"The application of the contemporary notion of migration to historical processes is not a neutral statement but the activation of an explanatory framework that brings with it assumptions about the nature of human mobility, privileging certain narratives over others." - Isayev and Baroud 2015
When Elena Isayev (Exeter University) and Evan Jewell (Rutgers University) initially invited me to contribute a chapter to an upcoming volume they are co-editing for Routledge on "Mobility in Antiquity: Rethinking the Ancient World through Movement", I was both intrigued and a little unsure of what I was going to write about. It's been rewarding to explore these questions and think about how to talk about the immense amount of mobility we can observe in the past when using ancient DNA, and how we can best understand and interpret these observations through interdisciplinary work. The chapter - co-authored with Mehmet Somel - will be out soon, and in the meantime, I want to share a few key points here:
Abstract
Since the first ancient human genome was sequenced in 2010, many studies have examined genetic changes in past populations, often drawing on “migration” as the primary explanatory mechanism for these changes. While migration has frequently been used as an umbrella term for any type of human movement in archaeogenetics studies, mobility occurs and has occurred in many diverse patterns: it can be seasonal, continuous, or multigenerational, and it can involve large groups of people or single individuals, and it can, at times, be linked to certain age, gender, socio-economic factors. This chapter examines how archaeogenetic studies can explore various modes of mobility, beyond migration, especially through interdisciplinary collaborations and the integration of historical, archaeological and bioanthropological sources. We highlight examples of how researchers in the field are exploring various types of mobility, focusing on the Mediterranean. We identify challenges in the study of mobility patterns, including limits to genetic inference using current-day techniques, equifinality that arises from working with small, geographically and temporally heterogeneous datasets, the need to develop a shared terminology across disciplines, and ethical pitfalls related to the politicisation of results.
Terminology
The primacy of migration as an explanatory mechanism in ancient DNA research derives from several historical contingencies. The first is semantic differences across disciplines. In the biological sciences, this same term has a broad usage. While it can apply to unidirectional movement, migration also encompasses seasonal movement that individuals may undertake annually throughout their lifetime as well as multi-generation cycles. While we speak of caribou and monarch butterflies as “migrating”, when we speak of humans, we would use a range of terms for these various modalities of mobility. In population genetics, migration has gained an even more generalised meaning: Groups of interbreeding individuals are referred to as “demes” (from the same root as “demography”) and the movement of genetic material between these demes as “migration”, allowing researchers to have a shared terminology for a broad range of species.
One particularly relevant definition of the term comes from culture-historical archaeology, because of the lasting impact this usage has had on the public understanding of this term. In the early 20th century, practitioners of culture-historical archaeology studied what they called “culture areas.” These were geographical zones, often represented as clearly delineated and bounded regions on maps, defined by the presence and absence of certain artefact types (e.g. decorative ceramic motifs, or lithic blade types). These zones could expand, contract or disappear as the result of diffusion, migration and replacement (Trigger 2006; Källén 2025). The development of culture-historical archaeology became entangled with rising nationalism in Europe in the first half of the 20th century and its focus on zones occupied by a homogenous people/ethnicity in (pre)history became part of many nationalist narratives and projects (Trigger 2006; Hakenbeck 2019).
Subsequent developments in archaeological praxis and theory - from the turn to scientific, reproducible, hypothesis-driven methods of the 1960’s new/processual archaeology, to the post-processual archaeologies, which emphasized the importance of complexity, contextualization, reflexive research, multivocality, and the incorporation/development of diverse social theories - have emphasized an understanding of human mobility as complicated and nuanced in its forms and motivations. These frameworks have rejected culture-historical archaeology’s essentializing view of the relationship between material culture and identity. Hence the common turn of phrase “pots don’t equal people”, which serves as a reminder that any one way of learning about past people is not definitive in their entirety.
I hope this excerpt has piqued your interest in the topic and how we can talk about mobility, movement and interaction in the past without bringing along the baggage of culture history. Excited to share more when the chapter is out!
Hakenbeck, Susanne E. 2019. “Genetics, Archaeology and the Far Right: An Unholy Trinity.” World Archaeology 51 (4): 517–27.
Isayev, Elena, and George Baroud. 2015. “Migration and Mobility.” In Oxford Classical Dictionary.
Källén, Anna. 2025. The Trouble with Ancient DNA. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Trigger, Bruce G. 2006. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
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