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New Vistas on the Distant Past

Migration: principles and problems

The idea of migration in prehistory and the Dark Ages, so long out of favour, is now back on the agenda.^{1P.N. Peregrine, I. Peiros and M. Feldman (eds.), Ancient Human Migrations (2009); P. Heather, Empires and Barbarians: Migration, development and the birth of Europe (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).} In the 1950s the movement of people was assumed to explain any significant cultural change. Then there was a paradigm shift in the 1960s, kick-started by Grahame Clark's attack on the vision of Britain's past as wave after wave of invasion.^{2G. Clark, Invasion hypothesis in British Archaeology, Antiquity, vol. 40, no. 159 (1966), pp. 172–189.} Pots are not people became the guiding rule of Western archaeology. How can archaeology distinguish between a pot made by an immigrant and a foreign pot acquired by trade? It was wise to make the distinction between cultural change and folk movement. Yet it led to migration-blindness.^{3D. W. Anthony, Migration in archaeology: the baby and the bathwater, American Anthropologist, vol. 92 (1990), no. 4, pp. 23-42; D. W. Anthony, The Bath Refilled: Migration in Archeology, American Anthropologist, vol. 94 (1992), no. 1, pp. 174-176; H. Härke, Archaeologists and migrations: a problem of attitude? in T.F.X. Noble (ed.), From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms (2006), pp. 262-276.}

Some prehistorians went into a state of denial, implicitly refusing to accept that population movements had ever been a significant feature of European prehistory.^{4B. Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans (2008), p. 21.}

The anti-migrationist stance reflected the zeitgeist of the post-imperial age. Invasion and colonisation were no longer appealing concepts. Pride in indigenous culture rose. Continuity became the dominant interest. This revolution in thinking was a worthwhile exercise. It challenged assumptions. Yet history is a weave of continuity and change. Pull just one thread out of that tapestry, and we cannot see the whole picture. Gradually a weight of evidence accrued at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy. Eventually any intellectual cage will start to creak, if facts just won't fit into it. The sound of bursting bars is upon us.

The new thinking is partly a consequence of the welter of scientific techniques that have become available to archaeologists, who once relied on the trusty trowel and notebook. The willingness to use these techniques bespeaks a shift towards more science-based archaeology. Kristian Kristiansen sets the movement into the historic context of a recurrent cycle of Rationalism and Romanticism in Western thought. He predicts a change of focus towards larger, more global problems. Mobility and migration as well as ethnicity and warfare will dominate this research.^{5K. Kristiansen, Theory does not die it changes direction, chap 6 in John Bintliff and Mark Pearce (eds.), Death of Archaeological Theory (Oxbow Books 2011), pp. 72-79.}

Scientific techniques

Databases of radiocarbon dates have been eye-opening. There had been a tendency to simply assume that if you had a sequence of sites in a region from, for example, 10,000 BC to 500 BC, that people had been there continuously throughout. It was possible to imagine one uninterrupted lineage of parent begetting child, simply shifting their ways from knapping flint to casting bronze and iron. Once you have a dense graph of radiocarbon dates for human presence in that region, things look different. You can see the peaks and troughs of activity. You can see the revealing absence of evidence for certain periods. You can match the ups and downs with climate change or show how changed technology went hand in hand with population growth.^{6e.g. C.S.M. Turney, M. Baillie, J. Palmer and D. Brown, Holocene climatic change and past Irish societal response, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 33, no. 1 (January 2006), pp. 34-38; B. Weninger et al., The Impact of Rapid Climate Change on prehistoric societies during the Holocene in the Eastern Mediterranean, Documenta Praehistorica 36 (2009), pp. 7-59.} Similar analysis can be carried out with databases of dendrochronological dates. High levels of tree felling suggest a building boom. Palaeobotany can shed light on past environments. Once a database has been built of pollen counts from different periods, it becomes possible to see farmers deforesting a region, or the regrowth of forest as farmers retreat. Taking such techniques one step further, sophisticated analysis of the rate of population growth has been used to distinguish between a new lifestyle gradually adopted by locals and incomers arriving with a lifestyle completely familiar to them.^{7M. Collard et al., Radiocarbon evidence indicates that migrants introduced farming to Britain, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 37, no. 4 (April 2010), pp. 866-870.}

Isotope studies hold out hope of being able to tell how far an ancient person moved in his or her lifetime. A man buried in some style in Roman Gloucester had silver buckles typical of types made by Goths and steppe peoples in the Crimea. Oxygen isotopes from his teeth confirmed the exotic origin. They suggested that he had spent his childhood in a cold region of Eastern Europe.^{8M.Pitts, Wealthy man in Roman Gloucester was migrant Goth, British Archaeology, no. 113 (July/August 2010), p. 7.} A wealthy part-African woman was discovered in a Roman cemetery in York, her origins pieced together by a similar combination of techniques.^{9S. Leach et al., A Lady of York: migration, ethnicity and identity in Roman Britain, Antiquity, vol. 84, no. 323 (March 2010), pp. 131–145.} Another seemingly African skeleton from Stratford, thought to be a retired Roman soldier, attracted the attention of Dr Schroeder at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who offered to provide Archaeology Warwickshire with isotope and DNA analysis.^{10BBC News: 1,700-year-old African skeleton could be an ancestor (5 April 2011).} Increasingly hopes are pinned on the potential of ancient DNA to reveal our origins.

So archaeology has lost its monopoly on probing prehistory. Study of the distant past is becoming an increasingly multi-disciplinary affair. Some archaeologists are co-operating with linguists and population geneticists to build up a picture of ancient human migrations. This is not to say that archaeology cannot make its own contribution simply by intelligent deduction from material remains. Burial rites are particularly interesting. The movement of just one or two traders should not affect burial customs. A trader dying away from his own community might be buried by the locals in the local manner. But if you have folk movement, you expect the newcomers to bring their own burial rites. Naturally this cannot be an absolute rule. Human beings are too complex and flexible for absolute rules about their behaviour. People may change their burial rites when they adopt a different religion. Christianity is the classic example. Pagans who buried their dead with grave goods could turn into Christians who buried their dead without grave goods. A safer deduction is that a package of multiple material changes including burial rites suggests migration.

Coming and going

Archaeologists in the past tended to assume that once humans appear in an area, then they stayed there, even if archaeological evidence for their later presence is missing. Gradually it is becoming apparent that this assumption is unsafe. Nomadic people go where the food is. They may follow the herds for hundreds of miles. Hunter-gatherers often moved in a seasonal pattern. Such habitual mobility made it easier for them to move to an entirely new region in response to climate change. Even so mortality rates were bound to rise in adversity. So a more realistic view of the archaeological data is of episodic regional extinction and recolonization.^{11F. Reide, Climate and Demography in Early Prehistory: Using Calibrated 14C Dates as Population Proxies, Human Biology, vol. 81, nos. 2–3, (April–June 2009), pp. 309–337.}

Farmers are usually seen as more sedentary, yet early farmers tended to be quite mobile. They did not have the means to keep their fields fertile indefinitely. So they tended to practice slash-and-burn agriculture. Humus collects in the soil of deciduous or mixed woodland, making it nutrient-rich. An area of woodland or forest would be cleared and farmed until the crops were poor. Then farmers would move to another patch of woodland and repeat the process. It would not be inconceivable for them to move more than a few miles to seek a more productive or safer spot to farm. Some problems cannot be so easily escaped though. Disease spreading from animals to humans, once the two lived cheek by jowl on farms, could weaken or wipe out whole communities. Now that archaeologists have built up databases of radiocarbon dates from settlements, a picture of boom and bust can be detected for Neolithic cultures such as the LBK in Central Europe.^{12S. Shennan, Evolutionary Demography and the Population History of the European Early Neolithic, Human Biology, vol. 81, nos. 2–3 (April–June 2009), pp. 339–355.}

Types of migration

Does this mean a return to an old-fashioned view of the past? Should we picture 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.

Nor is movement always voluntary. Millions of people were taken as slaves from Africa to the Americas. Some 50,000 British criminals were transported to America prior to the Declaration of Independence, then about 160,000 to Australia. Orphaned and destitute British and Irish children were as little able to resist their fate when taken to the colonies in the 17th century as indentured servants, or sent to Canada and Australia under the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 and 1937, or Children’s Act 1948.^{13P.W. Coldham, Emigrants in Chains: A social history of forced emigration to the Americas of felons, destitute children, political and religious non-conformists, vagabonds, beggars and other undesirables 1607 - 1776 (1992); R. Hughes, The Fatal Shore: History of the transportation of convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (1987); P. Bean, Lost Children of the Empire, (1989).} See the box below for more on slavery.

Then too we know the restless curiosity of man, exploring just to see what is on the other side of the hill. Projecting the present into the past is not without its dangers. Yet if we bear in mind the great variety of reasons for mobility today, it may help us to keep an open mind about the reasons for movement in the past. Instead of waves of invasion, let us think more neutrally of waves of wanderers.

There are so many varieties of migration and mobility that it is impossible to generalise about it. One school of thought assumed that migration only arises from population density. Certainly over-population can lead to people searching out new territory, but there are methods of population control. So migration is a choice. We can see factors which pull people in a certain direction, such as a better climate, sources of raw materials or social opportunities, and factors which push people out of their current home, such as disaster, climate change and social strife. An interplay between pull and push factors can govern migration choices, as long as transportation is within reach, together with information on attractive destinations.^{14D. Anthony, Prehistoric migration as social process, in J. Chapman and H. Hamerow (eds.), Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation, BAR International Series 664 (1997).}

How does migration affect self-identification? Some of those fleeing disasters or hardship may see themselves as temporary refugees, but others may never return to the land of their birth. The new land becomes the homeland for their descendants. Sometimes a movement which began as an expansion of territory ends up creating separate tribes or nations, who may even become enemies in the course of time.

Pots and people

The dictum that pots are not people remains valid. Ironically its lessons have yet to be fully learned. Pottery has been used to date archaeological sequences since Flinders Petrie established the method in the late 19th century.^{22S. Shennan, Quantifying Archaeology (1997), p. 341.} So useful did pottery become to archaeologists that entire cultures were named for a pottery style, such as Bell Beaker or Corded Ware. Pottery can then loom disproportionately large in thinking about that society. For example Andrew Sherratt envisaged bell beakers as part of a crucial male-bonding ritual, featuring alcohol-fuelled jollity, or even narcotics. Science gives us a more prosaic insight. The residues on these beakers reveal a variety of practical uses. ^{23E. Guerra-Doce, Exploring the significance of Beaker pottery through residue analyses, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, vol. 25, no. 3, (August 2006) pp. 247-259; L. Soberl; J. Pollard and R. Evershed, What's in the Beaker? Investigating the function of British Beakers through organic residue analysis, abstracts from the 16th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in September 2010.}

More importantly fashions in pottery may change while more central features of a culture remain constant, or vice-versa. By creating the label Bell Beaker archaeologists constructed an intellectual cage for themselves. The earliest examples of the pottery style are found in Iberia.^{24J. Müller and S. van Willigen, New radiocarbon evidence for European Bell Beakers and the consequences for the diffusion of the Bell Beaker Phenomenon, in Franco Nicolis (ed.), Bell Beakers today: Pottery, people, culture, symbols in prehistoric Europe (2001), pp. 59-75.} So the assumption has been made that the entire culture must therefore have sprung from Iberia. Yet the Bell Beaker People appear to be one and the same as those who brought metallurgy to Iberia. I have dubbed them the Stelae People, since their route from the Pontic steppe around 3,100 BC is marked by anthropomorphic stelae that they set up, apparently to honour their dead. Jocelyne Desideri's evidence supports that. Examining hereditary features in teeth, she found that while Bell Beaker People were newcomers in Hungary and the Czech Republic, there was a different picture in Southern France, Northern Spain and Western Switzerland, where Bell Beaker people not only shared the graves and settlements of their Final Neolithic and Copper Age predecessors, but were actually related to them. One site in particular is crucial - Petit-Chasseur, at Sion in Switzerland. This site is famed for its stelae.^{25J. Desideri and M. Besse, Swiss Bell Beaker population dynamics: eastern or southern influences?, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, vol. 2, no. 3 (September 2010), pp. 157-173.} Richard Harrison and Volker Heyd had already concluded on archaeological grounds that those commemorated by the stelae continued to be revered as honoured ancestors by those who made Bell Beaker pots, so linking the Bell Beaker people to the steppe.^{26R. Harrison and V. Heyd, The Transformation of Europe in the Third Millennium BC: the example of ‘Le Petit-Chasseur I + III’ (Sion, Valais, Switzerland), Praehistorische Zeitschrift, vol. 82, no. 2 (2007), pp. 129–214.}

Another problem arising from traditional archaeological methods is the type-site approach to creating culture history. The first place where a particular pottery type is found often gives its name to the culture. The culture is then recognised elsewhere by its pottery. Sheer chance dictated the place that it was first found, and to what depth and breadth that site was investigated, but the happen stance that brought particular sites into prominence tends to shape thinking about how cultures develop, spread and relate to each other. Movement of ideas and/or people is envisaged from type-site A to type-site B. In Northern Mesopotamia a neat sequence has long been assumed from Hassuna to Samarra to Halaf to Ubaid. The use of radiocarbon dating has exposed the gaps and overlaps of this model. Regardless of label, Hassuna, Samarra or Halaf, we see the spread of painted pottery across Northern Mesopotamia around 6,000 BC. The end of that first phase comes c. 5700 BC. Halaf sites can be traced to about 5550 BC. Ubaid proper does not start until c. 5100 BC.^{27S. Campbell, Rethinking Halaf chronologies, Paléorient, vol. 33. no 1, (2007), pp. 103-136.} Or so it seemed. Then startling results from Domuztepe in south-east Turkey threw even this heavily revised chronology into doubt. Ubaid elements in pottery there were mixed with Halaf types and dated c. 5700 BC. Furthermore the Ubaid sherds were of a Northern Mesopotamian type. Previously Ubaid had been seen as a Southern Mesopotamian culture which expanded northward. There is no doubt that crucial elements of it did. So once again the lesson seems to be that pottery style is not necessarily diagnostic of major cultural change. ^{28S. Cambell and A. Fletcher, Questioning the Halaf-Ubaid transition, in R.A. Carter and G. Philip (eds.), Beyond the Ubaid, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization no. 63 (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago 2010), pp. 69-84.}

Ubaid is named after the Southern Mesopotamian site of Tell al-Ubaid, first explored in the 1919, where a distinctive type of buff pottery painted in dull grey-brown to black was found. It is now recognised that this pottery occurs over a vast area stretching from southeastern Turkey to southwestern Iran. The period of its use is equally large, spanning nearly three millennia in southern Mesopotamia, where it starts c. 6500 BC. So it runs in parallel to the painted pottery of Northern Mesopotamia. Scholars have started to doubt the value of the term culture for so vast a territory and time.^{29R.A. Carter and G. Philip, Deconstructing the Ubaid, in R.A. Carter and G. Philip (eds.), Beyond the Ubaid, Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization no. 63 (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago 2010), pp. 1-22.} Yet there is a curious feature of the Ubaid which suggests the movement of people as well as pots. Head-shaping - binding the infant skull to modify its contours - is an ancient practice. Though always more unusual than universal, it appealed to several unrelated prehistoric peoples in widely-separated parts of the globe. A particular type of binding around the head, shown here, created an abnormally elongated skull. It was first adopted in the 8th millennium BC in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in south-western Iran, perhaps for aesthetic reasons. It would become a highly visible and permanent mark of ethnicity. Elongated heads entered Mesopotamia with Ubaid-type pottery and overlap with its distribution. This suggests migration or at least inter-marriage with women familiar with the technique.^{30K.O. Lorentz, Ubaid headshaping, in R.A. Carter and G. Philip, Beyond the Ubaid (2010), pp. 125-148.} Nor is the pottery the only material similarity within the Ubaid horizon. Strange figurines with cone-shaped heads and coffee-bean-shaped eyes may reflect the habit of head-binding. There are also flanged discs, niched and buttressed public buildings and communal cemeteries. A tripartite plan in houses is characteristic, with a central space flanked by smaller rooms on either side. So it may make sense to consider the Ubaid a culture, but one which emerged from a melting-pot of influences. ^{31R.A. Carter and G. Philip, Deconstructing the Ubaid, in R.A. Carter and G. Philip (eds.), Beyond the Ubaid, Studies inAncient Oriental Civilization no. 63 (Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago 2010), pp. 1-22.}

Impact

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. Land may be deserted and open to new colonists long after farming first appeared there.

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 replacement is an important clue to mass migration. But the complexities are many. In some cases incomers may 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.

Notes

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