), pp. 1332-1335.} Just west of those mountains the forefather of the Indo-European languages developed at around the same time. Horsemen carried those languages from the European steppe into Asia. The Indo-European Scythians seem to have controlled the Silk Road from China to the West in its early days. But as the Turkic tribes grew in strength and pushed westward, the descendants of Scythians could join them or flee west before them. Studies of ancient DNA indicate the point at which East Asian peoples came to predominate over Western Eurasian in Central Asia. In Kazakhstan there were Western Eurasian lineages prior to the 7th century BC, followed by East Asian lineages appearing. Assyrian archives and Greek historian Herodotus record the impact on the West of this turn of the tide. Scythians migrated from Asia to the homeland of their ancestors, settling in what is now Azarbaijan and Ukraine.^{6W.Vogelsang, The Afghans (2002), pp. 83-90; P.R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (1996), pp. 25-28.} The same trajectory across the steppe would later bring the Turks to Turkey, and the Huns and Mongols to Eastern Europe. The tide turned again as the Russians rose in power and pushed eastwards into Siberia. This shuttling between east and west wove a complex cultural and genetic tapestry. It will take the combined efforts of researchers in linguistics, archaeology, climatology, genetics and history to unravel its threads.^{7Bokovenko, N.A. Migrations of Early Nomads of the Eurasian Steppe in a Context of Climatic Changes, in E. Marian Scott, A., Yu. Alekseev and G. Zaitseva (eds.), NATO Science Series: IV: Earth and Environmental Sciences Impact of the Environment on Human Migration in Eurasia, vol. 42 (2005), pp. 1568-1238; C. Schuh et al, Mobility in the prehistoric western Eurasian Steppe – an interdisciplinary approach, 6th Bone Diagenesis Meeting 18-21 September 2009, University of Bonn: Abstract Volume (2009), p. 60; O. Gokcumen et al, Genetic variation in the enigmatic Altaian Kazakhs of South-Central Russia: Insights into Turkic population history, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, vol. 136 (2008), no. 3, pp. 278 - 293.}

Projects

Research projects in progress on aspects of human migration, transport and related topics in Western Eurasia include:

Europe or world wide

• AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, based at University College London, brings together archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, human genetics and mathematical modelling, with the aim of understanding the evolution of human cultural diversity. Within its world-wide research programme are a number of projects related to mobility, including:
  • Constructing the Human Niche at the End of the Last Ice Age: An integrated quantitative approach to the pioneer Late Pleistocene human re-colonisation of Europe.
  • Human mobility and the prehistoric spread of farming: Isotopes in archaeological skeletons.
  • Human mobility and kinship during and after the transition to agriculture in Neolithic Europe and Southeast Asia. Measuring isotopes in tooth enamel at Vaihingen (Germany).
  • Lactose tolerance and population expansion in prehistoric Europe.
  • Population replacement in Anglo-Saxon England. Mark Thomas continues to examine Y chromosome variation in Britain.
• Forging Identities: The mobility of culture in Bronze Age Europe: a network of universities, museums and research institutions will explore intercultural interaction in Bronze Age Europe, financed by the European Commission. Partners include professors Helle Vankilde, coordinator, Josef Batora , Horia Ciugudean, Janusz Czebreszuk, Svend Hansen, Andreas Hauptmann, Kostas Kotsakis, Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas B. Larson, Kirstem Liden, Johannes Muller, and Maria Teschler-Nicola, as well as contributors from other institutions, including the Universities of Cambridge and Southampton.
• The Formation of Europe: Prehistoric Population Dynamics and the Roots of Socio-Cultural Diversity (FEPRE). Multi-disciplinary project investigating  the spread of the Neolithic in Europe. Participants: Newcastle University, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, University of Leicester, University of Manchester, Universitat de Girona, Jagiellonian University and Institute for the History of Material Culture.
• The Genographic Project by National Geographic, headed by Spencer Wells, aims to collect DNA samples from over 100,000 people worldwide to plot the migrational routes by which the Earth was colonised.
• Migration and Identity: The University of Exeter is conducting several interdisciplinary projects on this theme, tackling some politically red-hot issues.
• The peopling of the European continent: the mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome perspectives. The project at the Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy, is headed by Prof. Antonio Torroni. It is currently investigating mtDNA subclades in the hope of identifying markers of Neolithic arrivals in Europe.

British Isles and Scandinavia

• Ancient Britain and the Atlantic Zone: a project of the Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies, University of Wales, examining the evidence from linguistics, archaeology and genetics for British Celtic origins in the Atlantic Bronze Age rather than the central European Iron Age. A volume is to be published in 2010, edited by Professors John T. Koch and Sir Barry Cunliffe, of papers presented at Celticization from the West (December 2008).
• ARGEOPOP: Finnish pre-history reconstructed in the light of archaeological and population data.
• The Beaker isotope project: mobility, migration and diet in the British Early Bronze Age. A collaboration between the University of Sheffield and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
• The Bronze Age Copper Mines of North Wales: searching for genetic evidence of the prehistoric settlement of the British Isles. Study by the University of Sheffield.
• Celtic bones: A bio-cultural analysis of the health and lifestyles of early medieval communities from Western Britain and Ireland, AD 410-900, considering population movement, and the impact that Irish and Scandinavian migrations may have had on the lives of the local inhabitants. This PhD project by Katie Hemer at the University of Sheffield includes isotope analyses. The paper on the results was read at UKAS September 2009. Abstract online [pdf], p. 48.
• Centre for Sami Research at Umeå University, Sweden, is conducting studies on the Sami lifestyle and the impact of colonization on them.
• The People of the British Isles: An Oxford University project funded by the Wellcome Trust to aid medical research, and shed light on ancient migrations within the British Isles.
• Roots of the British: 1000 BC to AD 1000. This multidisciplinary project at Leicester University aims to reappraise the evidence for the migration and/or continuity of human populations in the British Isles in the distant past, particularly Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Viking. It has access to the genetic database created by The People of the British Isles project.
• Viking Unst: multinational project to excavate Viking longhouses on the northernmost island of the Shetland Isles, Scotland, and reconstruct aspects of Viking life in a permanent visitor attraction.

Central Europe

• Bell Beaker Metallurgy in Central Europe: PhD project by Matthias Merkl at the University of Edinburgh.
• Kinship, lineage and phenotype: Genetic composition of Middle Neolithic populations and their relationship to social differentiations. This project led by Dr. Rebecca Renneberg at the Institute of Legal Medicine, University of Kiel, is analysing ancient DNA from about 250 European Neolithic individuals. Among other things, it hopes to shed light on the origin of European diversity in eye-, skin- and haircolour.
• Kinship and residence patterns in the Late Copper Age in Southern Germany: a German-British Network Project which intends to include aDNA and isotope studies. It is a collaboration between the Universities of Bristol, Halle and Manchester, and Staatssammlung für Anthropologie und Paläoanatomie München.
• Origins and development of farming societies in Europe: the case of the LBK. The University of Sheffield has carried out bioarchaeological and biocultural analysis of the earliest LBK cemetery in the Czech Republic at Vedrovice.

Mediterranean

• Antikythera Mechanism Research Project: The astronomer Mike Edmunds and the mathematician Tony Freeth (University of Cardiff), the astronomer John Seiradakis (University of Thessalonica), the astronomer Xenophon Moussas and the physicist, Yanis Bitsakis (University of Athens), and philologist and palaeographer Agamemnon Tselikas (National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation) are reinvestigating the extraordinary mechanism found by sponge divers at the bottom of the sea near the island of Antikythera.
• Exploring Identities in the Levant: The Council for British Research in the Levant aims to provide a research network, encouraging research on a number of themes, including the spread of early humans through the Near East from Africa.
• Material Connections: Mobility, Materiality and Mediterranean Identities. Peter van Dommelen, Bernard Knapp and Michael Rowlands direct this research project of the University of Glasgow, looking at contacts amongst various Mediterranean islands and their nearby shores to explore the social and cultural impact of migratory, colonial and exchange encounters.
• Migrations and Mobility in Archaic Greek History: The German Archaeological Institute aims to reconsider the foundation of Greece colonies all over the coastal regions of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea (c. 750 - c. 550 BCE).
• Pavlopetri Underwater Archaeology Project: an Early Bronze Age submerged port off the southern Laconian coast of Greece is being investigated in a collaborative project between the University of Nottingham and the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.
• Population origins and movements in the Southern Levant: research by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Bioanthropology and Ancient DNA Laboratory.
• Portus Project: An investigation of the principal port of imperial Rome, led by the University of Southampton.
• Roman Imperial slaves. Tracy Prowse, Assistant Professor of Anthroplogy at McMaster University, Canada, is using isotope and DNA analysis of skeletons in the Roman cemetery on an Imperial estate at Vagnari, south Italy, to investigate the origins of Imperial slaves. One had an East Asian mtDNA. The results will be presented at the Roman Archeology Conference at Oxford, England, in March 2010, and published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.
• Settling the Steppe: the archaeology of changing societies in Syro-Palestinian drylands during the Bronze and Iron Ages: a project by the University of Leiden.
• Titriş Höyük aDNA Project: joint US-Turkish exploratory study looking at human ancient DNA from Early Bronze Age burials in southeastern Turkey.

Russia

• Baikal Archaeological Project: a multinational and multidisciplinary investigation of hunter-gatherer burials along the shores of Lake Baikal, Siberia, and the rivers that flow into it. This includes the extraction of ancient DNA. The project has already generated numerous publications.
• Ice Age development and Human Settlement in northern Eurasia (ICEHUS) : a Russian-Norwegian co-operation which aims to improve understanding of the Late Quaternary environmental changes at high latitudes and their impact on the earliest human occupation in northern Russia.

Steppes

• Botai: Early horse herders on the steppes of Northern Kazakhstan: Dr. Sandra Olsen, Curator of Anthropology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, describes her joint fieldwork with Drs. Bruce Bradley and Alan Outram of Exeter University (see below).
• Harnessing Horsepower: Horses and Humans in Antiquity: David W. Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown have devised and tested indicators of horse domestication.
• Horse Domestication in the Botai Culture, Eneolithic Kazakhstan: Dr Alan Outram of Exeter University heads an international project to investigate the origins of horse domestication.
• Klin Yar: Andrej Belinskij and Heinrich Harke of the University of Reading probe skeletal evidence for male-only immigration of Sarmatian pastoralists from the northern steppes into the North Caucasus, and the later Sarmatian-Alanic transition. DNA analysis is planned.
• The Palaeogenetics Group at the University of Mainz is engaged in several studies, including:
  • Lactase Persistence in Meso- Neolithic Europeans.
  • Palaeogenetic analyses of economic innovations and social mobility in the Eurasian Steppe 3500-300 BC. For this DNA has been recovered from 14 Kurgan skeletons of Central-Asian, Sarmatian, origin (400-200 BC).
• Topoi: This research cluster is based at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. One project is using strontium isotope research to determine the degree of migration and mobility between the North Pontic and the Carpathian basin in the Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age. A paper on the results (C. Gerling et al, Mobility and diet in the prehistoric western eurasian steppes in the light of stable isotope analysis) was presented at UKAS September 2009 [pdf of abstracts], p. 43.

Notes

If you are using a browser with up-to-date support for W3C standards e.g. Firefox, Google Chrome, IE 8 or Opera, hover over the superscript numbers to see footnotes online. If you are using another browser, select the note, then right-click, then on the menu click View Selection Source. If you print the article out, or look at print preview online, the footnotes will appear here.

Page created by Jean Manco 13 September 2009; last revised 10-03-2010.