Homo Migrans

Modeling Mobility and Migration in Human History

Megan J. Daniels

• Éditeur: SUNY Press
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438488028
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Archaeology

One of the most significant challenges in archaeology is understanding how (and why) humans migrate. Homo Migrans examines the past, present, and future states of migration and mobility studies in archaeological discourse. Contributors draw on revolutionary twenty-first-century advances in genetics, isotope studies, and data manipulation that have resolved longstanding debates about past human movement and have helped clarify the relationships between archaeological remains and human behavior and identity.These emerging techniques have also pressed archaeologists and historians to develop models that responsibly incorporate method, theory, and data in ways that honor the complexity of human behavior and relationships. This volume articulates the challenges that lie ahead as scholars draw from genomic studies, computational science, social theory, cognitive and evolutionary studies, environmental history, and network analysis to clarify the nature of human migration in world history. With case studies focusing on European and Mediterranean history and prehistory (as well as global history), Homo Migrans presents integrated methodologies and analyses that will interest any scholar researching migration and mobility in the human past.

	CHAPTER ONE
	Movement as a Constant?
	Envisioning a Migration-Centered Worldview of Human History
	Megan J. Daniels

Abstract Migration is, paradoxically, one of the great constants throughout human history: our story is one of continuous movement and exchange, despite our attempts to draw neat geographical and conceptual boundaries around particular groups and regions past and present. This emerging axiom has come about via several means: fast developing methodologies such as aDNA and isotope analyses have truly changed the very questions that we can ask about our data. Combined with new sociohistorical models of the ancient world, these integrated approaches push for a migration-centered view of human history, one that sees mobility and migration as fundamental, constant features of human development and adaptation over the long term. This model, while releasing us from past paradigms that used migration almost solely as an explanation for cultural change, presents new challenges to archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and geneticists, not least those that involve teasing out the entangled causes, processes, and consequences of human movement to build broader theoretical paradigms. This introductory paper will present the objectives of the volume against archaeology’s fraught history with migration as an analytical concept as well as our modern entanglements with migration. It lays the groundwork for the subsequent papers in this volume by highlighting the opportunities and challenges of a migration-centered paradigm of human history, and the promises of integrative, interdisciplinary, theoretically informed, and multiscalar research.

MOVEMENT, THROUGH SPACE AND TIME

The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart.

—Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

The inspiration for this volume—and the conference from which it stems—comes, in large part, from where we find ourselves today: in a world rocked by global movement and by our whirlwind experiences of these displacements, so poignantly captured by novelist Mohsin Hamid. It is increasingly common to characterize the twenty-first century through its mass movements of people. For instance, the tellingly named textbook by Stephen Castles, Hein de Haas, and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration, ascribes its title to the fact that “[m]igration has gained increasing political salience over the past decades” (Castles et al. 2013:5). While the authors acknowledge that human movement is nothing new, they argue that migration has taken on a distinctly novel character with the beginnings of European expansion in the sixteenth century and especially with the mass rural to urban movement in wake of the Industrial Revolution. The International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) 2018 World Migration Report now estimates that in 2015 there were 244 million international migrants (3.3% of the world’s population), and the most recent reports lift that number to 272 million for 2019, an increase of 51 million since 2010 according to the UN International Migrant Stock 2019. This number is projected to grow in the coming years due to various factors including climate change and conflict (e.g., Laczko and Aghazarm 2009).

Humans today are constantly on the move, and we are just as frequently trying to get our minds around what to do about being on the move, or else how to deal with other humans on the move. Yet, while the idea of migration is often framed as an event or, most recently, a crisis of the modern world, we must understand these moments as surges in a much longer continuum of human movement, one that has its roots in our evolution. The recent migrations of people from the Middle East and North Africa into the Mediterranean and Europe, undoubtedly as a result of dire situations only a decade or so old, have been framed as an event or crisis. Yet if we asked how long populations have dispersed around the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Middle East, pushed by war, scarcity, and disaster, and pulled by promises and possibilities of social and political stability and economic abundance, how far back in time would we have to go? This is not to deny the importance of understanding and addressing particular causes and consequences of migration by labeling it as “natural” (Castaneda 2017); but two points need emphasizing from the start: (1) migration is not something peculiar to our age, and (2) it is more our definitions of and attitudes toward migration that have changed in recent times than migratory behavior itself (see Isayev, this volume and 2017:11–12; also Greenblatt 2010; van Dommelen 2014:480). Furthermore, while global movement might seem a product of our modern era of hyper-connection fueled especially by the wide availability of air travel, technology merely amplifies what humans have been doing since we first emerged as a species. To quote Russell King (2007:16), “In a sense, humans are born migrants: our evolution is fundamentally linked to the act of migration, to moving from one place to another and adapting to that environment.” In her recent book, The Next Great Migration (2020), Sonia Shah takes this claim even farther: migration is not merely a human cultural tendency, but a biological imperative of all life on earth, and, in opposition to modern-day framings of migration as some crisis to be averted, it is the key answer to the survival and flourishing of all forms of life.

The earliest phases of migrations include those of extinct members of the genus Homo out of Africa after 2.5 million years ago (Hertler et al. 2013), followed by anatomically modern humans between 120,000 and 10,000 years ago, and then the migrations of farmers, herders, and boat builders across the globe from 10,000 years ago onward (Bellwood 2013a; see papers in Bellwood 2013b). Timothy Earle and Clive Gamble, in their chapter on migration in Shryock and Smail’s edited volume Deep History, capture the complexity, the interconnectedness, and the cloudiness of this relentless human movement in a single sentence:

Even with the first settlement of regions, new migrations continued often at even greater rates, displacing earlier settlers, forcing removals and relocations, creating regional movements of marriage partners and workers, funnelling vast populations through colonial and postcolonial global economies, and creating diverse, intermingled diasporas. [Shryock and Smail 2011:192]

This explanation, encompassing prehistory to modern-day, captures the blurriness not only of migrations themselves, but also their concomitant causes and effects. The complexities of this process have afforded migration a troubled place in archaeological studies over the course of the twentieth century, from undertheorized “catch-all” explanation for cultural change, to racist narratives of dominance, to a subject largely avoided in archaeology in the second half of the century (Anthony, this volume). Since the 1990s, however, in wake of disciplinary turns within archaeology and history responding to intensifying postcolonial narratives and a growing awareness of modern-day globalization, migration has reemerged as a subject of study for understanding the human past. Revolutionary advances in genetics, isotopes, and data manipulation have further bolstered its significance. Given our current global experiences with human movement—and the troubled responses by individuals and governments to this movement—interdisciplinary and nuanced perspectives of migration and its role in driving human development are now more conceivable—and more necessary—than ever before.

This volume, therefore, seeks to take a sharp lens to various parts of this long history of movement, integrating new models and explanations built using diverse methodologies and case studies into a much longer history—and ultimately a much greater understanding—of human migration. It seeks to capitalize on what Kristian Kristiansen has called the “Third Science Revolution” (2014, with responses; also this volume), which has emerged in response to unparalleled advances in the sciences in areas such as genetics and Big Data, and coincides with current theoretical and methodological reorientations in archaeology (Kristiansen 2014:14). This volume also aims to engage these revolutionary changes in archaeology with ongoing shifts in historical models of the ancient world, chiefly paradigms such as connectivity, networks, and globalization, which continue to influence research agendas and offer their own steep challenges in characterization and application. I will elaborate on these developments further below, but in the following section I take a closer look at migration’s appearance, disappearance, and subsequent reemergence in archaeology to frame the rest of this volume.

MIGRATION AND ARCHAEOLOGY: A FRAUGHT HISTORY

How and why humans move, and the resultant effects of those movements on sociocultural configurations, are the piloting questions behind historical, archaeological, anthropological, and genetic research into migration. But the place of migration in archaeological research has had a fascinating and, at times, fraught history. Its emergence as a driving factor in the story of human evolution seems to have been motivated by two seemingly simple yet groundbreaking realizations from the Renaissance onward: first, that humans were very diverse across space and time and second, that human history was very long—at least compared to the biblical worldview that held sway over Medieval Europe and persisted well into the nineteenth century. This outlook, emerging from the studies of Archbishop James Ussher and John Lightfoot, encompassed human history in a mere 6,000 years (Ussher 1658; Murray-Wallace 1996), and saw humans originating from the Garden of Eden somewhere in the Middle East (see Delumeau 2000, especially chapter 3). Humans were seen to have changed over time due to the influence of geography and climate on individuals and bodily humors, ideas that came both from Greco-Roman theories (e.g., Aristotle, Politics 7.1327b) and Medieval characterizations (Harvey 2016). In the biblical view, however, human diversity was a mark of moral degeneration: humans were said to be “made of one blood” (Acts 17:26), and their linguistic and physical variety, along with their dispersion across the globe, found explanation in stories of divine punishment for human transgressions such as the Deluge (Genesis 6:5–7) and Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) (cf. Randsborg 2000:212–213).

How this worldview eroded over time is due to compounding causes too numerous and complex to capture accurately in this brief space, but I will mention a few major factors related to the study of migration. The rise of antiquarian tradition and methodology, founded in critical study of history using documentary, topographical, and physical sources, influenced new approaches to the study and interpretation of sacred scriptures, and coincided with a number of religious shifts in northern Europe (Backus 2003). Moreover, the emergence of new types of scientific enquiries in the early seventeenth century, such as evidence-based autopsy and philosophical skepticism, set the stage for novel approaches to history and science that transformed both the antiquarian and biblical traditions (Acciarino 2018:13–14). The Enlightenment turn toward ideals of evolution and progress only furthered this process, although antiquarian approaches continued to spread far and wide, despite experiencing increasing marginalization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Miller and Louis 2012:2, 4–5), and biblical models of history persisted doggedly into the nineteenth century, and still survive today.

The concept of migration as an explanatory device materialized from a number of avenues during this time. Certain antiquarian writers put forth theories about human migration to account for common origins of variegated peoples. The royal historiographer for the Hapsburgs, Wolfgang Lazius, for instance, wrote De Aliquot Gentium Migrationibus (1557), which stressed the migration of Germanic tribes (migratio gentium, later Völkerwanderung) as a way to offer narrative coherence to the history of the diverse subjects of the Hapsburgs (Goffart 1989:122, note 42).¹ This concept of the Völkerwanderung would carry particular valence into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the process of German nation building, with the strength and vigor of the Germanic people envisioned as a culmination of previous conquests under the Huns and Vandals in the so-called Migration Period.² The concept of German nationality as based on blood and not residence in a particular territory would continue to influence archaeological thought in the German-speaking world well into the twentieth century (Härke 1997:63; Sherratt 1990).

Undoubtedly, the European experiences in the New World prompted theories and arguments about the origins of the indigenous peoples present throughout the Americas. Many accounts from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries argued for indigenous peoples coming across the Atlantic or Pacific, and biblical views tended to position these peoples as descended from the Canaanites, who had fled from the Hebrews and their Levantine homeland (Trigger 2006:115–116). Yet as early as the late sixteenth century, the recognition of physical similarities between American Indigenous peoples and those from East Asia prompted a Jesuit priest, José de Acosta, to write Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1589). In this work, Acosta argued that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas must have traveled from the Middle East, by way of a land bridge from Siberia. But even de Acosta’s account, as prescient as it may have been, nonetheless depicted these peoples as having lost all knowledge of, not only sedentary life, but also of their divine origins, thus remaining in line with dominant biblical narratives of the day. Even so, a realization was slowly but steadily emerging of the diversity of human life that covered the globe, and it set the stage for continuing inquiry into human origins.³

These converging intellectual developments were augmented further by another great discovery—one with roots in the late eighteenth century and that came to fruition in the mid-nineteenth cent...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Chapter One Movement as a Constant? Envisioning a Migration-Centered Worldview of Human History
• Part I New Data and New Narratives
• Part II Migrations, Visible and Invisible: Toward More Inclusive Histories
• Part III Computational Models of Migration
• Part IV Sociohistorical Models of Migration
• Part V Migration and Complexity
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover