Negotiating Migrations: The Archaeology and Politics of Mobility

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com, funded by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo. The book explores how small-scale inter-personal relations shaped migration events in archaeology, offering a new approach to understanding migration in the past at various scales and regions.

Format: Hardback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 08 August 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

As a species, we have always been mobile, and migration has been a fundamental aspect of prehistoric life. This open-access volume utilizes archaeological case studies primarily from the European Neolithic, but also from the Pacific, the US Southwest, the medieval Migration Period, and the historical Great Lakes, to explore 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 peoples' 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 understand migration in the past at a variety of scales, in many different regions of the world. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo.

Dimension: 216 x 138 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350427662