Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation 9780860548577, 9781407349749

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: On the Move Again - Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation
The Impact of Modern Invasions and Migrations on Archaeological Explanation
Prehistoric Migration as Social Process
Migration Theory and the Anglo-Saxon "Identity Crisis"
Britons, Anglo-Saxons, and the Germanic Burial Ritual
Social Network and Patterns of Language Change

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1997 CHAPMAN & HAMEROW (Eds)

BAR S664

Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation Edited by

MIGRATIONS AND INVASIONS IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

B A R

John Chapman and Helena Hamerow

BAR International Series 664 1997

Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation Edited by

John Chapmanand Helena Hamerow

BAR International Series 664 1997

Published in 2016 by BAR Publishing, Oxford

BAR International Series 664 Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation

© The editors and contributors severally and the Publisher 1997 Volume editor: Rajka Makjanic The authors' moral rights under the 1988 UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act are hereby expressly asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied, reproduced, stored, sold, distributed, scanned, saved in any form of digital format or transmitted in any form digitally, without the written permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 9780860548577 paperback ISBN 9781407349749 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9780860548577 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library BAR Publishing is the trading name of British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd. British Archaeological Reports was first incorporated in 197 4 to publish the BAR Series, International and British. In 1992 Hadrian Books Ltd became part of the BAR group. This volume was originally published by Archaeopress in conjunction with British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd/ Hadrian Books Ltd, the Series principal publisher, in 1997. This present volume is published by BAR Publishing, 2016.

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The cover illustration depicts a late eighth- or ninth-century grave marker from Lindisfarne. Illustration by Y. Beadnell.

Contents

Contributors

11

Acknowledgements

111

I

2

3

4

5

6

John Chapman and Helena Hamerow On the Move Again: Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation

I

John Chapman The Impact of Modern Invasions and Migrations on Archaeological Explanation

11

David Anthony Prehistoric Migration as Social Process

21

Helena Hamerow Migration Theory and the Anglo-Saxon 'Identity Crisis'

33

Sally Crawford Britons, Anglo-Saxons and the Germanic Burial Ritual

45

James Milroy and Lesley Milroy Social Network and Pattern of Language Change

73

Contributors

Professor David Anthony, Hartwick College, New York Dr. John Chapman, Department of Archaeology, University of Durham Dr. Sally Crawford, Department of Ancient History and Archaeology, University of Birmingham Dr. Helena Hamerow, Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford Professor James Milroy, Department of Speech, University of Newcastle Professor Lesley Milroy, Department of Speech, University of Newcastle

ii

Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank all those who helped make the TAG (Theoretical Archaeology Group) session on 'Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation', held at the University of Durham in December 1993, a success, in particular the contributors to this volume. We are also grateful to the TAG '93 Organizing Committee and its chairperson, Dr. Matthew Johnson, for providing such a pleasant and stimulating venue. John Chapman is grateful to Lindsay Allason-Jones for her comments on mobility in the Roman period. Finally, thanks are due to Sandra Hooper and Yvonne Beadnell for the excellent graphics which appear in this volume.

J.C. H.H.

111

INTRODUCTION:

"immobilist" theorizing. This surpnsmg development requires an explanation of its own, in terms which allow cross-cultural comparisons without denying the need for historically contingent models. At the heart of the matter, migrations and invasions link people, landscapes and places in a myriad ways which deserve close attention to broad pattern as much as to detail.

ON THE MOVE AGAIN - MIGRATIONS AND INVASIONS IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

JOHN CHAPMAN and HELENA HAMEROW The lie of the land

Migration (and we may subsume "invasion" under this more general heading pro tem) can be characterized in many ways, which have one of two main tendencies - inclusive and exclusive definition. A good example of the former is Tilly's ( 1978) sixfold classification (quoted in Moch 1992 and used by David Anthony, this volume) into local, circular, chain, career, colonizing and forced migrations. The latter position is represented, inter alia, by Adams, who defines migration as "a simultaneous and permanent movement of substantial numbers of people ... which might be expected to leave measurable traces in the cultural, linguistic and skeletal record" (Adams et al. 1978: 486). Adams' definition clearly excludes Tilly's "local" migrations, and may well exclude many forms of "career" migrations, while mobile strategies such as transhumance, which would be included by Tilly, do not meet the rigours of Adams' formulation. Indeed, Tilly's classification may be taken to define "mobility" rather than "migrations" - a catch-all definition which is too imprecise for clear analysis of cultural patterning. However, there is a danger that, in excluding alternative forms of mobile behaviour, archaeologists could foreclose on important interrelationships between different forms of mobility. As Zvelebil has recently observed, hunter-gatherer and farmer economic strategies are often more similar than it appears at first sight, since the mobility of the former is described in terms of seasonal mobility, while that of the latter is often considered as transhumance (Zvelebil 1993:147). In these studies, an inclusive view of migration is taken so as to allow the broadest comparisons of relevant socio-spatial data.

There can be little doubt that, at the scale of the longue duree, migration and invasion are two important processes with potential explanatory status. In this collection of essays, the contributors seek to understand migrations and invasions on their own terms, the strengths and weaknesses of migration and invasion models as explanatory models of cultural change, and the reasons for the popularity and unpopularity of such models. The aim has been to identify the critical underlying variables in these twin processes, so as to reach a deeper understanding of two undeniably important aspects of human interaction. The great advances in the study of world prehistory share several salient features but two of them have had a strangely chequered history. During the 20th century, the processes of migration and invasion have been banished from centre-stage to the back-of-house, only to be readmitted more recently to the wings. In this volume, we explore this dramatic narrative and try to discover why this should have been so. It may seem obvious to the reader that human mobility, often on an inter-continental scale, has made a major contribution to cultural development. Whether we consider the peopling of the world (Fig. 1), the spread of Homo sapiens sapiens, the emergence of farming or state formation, people have been on the move on a local, regional, inter-regional and long-distance scale in ways that, to say the least, include the processes of migration and invasion. However, despite this indisputable point, archaeologists downplayed the significance of migrations and invasions over a period of almost 30 years. All manner of local processes were invoked to explain the most important cultural changes, creating a strong bias towards local, "indigenist" or

Another important preliminary question concerns the choice of either uniformitarian models in which the form of migrations and invasions is assumed to be constant across time or historically 1

contingent models each focussing on migration but specific to time, place and social formation. In one sense, this notion runs parallel to debates about the applicability of Wallersteinian world systems models to the European Bronze or Iron Ages (Scarre and Healy 1993), or the debates between substantivist and formalist economic anthropologists (Cook 1974; Dalton 1969). These questions form part of the debate about how we use the present to re-create models of a past irredeemably removed from our own direct experience. We have no choice but to use our current insights to gain understanding and to define more clearly the general structures which form the framework for discussion of processes of change.

shifts in archaeological theory, with all the sociopolitical factors of academic competition that are entailed. The reader may well object to migration models being treated as the intellectual equivalent of status goods in Richard Bradley's (1984) 1 Prestige Replacement model but it can be argued that theoretical innovation and replacement are often two sides of the same coin. Another factor may well be the social perceptions of the significance of contemporary migrations and invasions and how those perceptions are dialectically related to the production and consumption of migration models. It is no accident that attention to migrations and invasions as forms of explanation of cultural change has re-emerged after two decades of rejection. The insistent clamour of the homeless, the migrant and the refugee is rarely still and we cannot but face its consequences on an academic as well as a human level. There are few areas of the world left unaffected by the gathering pace of migrations and invasions, whether within "nation-states" or between such countries. Hence, there is a deeply felt motive for support of the notion that migrations and invasions of a kind now all too readily recognisable in the modern world were also a fundamental part of the past.

The rise and fall of migration and invasion models

Our position is that there is little point in attempting to find an essentialist characterization of migrations and invasions that would fit every historic or cultural context. In any survey of migrations and invasions in the historic period, the principal theme is one of diversity linked to the achievement of varied levels of centralised and logistical power. It is important to stress that the range of models for prehistoric migrations and invasions is potentially vast. The very wealth of this body of comparative data is, paradoxically, its greatest weakness, since it is hard to pronounce on the most appropriate comparanda for prehistoric processes of change amidst such diversity. Two inter-linked issues arise out of these preliminary considerations. The first concerns why the relative popularity of migration and invasion models has changed so much over the last century. The second explores what is distinctive and attractive about migration and invasion models as explanatory models for past cultural change. It may be thought that there is a direct and unambiguous link between the two issues, insofar as migration models are popular when they are perceived to be effective explanatory models. This rationalist notion cannot easily be dismissed but may well be a necessary but incomplete part of the story. In addition, the rise, fall and recovery of migration models is partly embedded in paradigm 2

The desirability of migration models as explanatory models is also related to changing archaeological perceptions of what constitutes a "good" explanation. "Good" compared to what else? How can archaeologists "explain" anything about a radically different past? Practitioners of the three major 20th-century paradigms of traditional, processual and post-processual archaeology have distinctive views on these issues. It will be useful to characterize the changing positions in relation to the success or otherwise of migration models.

1 Richard Bradley's ( 1984) Prestige Replacement model characterizes prestige goods systems in which a principal force for innovation is the drive toward ever new kinds of status goods. This produces an archaeological record in which a new status good appears in restricted distribution when it is rare and valuable and whose distribution is wider in later periods when it is no longer of such high status.

On "explanation"

two processual standbys of population increase and environmental change, in a systemic approach. Indeed, it is one of processual archaeology's many ironies that, at the very moment when population increase was hailed as a prime mover of real significance, the migrations and invasions which may have been linked to such increases tended to be excluded from the debate. Migration models were not, however, totally excluded from the theatre of processual archaeology, as we can see from a consideration of the work of David Clarke.

At a general level of explanation, diffusion and differentiation may be defined as two simultaneously operating processes of change (Nandris 1972:61). In the 20th century, there has been a cyclical tendency in the precedence given to one process over the other in the explanation of culture change. In traditional archaeology, diffusion was invoked whenever local cultural change was perceived to have been too rapid or too large-scale to be comfortably accounted for by local differentiation. Similarly, archaeological "cultures" were formulated as the building blocks of culture change; to define change meant the characterization of the cultural state before change, the input from another culture at the time of change and the development of a new state (Childe 1947; for recent analyses of cultural syncretism, see Champion 1990 and Rowlands 1994). The majority of archaeologists adopted diffusion as the primary process, of which migrations and invasions were two of the most important forms it could take. Migration models could easily be integrated with archaeological theories of culture change as two forms of process. The processual criticism that their forebears never used "process" to explain cultural change was misplaced: migration models were just as processual as trade mechanisms, only rather less explicitly defined.

In his seminal work on archaeological theory, David Clarke characterized the nested hierarchy of socio-archaeological processes with an apparent rigour which few have equalled since (1968:41131). He defined twelve types of process, five of which involved migration or invasion: (1) culture group repatterning (through

imperial colonization) (2) cultural intrusion/substitution (through military conquest or mass migration) (3) cultural assimilation (through military conquest following acculturation) (4) subcultural intrusion/substitution (through the substitution of one subculture by another in deliberate action)

The shift in paradigm to processual archaeology introduced explicit and overtly scientific procedures for the explication of cultural change (Watson et al. 1971). With the new-found emphasis on scientific procedures, the nomothetic approach and the importance of law-like generalizations, migration models fit less easily into the new framework. In many ways this was curious, since there was no reason why migration models should not have been investigated in a range of comparable environments. Indeed, there was no reason why migration models should not have generated testable, refutable hypotheses of the form "If A, then B": viz., if a migration / invasion occurred, then it would be marked by changes in the cultural, linguistic and skeletal data (cf. Adams et al. 1978). There was also no reason why migration models could not have been included as an external variable, comparable to the

(5) stimulus diffusion (through warfare as one form of interaction to produce deliberate derivative development) Clarke summarized these patterns by suggesting their origins in varying degrees of human movement and population reorganization (Clarke 1968:413). In fact, while mass migration accounts for only one process, the mechanism leading to all five processes is one of military invasion. Insofar as Clarke's goal was the explanation of different patterns of cultural change in artifact assemblages, invasions assume a surprisingly major role in his theoretical framework, which in general are less concerned with local differentiation than with processes of diffusion. However, few processualists paid much attention to Clarke's formulations, tending rather to focus on internal ,., .)

systemic differentiation as a result of population growth, environmental change and/or positive feedback (Renfrew 1972). Instead, they used Clarke's formulations of the relations between spatial pattern and social process to model other processes of cultural development. Why were migration models rejected by so many processual archaeologists when their expla..'latory potential and potential for rigorous testing was equal to many of the other models then current? Two reasons may be proposed: ( 1) failings in the chronological framework supporting migration models were seen as failings in the models themselves; and (2) theoretical weaknesses in the conception of cultures were blamed on the migration models. In the case of the former, radiocarbon dating of many European Neolithic, Copper and Bronze Age phenomena assumed to have been Oriental or Aegean innovations (e.g., megaliths) demonstrated that the supposed derivatives were in fact earlier than their alleged prototypes (Renfrew 1973). In the case of the latter, migration models were based on particular notions of archaeological "cultures" - bounded, homogenous and normative - which were no longer acceptable (Binford 1972; for a review, see Chapman and Dolukhanov 1993). It may be countered that such failings that existed could have been corrected with the aid of a new generation of more refined migration models. But such models were felt to be so bound up with the imprecise chronologies and the inaccurate model of "cultures" that they could not be saved (hence the "baby" thrown out with the "bathwater": Anthony 1990; Chapman & Dolukhanov 1992). In addition, it may be supposed that the swing towards the pole of processes of internal differentiation was partly an ideological question for "New" Archaeologists wishing to define themselves in opposition to traditionalists and therefore preferring to select a strongly contrasting range of explanatory strategies. What is important to emphasize is that the denial that preprocessualists were interested in process is a gross distortion and should now, with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, be accepted as such. In the post-processualist movement of the 1980s 4

and 1990s, explanation has never been a strong suit; indeed, processualists have attacked the postprocessualists for their perceived failure to formulate rigorous explanations for cultural change (Binford 1982; Bintliff 1991). This apparent weakness in post-processualist approaches masks, however, a critical attitude to archaeological data and social theory based not only on taphonomy but also on the self-reflexive critical assessment of the Frankfurt School (Habermas 1972 and 1987) and a determined adherence to source criticism. The rejection of the Holy Trinity of processual archaeology - logical positivism, universal laws and systems theory - frees post-processualists to investigate long-term cultural sequences in terms of changes in the structures of meaning at the heart of social groups (e.g., Hodder 1991). In such projects, consonance with the data at hand becomes the most important criterion of postprocessual theory-building, which is based on historical trajectories in a more fundamental way than had ever been the case with most processualists. The rejection of universal laws and general processes by post-processualists leads to two insights into the 'reconstruction' of migration models: (1) the historically contingent characterization of migrations and invasions, leading to a sounder basis for the derivation of analogues for prehistoric processes; and (2) the incorporation of aspects of social power and social network theory into such model-building. Migration and invasion models as historically contingent

In many accounts of recent migrations and invasions, the twin beacons of the state and the city shed much light on their form and nature. The raising of armies for military action as an important means of state creation and territorial consolidation led to significant invasions by most states. State expenditure on programmes of public works and state power over the raising of taxes and the imposition of conformity, whether religious or moral, had an enormous impact on human migrations (Tilly 1978). Similarly, urban development caused human mobility on a vast scale, through the processes of settlement

nucleation and differentiation of labour, the latter leading, in Europe, to the emergence of an urban proletariat (de Vries 1984).

Career migration emerged as a rival to circular migration and chain migrations to cities (Moch 1992:158-160). Although huge urban growth accounted for much migration, human mobility exceeded the pace of urban growth in this mature capitalist phase.

It should be recognised that the presence of many

fine-grained analyses of rural - urban mobility is partly related to available data - generally biassed against rural and upland regions (Moch 1992:100101). Such bias in the primary data skews our perceptions of the kinds of migrations that occurred beyond the boundaries of cities and states. Nevertheless, from a prehistoric perspective, the impact of pre-state social networks on migration and invasion would have been incomparably less significant because of the differences in social power in such formations. Thus, the critical divide in the study of migrations and invasions comes not when we move back into periods with no available written records but with the shift to more decentralised, more overlapping power networks with deeper roots in local kinshipbased societies. A brief comparison of migrations documented through historical records since the Roman period (Castles and Miller 1993; Moch 1992; Mann 1986) indicates some of the changing forms and patterns of migrations in varying historical and social contexts.

In the early industrial period of the 18th century, regions with local industry attracted mass labour while those regions without local manufacturing bases developed circular migration systems to other agricultural areas (Moch 1992:99-101). It was only the elites who moved vast distances and even they tended to return.

In pre-industrial societies, most Europeans moved along local or circular migration pathways within their own regions or provinces. While the emerging world-system did produce local peaks of labour demand (e.g. Holland's large output of cheese), most regions had self-contained smallscale migrations within kin and village networks. In this sense, although occasionally responsive to world-systems opportunities, the patterns of preindustrial migrations were fundamentally at variance with those of later, industrially-based and capitalist social networks (Moch 1992:58-9). This conclusion should give us pause before we consider the role and form of earlier migrations.

In the 1980s and 1990s, international migration is seen as a transnational revolution reshaping countries and policies around the globe. The most numerous migrants are the economic migrants, moving in search of the most prosperous labour market to the tune of an estimated 80 million people per annum (Castles and Miller 1993:5).

At some point during the Late Medieval period, a critical point was reached in the filling-up of the continent of Europe, such that no significant tracts of 'virgin' territory were left. This meant that, henceforth, central territorially-based states had to expand against each other rather than expand into unclaimed landscapes. Hence, a major cause of migration in this period was international warfare, exemplified by the Hundred Years War. But because the funding of warfare necessitated the concentration of resources at home, economic expansion was crucial and trade brought some degree of non-local migration (Mann 1986).

Earlier in the 20th century, state-sponsored and controlled migrations were typical of the forced migrations of post-1914 Europe (Moch 1992:189191). State policies grew out of labour needs as much as from the coercive and brutal racist policies of the 1930s and 1940s. Often the circular migrations of earlier times evolved into chain migrations resulting in full settlement (e.g., the German Gastarbeiter experience: Abadan-Unat 1985). In the massive industrial expansion of the later 19th century, Europeans travelled further than their ancestors and were more likely to stay away. 5

Moving still further back in time, in AD 1000 Europe comprised a collection of feudal states, with little political centralisation. Trade led to limited migration but the role of Christendom as a stimulus to human mobility cannot be underestimated (Mann 1986). This stimulus

operated in two ways - through international wars such as the Crusades, and through pilgrimages whose routes criss-crossed Europe - two specific forms of circular migration. But these migrations were tied to kinship and allegiance patterns, with no clear notion of economic gain except among the elite.

areas of Eurasia and North Africa. The Romans preferred residents to be settled, since they were easier to tax that way. With upland-lowland and long-distance (e.g. African) transhumance movements continuing much as before, economic and career migrations had a minor effect on the empire, being related more to military problems than to economic developments.

The frequent bouts of migratory warfare in the early Middle Ages have led to the designation of the fourth to sixth centuries as the "Migration Period" (or Volkerwanderungszeit). This term, however, masks two important points. First, while the collapse of the Western Roman Empire did serve as a major catalyst to migration all along the former limes, migrations of Germanic peoples from the Baltic regions had in fact been .taking place on a large scale since before the birth of Christ and continued long after the sixth century (e.g., the Scandinavian expansion of the ninth and tenth centuries). Secondly, the Migration Period involved more than just a post-collapse 'gold rush' into former regions of the Roman Empire. Archaeology and the writings of contemporary observers suggest that different types of migration were occurring, ranging from mobile war bands and relatively small-scale dislocations to escape flooding along the North Sea coast, to planned migrations involving hundreds and thousands of people, such as those recorded by Caesar. Early Medieval writers displayed an overt interest in these migrations and the identification of what Bede called gentes, 'peoples' who are defined in these sources on the basis of a common language, culture and, above all, ancestry. Their biographers (e.g., Gregory of Tours in his History of the Franks, or Bede in his History of the English Church and People) chose convenient ethnic labels to help explain the origins of these various peoples. To trace these migrations today, however, on the basis of language or material culture, or to identify biological populations named by ancient authors in a period when people changed language and ethnic allegiances within their lifetime, 1s a task of immense and absorbing complexity. In the Roman period, the principal migrations were both early and military and connected to the establishment of the empire, which in tum led to relative stability and "Pax Romana" ove:: large 6

Migration and invasion models and social power

The upshot of this birds'-eye view over the historic past is that factors of scale and logistics are critical to a proper perception of how prehistoric and early historic migrations may have taken place. One of the crucial determinants of the form of migrations and invasions in the historic period is the concentration of military and political (viz. state) power in the hands of a dominant elite. Mann ( 1986) has theorized on logistical grounds that most states have an inner core of territory under direct military control and an outer core integrated by trade and ritual more than military means. In pre-state groups, the area under military or defensive control is of necessity much more restricted, with a correspondingly higher proportion of the region linked through trade and exchange. This leads to a consideration of the size and strength of social networks in which a particular dominant elite participates at a particular time. The question of the existence of pre-16th century world systems is important here. Recent claims that structural interdependence was fostered between Iron Age and Bronze Age cores and often far-flung peripheries (Champion I 990; Rowlands et al. 1987; Sherratt 1993) may be criticized for lack of evidence for economic interdependence but it is incontrovertible that long-distance 'prestige goods' links were maintained over wide areas in Eurasia (Frankenstein and Rowlands 1978; Taylor 1992). On these grounds, the wider the social networks of any particular social group, the more probable long-distance migrations or invasions would be, given the information gap otherwise to be overcome. By the same token, it has been argued that the larger the exchange network of a particular elite, the greater the social differentiation possible for the key players in that network (Gledhill and Rowlands 1982). A similar logistical

argument can be made for invasions in the Early Medieval period (for a case study of the early Croatians and the role of invasions in state formation, see Evans 1990).

migrations to suggest not only the complexity of the processes at work, but also the notion that some of these processes will be more amenable than others for use as archaeological analogies. Anthony develops three themes in his paper migrations as social processes rather than the results of purely demographic changes; migrations as rule-bound, with the implications of the appearance of strong patterning in the archaeological record; and the relationships between migrations and linguistic change, paying special attention to the evolution of the IndoEuropean language family.

The human past has included a huge variety of social networks, ranging from simple, acephalous foraging groups through multi-power-actor civilizations to territorial empires. In his analysis of social power from earliest times to AD 1760, Mann ( 1986) identifies a comparable range of logistical capabilities amongst such groups. It may be hypothesized that the level of logistical control defining social networks should correlate closely with the probable range and form of patterns of migration and invasions. Armed with such logistical principles and aware of the crucial significance of size and scale in questions of social interaction, we should become more proficient at characterizing past processes of migrations and invasions. Summary of papers In this volume, we do not tackle specific "Great Debates" concerning the major advances in world prehistory and the role of migrations and invasions in these problems. Rather, we investigate the twin themes of the reasons for the popularity or otherwise of migration models and the reasons why such models can provide good explanations for cultural change. The papers focussing on the historiographical analysis come before those concentrating on questions of archaeological and linguistic explanation. In the first essay, John Chapman looks at the history of European migrants, especially refugees, over the last 200 years and identifies trends in the scale of refugee movements. He then attempts to document a link between such trends and the consciousness of archaeological theory-builders in creating explanations, with or without migration models. In what is perhaps the central paper of the collection, David Anthony defines migrations as a multiple and complex social process which can no longer be ignored by archaeological theorists. Anthony makes use of Tilly's (1978) typology of 7

David Anthony's paper leads in two main directions - towards the archaeological evidence and towards historical linguistics. In one of the papers presented at TAG 93 but not published here, Paul Mellars discussed the methodological issues underlying the archaeological criteria necessary to the identification of migrations in the Palaeolithic (see Mellars 1992). In his case study of the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe between 40,000 and 30,000 BC, Mellars claims that the range of technological and cultural innovations characterising the "Upper Palaeolithic Revolution", datable to the Near East c. 50,000 40,000 BC, gave strong adaptive advantages to anatomically modern human groups in this region in equipping them to deal with new cooler European environments and compete successfully with coeval Neanderthal groups. Mellars identifies four criteria in support of a migration from the Near East into Europe: (1) the uniformity of the new (Aurignacian) lithic technology in the Near East and across the whole of Europe; (2) the difficulties of diagnosing unambivalent local prototypes for this technology; (3) the trend in radiocarbon dates towards later dating for progressively western sites, from Bulgaria to Spain; and (4) the development of distinctively Upper Palaeolithic cultural and symbolic innovations such as complex bone, antler and ivory artifacts, personal ornaments, long-distance exchange networks and naturalistic art and geometric decoration. This case study is a good example of the sensitive use of what is often throught by specialists of later periods to be relatively intractable material in the testing of a migrationist hypothesis in the Palaeolithic period.

By contrast, Helena Hamerow' s contribution focusses on the archaeology of the proto-historic Early Medieval period and contributes a detailed study of the archaeological data used to evaluate both local and Continental components in early Anglo-Saxon England. This case study examines data from burial ritual, domestic architecture and, briefly, land use. Hamerow's two paradigms - the migrationist and the indigenist - could equally well contribute to a re-assessment of any feudal state migration model - itself a clear indication of the wide-ranging significance of the theoretical and methodological issues being debated here. She argues that in order to identify the dual processes of Germanic migration and indigenous continuity in Britain, direct comparisons must be drawn between Continental and 'Anglo-Saxon' settlements and cemeteries.

References Cited Abadan-Unat, Nermin. 1985. Identity cns1s of Turkish immigrants: first and second generation. Pp. 2-22. In Basgoz, I. and Furniss, N. (eds). Turkish workers in Europe: an interdisciplinary study. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Adams, William, van Gerven, D. and Levy, R. 1978. The retreat from migrationism. Annual Review of Anthropology 7: 483 532. Anthony, David W. 1990. Migration in archaeology: the baby and the bathwater. American Anthropologist 92/4: 895 - 414. Binford, Lewis R. 1968. Archaeological perspectives. Pp. 5 - 32. In Binford, Sally R. and Binford, Lewis R. (eds). New perspectives in archaeology. Chicago: Aldine. 1972. An archaeological perspective. London: Academic Press. _______ . 1982. Meaning, inference and the material record. Pp. 160 - 163. In Renfrew, Colin and Shennan, Stephen (eds). Ranking, resources and exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bintliff, John. 1991. Post-modernism, rhetoric and scholasticism at TAG: the current state of British archaeological theory. Antiquity 65/247: 274 - 279. Bradley, Richard. 1984. The social foundations of prehistoric Britain. London: Longman. Castles, Stephen and Miller, Mark J. 1993. The age of migration. International population movements in the modern world. London: Macmillan. Champion, Timothy C. (ed). 1989. Centre and periphery: comparative studies in archaeology. London: Unwin Hyman Chapman, John and Dolukhanov, Pavel M. 1992. The baby and the bathwater: pulling the plug on migrations. American Anthropologist 94/1: 190 - 194.

In the following essay, Sally Crawford does precisely this, reassessing some commonly proposed hypotheses regarding the nature, scale and composition of the Anglo-Saxon migrations by means of an explicit comparison of burial ritual and intra-site patterning in Continental and English cemeteries. The final paper by James and Lesley Milroy takes the other direction suggested by Anthony in its consideration of linguistic evidence. The Milroys use sociolinguistic theory and case studies to document language change as a social process, in parallel to Anthony's contention that migrations are a social process. The Milroys' principal theoretical tool is network analysis in its sociolinguistic form and the case studies concern their own fieldwork in Ireland and their models for language change in local communities. Their main finding identifies the most likely context of language change as being in networks of weak social ties, a context frequently arising out of migrations linked to abrupt language change. In summary, the effects of migrations as social process on language change are discussed.

1993. Cultural transformations and interactions in Eastern Europe: theory and terminology. Pp. 1 - 36. In Chapman, John and Dolukhanov, Pavel M. (eds). Cultural 8

transformations and interactions in Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Avebury. Childe, Vere Gordon. 1942. What happened in history. Hannondsworth: Penguin. _________ . 1947. Archaeology as a social science. University of London Institute of Archaeology, Third Annual Report: 49-60. Clarke, David L. 1968. Analytical archaeology. 1st. edition. London: Methuen. Cook, Sherburne. 1974. Economic anthropology: problems in theory, method and analysis. Pp. 795 - 860. In Honigmann, J. (ed). Handbook of social and cultural anthropology. Chicago: Aldine. Dalton, George. 1969. Theoretical issues in economic anthropology. Current Anthropology l 0/1: 63 - 102. De Vries, Jan. 1984. European urbanization, 1500 - 1800. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Evans, Huw M. A. 1989. The early Medieval archaeology of Croatia AD 600 - 900. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. Frankenstein, Susan and Rowlands, Michael J. 1978. The internal structure and regional context of early iron age society in southwestern Germany. Bulletin of the University of London Institute of Archaeology 15: 73 - 112. Gledhill, John and Rowlands, Michael. 1982. Materialism and socio-economic process in multi-linear evolution. Pp. 144 - 149. In Renfrew, Colin and Shennan, Stephen (eds). Ranking, resources and exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habermas, Jurgen. 1972. Knowledge and human interests. London: Heinemann. 1987. The philosophical discourse of modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Hodder, Ian. 1991. The domestication of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell. Mann, Michael. 1986. The sources of social power. Volume 1. A history of power from the beginnings to A.D. 1760. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mellars, Paul. 1992. Archaeology and the population-dispersal hypothesis of modern human origins in Europe. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 9

London B 337: 225 - 234. Moch, Leslie Page. 1992. Moving Europeans. Migration in Western Europe since 1650. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nandris, John. 1972. Relations between the Mesolithic, the First Temperate Neolithic and the Bandkeramik: the nature of the problem. Alba Regia VI: 61 - 70. Renfrew, Colin. 1972. The emergence of civilisation: the Cyclades and the Aegean in the 3rd millennium B.C. London: Methuen. 1973. Before civilisation. London: Jonathan Cape. Rowlands, Michael. 1994. Childe and the archaeology of freedom. Pp. 35 - 54. In Harris, David R. (ed). The archaeology of V. Gordon Childe. London: UCL Press. Rowlands, Michael, Larsen, Mogens and Kristiansen, Kristian (eds). 1987. Centre and periphery in the ancient world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scarre, Chris and Healy, Frances (eds). 1993. Trade and exchange in prehistoric Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Sherratt, Andrew. 1993. "Who are you calling peripheral?" Dependence and independence in European prehistory. Pp. 245 - 255. In Scarre, Chris and Healy, Frances (eds). 1993. Trade and exchange in prehistoric Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Taylor, Timothy. 1992. The Gundestrup cauldron. Scientific American 266/3: 66 - 71. Tilly, Charles. 1978. Migration in modem European history. Pp. 48 - 74. In McNeill, William and Adams, Ruth (eds) Human migration: patterns and policies. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Watson, Patty Jo, LeBlanc, Steven and Redman, Charles A. 1971. Explanation in archaeology: an explicitly scientific approach. New York: Columbia University Press. Zvelebil, Marek. 1993. Hunters or farmers? The Neolithic and Bronze Age societies of North-East Europe. Pp. 146 - 162. In Chapman, John and Dolukhanov, Pavel M. (eds). Cultural tramformations and

interactions in Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Avebury.

THE IMPACT OF MODERN INVASIONS AND MIGRATIONS ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

JOHN CHAPMAN Introduction

Our writing of the past is the product of many forces - academic and non-academic, intellectual and emotional, social and personal. These influences combine in ways often unsuspected to produce a new account of past times, one which not only attempts to make sense of the evidence which has survived but which attempts to make sense of the author's individual perceptions of her/his world and worldview. R. G. Collingwood observed that every archaeological problem 'ultimately arises out of "real" life' (Collingwood 1939:114). An important part of the de-centering processes of the 20th century has been the chief insight of critical biography - namely that "authors" are no more autonomous in their cultural work than is the language in which they write. It is no longer absurd to suggest that each book, each article, has its own biography, reflecting and transforming the individual circumstances of its author as well as the academic impulses of the time. Abrupt changes in the field of interest of an author can also be related to shifts of fortune or the time that it takes for individuals to come to terms with their own experiences before they can be penned.

If the complexities of individuals' biographies seem daunting for archaeologists, how much more so would it appear for the history of archaeological thought, with its myriad criss-crossing of individual streams interacting, bifurcating and joining each other to form the main currents of thought. Yet the scale of the investigation has often enabled historians of archaeological thought to focus on the general pattern to the nearexclusion of the subjective and inter-subjective factors which create a succession of Zeitgeisten, each in turn partly determined by its past trajectory. While accounts of the political context of the formation of New Archaeology and postprocessual archaeology are conceivable, the linkages between the social and political

proclivities of Lewis Binford, Paul Martin, Michael Schiffer or Charles Redman and their archaeological writings have rarely been made explicit. Given the potential for litigation arising out of such writings, it may be concluded that a safer path is the attempt at critical biographies of famous deceased colleagues. The most obvious example is V. Gordon Childe, the recent anniversary of whose birth spawned at least three international conferences and (so far) two publications (Harris 1994; Irving et al. 1995; Lech, in press). But the life and times of few other archaeologists have been compared so closely with their oeuvre. In the latest edition of The Pastmasters, Chippindale misses a clear opportunity to set the self-portraits of eleven archaeologists in the context of criticial biography (Daniel & Chippindale 1989) the autobiographical raw material is at hand. In this essay, I am concerned with the intersection of the subjective, the inter-subjective and the objective insofar as it relates to the use and misuse of invasions and migrations to constitute explanatory models in 20th century prehistory. The limits of space and personal knowledge do not permit more than a sketch of some possible linkages between the general patterns and the individual biographies within the context of Europe1• The route that I have chosen explores the characterization of two patterns of explanation in which invasions and migrations form a constant and an interrupted leitmotif, a divergence which I attempt to relate to the histories of migrations and invasions in the homelands of the relevant archaeologists. It should be made clear at the outset that I shall not argue that the 20th century pattern of migrations and invasions is a determining factor, in a strong or a weak sense of the term, in the development of archaeological theory. There are, of course, many 1While

this paper is largely concerned with European perspectives, there is much informative literature which deals with the interaction of archaeological, ethno-historical, linguistic and, most recently, biological data in other parts of the world (see Brown & Brown 1992; Cavalli-Sforza 1991; Kirch & Ellison 1994; Nichols 1992; Renfrew 1994; Rouse 1986; Ruhlen 199 I; Spriggs 1993; and the Special Section in Antiquity 1992 (66):710-783, "Uttermost ends ofthe earth".)

11

factors which influence theory building. But I wish to draw attention to the fact that migrations and invasions are one of the most deeply felt experiences that a human being can encounter. I consider it highly probable that an experience as significant as an invasion or a migration will influence the personal writings of a prehistorian not, perhaps, in the overt way that the experience of Auschwitz influenced the writings of Bruno Bettelheim or Primo Levi, but as an undercurrent with which the author needs to come to terms in her/his writing. It is also true that the effects of invasions and migrations on other humans can have a strong impact on a writer, especially if she/he is personally connected to the lands where such events take place. It is the purpose of this essay to assess the impact of these personal experiences on the writings of prehistorians in the 20th century.

Patterns of explanation The core of archaeological explanations for cultural change and social evolution for the century from 1860 to 1960 was diffusion rather than differentiation. In Europe, the writings of early scholars such as Ferguson and Thomsen stressed the notion of mobility between regions as the main force for cultural change and the same can be said of Joseph Henry in the New World. This theory was reinforced by the introduction by Montelian typology of better chronological control through the formation of horizons of similar material culture (Montelius 1903) and the better spatial definition of groups with similar material culture introduced by Kossinnian spatial formalisation (Kossinna 1911). However, alternative views were promulgated by scholars such as Reinach and Bastian, who maintained a strongly evolutionist position while resisting most forms of diffusionism, and Myres and Arthur Evans, who stressed the active aspect of the local assimilation of diffused traits. Nonetheless, moderate diffusionism remained the main pr 1nciple of explanation into the early twentieth century. It was the merit of Childe not only to paint the Montelian - Kossinnian picture on the broadest scale in the first edition of The Dawn of European Civilisation (Childe 1925) but also to refute

convincingly the hyper-diffusionist tendencies of Elliott-Smith and the later racist tendencies of Kossinna. The main alternative to a diffusionbased culture-history, with its emphasis on the prehistory of specific peoples and their movements, was functionalism. This movement took two forms - the ecological approach of Steward, White and Caldwell in North America, Grahame Clark in Britain and van Giffen in Holland, and the economic prehistory of Childe and Clark in Britain. However, until the revival of evolutionary theory in the late 1950s, the culturehistory paradigm, with invasions and migrations at the core of its diffusionist explanations, remained central to post-war mainstream archaeology. At that time, a major bifurcation occurred in the theory and practice of archaeology. During the 1960s, the origins of the processual archaeological paradigm can be traced to a series of Anglo-American innovations collectively known as the "New Archaeology" (Caldwell 1959). An important part of the New Archaeology was an attempt at scientific rigour, which included a stronger commitment to explicit explanation of culture change. New archaeologists criticized all traditional forms of explanation on the basis of their implicit and weak theoretical bases. Two of the forms of explanation to be most strongly attacked were invasions and migrations. An increasing reliance on factors of internal social differentiation, population growth or environmental change rather than cultural diffusion as explanation led to the downplaying of migrations and invasions in processual archaeology for a period of almost 20 years. It is ironic that, coeval with the demotion of migrations and invasions, population increase was promoted to the status of "prime mover" in archaeological explanation - clearly, the demographic factor could not easily be ignored ! The picture in Europe is complex. In much of Central Europe, processual archaeology made little headway indeed and the traditional forms of explanation continued to dominate archaeology over the next two decades. However, the experience of Scandinavian and Dutch colleagues is at variance with this pattern, with processual trends being more strongly developed in Denmark 12

and Norway than in Holland and Sweden. In a series of important essays, Hodder and his coauthors provide a general account of theoretical archaeology in many countries of Europe over the last 30 years (Hodder 1991). Although few of the contributors mention migrations and invasions explicitly, the dominant paradigm in many countries from the 1960s to the 1980s continued to have these models at its core. Several factors have been held to account for the New Archaeological "Retreat from Migrationism": (1) the decline of colonialism since World War 2 and the retreat of westerners from large parts of the globe (Clark 1966; Adams et al. 1978; Rouse 1986; Kristiansen 1989). (2) the British tendency to insularity, reinforced by the development of the Welfare State (Kristiansen 1989) (3) the ambiguous results provided by migrationist hypotheses and the alternative explanations concurrently developed (Rouse 1986; Renfrew 1987) (4) the influence of the temperaments of individual archaeologists, leading to a built-in system of probabilities for the acceptance of one form of explanation over another (Adams et al. 1978). While each of these factors has its own significance, each has its problems, too. The decline in colonialism affected Britian, France, Germany and Portugal equally but there is little evidence for the decline in migrationist or invasionist explanations in either Germany, France or Portugal in these decades. Nonetheless, Grahame Clark's (1966) point that migrations are a version of ourselves, as imperial citizens of the world, is a necessary but insufficient condition of the explanation of changing models. The immobilism of the post-war Welfare state and the insularity of the British is contrasted by Kristiansen (1989) to pre-War invasionist and migrationist models covering large-scale spatial processes. While the first factor is too specific to

be useful, the second is a "national psychological" trait which is, by contrast, too general. The factor of the inadequacy of invasions and migrations as diffusionist models must certainly be taken into account. Renfrew (1987) has correctly observed that what was rejected in the "Retreat from Migrationism" was the evidence for migrations, not migrations per se. But there was no a priori reason why migrations and invasions could not be studied as processes then, as they indeed were in the late 1980s and 1990s (Renfrew 1987; Rouse 1986; see above, Introduction, this volume). Adams' insight that the temperament (but interestingly not the experiences) of individual archaeologists could have formed the basis of a critical appreciation of the contributions of important authors but this notion remained undeveloped. The "Retreat from Migrationism" lasted from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, at which point new approaches to migrations and invasions were developed using complementary evidence from linguistics and history (especially Rouse 1986; Renfrew 1987). In much of Europe, a continuing reliance on migrations and invasions as explanatory models can be noted. Thus, the recent tendency for the revival of migrations and invasions has produced a convergence with the more traditional of our continental colleagues (Figure 1). A careful examination of the factors held responsible for the retreat from migrationism leads me to conclude that they are all either partial or partially flawed. It will be useful at this juncture to broaden the debate to include a specific aspect of modern social and political life. The additional factor which I wish to discuss here is the impact of the history of migrations and invasions on the conceptual changes in theoretical archaeology. It is at the level first of the relations between structural conditions in social and political change and the individual experiences of different authors in various countries and divergent academic traditions that I wish to pursue this question.

13

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Refugees, invaders and migrants in recent history

The issue which I wish to explore is the linkage between the position of prehistorians in those areas of Europe where the retreat from migrationism was never made and the impacts of invasions and migrations in those countries, compared with the history of refugees, invaders and migrants in parts of Europe and North America where the retreat from migrationism was a crucial factor in archaeological theory-building from the 1960s to the 1980s. To what extent can major changes in theoretical perspectives can be related to the experiences of nations and individuals beset by population migrations, wars and their aftermath? A helpful analytical tool used much in critical biography and also in time-space geography (Carlstein 1982; Carlstein et al. l 978) is the notion of the generational experience. The basic idea is that those people who were born in the same decade and go through similar cultural and social experiences will share more than just a superficial similarity of attitudes and beliefs but rather a range of significant reactions, perhaps even worldviews. Intermediate between the concerns of the individual and the broader social network, the generational experience is a useful mid-scale unit of analysis, which could be used in a survey of the impact of migrations and invasions on clusters of authors. The story of the refugees of the world presents itself as a long account of more or less continuous

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upheaval. Distinct from the other principal category of migrants - labour migrants - and, equally, mobile communities such as Romanys or Vlachs, refugees may be defined as "people who, dispersed by persecution or man-made catastrophes like war or civil strife, have sought sanctuary and protection m another country"(Marrus 1985:11-12). The collection of accurate statistics on the number of refugees at any one time in any continent is fraught with complexity, both of definition and of time-scale. What can be stated unequivocally is that, whereas Europe was a net exporter of migrants, both labour migrants and refugees, to the rest of the world from AD 1500 to AD 1900, the pattern for the 20th century has changed abruptly as Europe has beome a net importer of migrants (Fig. 2). To the contrary, America has remained a net importer of labour migrants throughout the last three centuries, who have created an attachment to what has been termed the M-factor (M for Mobility) in its development - the notion that "I move, therefore I am alive" (Scott 1968:7). As will become rapidly apparent, mobility in Europe has overtones far more fraught than in the American experience. As Marrus (1985:4) comments, Europe was once the continent of most of the world's homeless; now that unfortunate role has been transferred to Asia and Africa. A summary model for the development of refugee crises is the historical model developed by Zolberg (1983). In this model, Zolberg defines the phases of nation-state formation as critical periods in 14

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European history. These periods are described as "crises of integration", in which large numbers of ethnically-defined refugees move into their "own" nation-state or move out towards or into another territory (Zolberg 1983). These human convulsions are seen as the result of the mobilization of new states to achieve the goals of state-makers independence, national cohesion and the absorption of coveted territory. Three main crises of integration can be defined for Europe in the 20th century: 1914 - 1920; 1939- 1950, and 1989 1991 (Fig.3). Countries

In the Second World War, Zolberg's second phase, the estimated number of refugees rose to 30 million (Kulischer 1948), a surprisingly large number of whom - perhaps 11 million - had been repatriated by 1945 (Marrus 1985). Nonetheless, major refugee problems continued well into the 1950s in continental Europe, with some 12 million ethnic Germans forcibly transferred between 1945 and 1950 and over a million refugees still homeless in 1951. The pattern of Second World War refugees overlapped with those refugees who

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Before a discussion of the logical links between the three crises of integration and the changing patterns of archaeological explanation, I shall define more closely their chronology and individual character. Lord Curzon's characterization of Balkan demography and migration in the forty years from the 1880s to the 1920s as "the unmixing of peoples" has lessons for much of Europe at the time of Zolberg's first phase. The politics of the First World War imposed nation states on the whole of Europe, such that, according to Schechtman (1946), while 60 million people were living under alien governments before the War, only 25 million lived thus after the Peace Settlements. An estimated 20 million refugees in the First World War form part of the former total, any of whom were still homeless in Europe until the late 1920s 2 . 2The cessation of the emigration of Europeans to North America at the outbreak of the First World War was a major

1940

moved to Europe as a result of the de-colonisation process, which itself started in the late 1940s. Marrus (1985) estimates that 10 million post- or de-colonial refugees moved into Europe since the 1950s. The decline of colonialism and the the retreat by westerners from many former colonies led to two demographic processes - the increased US presence in many parts of the world and the increase in migrants and refugees from former colonies and new states in the West. As King has concluded, the whole of Europe's economic and social geography has been transformed by international migration which increased in the 1950s, peaked in the 1960s and faded away in the early 1970s (King 1993:22). factor influencing the start of the "Great Migration" of African-Americans from the South to the North (Harrison 1991). While in no way comparable to European mass migrations pace Zolberg (1983), the internal migration of some five million blacks between 1915 and I 960 helped to generate social change in both North and South (Cohen I 991 ).

16

The oil price rises of the early 1970s brought to an end one era of mass migrations as the global recession of 1974 took its toll on employment possibilities (King 1993:22). King points out that, under post-Fordist forms of the organisation of production, mass migration is as outmoded as mass production, mass consumption, mass culture and mass society (King 1993:14). In Europe, the rise of refugee movements in the late 1980s, Zolberg's third phase, was in strong contrast to the frequency of small-scale, internal labour migrations typical of the 1970s and early 1980s. But figures quoted by Salt and Ford ( 1993) suggest that the total per annum migration flows into the EC were steadily increasing through the 1980s, reaching over half a million per annum by the mid1980s. Even if the numbers of refugees in these totals was small, Black has argued that the political significance of refugees in the European Community in the early 1980s far outweighed the actual numbers (e.g., fewer than 3% in Britain: Black 1993:8 and Table 1.2); in this context, it should not be forgotten that, in the period 1983 1990, over 80% of all applications for asylum in Western Europe were rejected (Fielding 1993). The impact of mass media coverage of potential refugee movement has had much to do with the notion that asylum seekers are perceived as a threat to civilised nations, so that a commentator such as Widgren (1990) warns that uncontrolled mass migation would threaten social cohesion, international solidarity and peace. Let us now tum to an exploration of the impact of these three crises of integration upon the development of explanations of culture change by archaeologists in Europe and North America. The cumulative impact of invasions and migrations on the people of continental Europe was that the experiences of three successive generations, starting from those born in the 1880s and 1890s through to those born in the 1940s, included a strong component of mobility and dislocation in their worldviews, a component which was reinforced with each successive generation. Neither could the generation of the post-war "baby boom" escape from such experiences, either direct or indirect, since refugee movements were still an important aspect of everyday life in the 1950s and the extent of assimilation of refugees into local

communities was naturally part of this impact.

It is maintained that the generational experiences of those born in North America or Britain in the same sixty-year period would have been rather different from those who had suffered the personal and social indignity of the invasion of their home and country by foreign troops. The social controls of the invaders over the personal expression, movement and actions of the invaded, not to mention the violence to, and the violation of, many civilians and service personnel, constitute strong components of any future worldview. It is hard to believe that this could not affect the personal writings of archaeological authors. What I am proposing is that one of the many factors in the demand for a retreat from migrationism in the 1960s was the shared generational experience of those archaeologists who had not lived through the mass movement of peoples during and after two world wars. And, conversely, one of the many factors which made the retreat from migrationism far less significant in continental Europe was the cumulative generational experience of prehistorians who had lived through one or both world wars or been born in the post-war "baby boom". At this juncture, the status of this claim should be simply stated. It must be stressed that this claim does not represent a deterministic attempt to uncover a socio-political "prime mover", since there is more variation within the biographies of prehistorians within any single country as well as between those in different countries than could possibly be accounted for by any single-factor explanation. As David Clarke observed, archaeology can be conceived as an adaptive system "related internally to its changing content and externally to the spirit of the times" (Clarke 1979:85). I merely emphasize that invasions and migrations were and continue to be an important factor in that spirit. After all, Bascom ( 1993) has estimated that, in 1993, the worldwide total of displaced citizens reached a horrifying 19 to 22 million people. If this intersubjective factor in a cumulative mass

of personal biographies is to considered as a serious factor, much neglected hitherto, the prediction could be made that the re-emergence of 17

migrationisms and invasions should be linked to new and differing patterns in the impact of refugee movements in the 1980s and 1990s. I now tum to the pattern of refugee movement in the last 20 years. It could be argued that general patterns of refugee movements in the 1980s had an impact on the community of archaeologists in Britain, Scandinavia and America despite their overall scale and because of media attention. The major shift in the late 1980s was clearly the fall of the Berlin Wall and the large-scale labour and refugee migrations from Eastern to Western Europe (Kemper 1993). Although this dramatic shift in migration patterns postdates the re-emergence of migrationist writings in the late 1980s, the buildup of pressures which led to the movements of 1989, combined with the greatly magnified media attention on refugees in that decade, were major forces relating to the emergence of a political consciousness of the new tides of refugees and that this arguably influenced the authors of new migrationist / invasionist accounts in the late 1980s. There can be little doubt that the impact of the new migrations will have strong effects on future worldviews. Knabe (1992) predicts that Germany alone will have absorbed an extra 2 million refugees in the last decade of this century. On this basis, the prediction is that neomigrationist and neo-invasionist explanatory models will continue to attract more attention in the 1990s than in the late 1980s. Conclusions

At the end of his masterpiece, Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said has noted that it is one of the unhappiest characteristics of the 20th century to have produced more refugees, migrants, displaced persons and exiles than ever before in history (Said 1993:402). Displacement, alienation and internal and external migrations have grown into the pysche of modem humans, as much through the imperialist images which are still so dominant in Western cultures as through the European experience per se. Yet the message of those deep-rooted experiences has rarely been disentangled in a history of archaeological thought that privileges the objective and past traditions of

thinking over the subjective and inter-subjective. This article has demonstrated a clear pattern of dominance of migrationist / invasionist models within successive archaeological paradigms, both traditional and processual, and a partial return to these theoretical standpoints, if in a more sophisticated manner. It would be inappropriate to attempt positivistic proof of a statistically significant correlation between the history of 20th century migrations and invasions and changing trends in archaeologial thought. Nonetheless, there are several generations of archaeologists living in Europe whose life experiences bore the often devastating effects of invasions and migrations in two World Wars and their aftermaths. It is hard to resist the notion that these personal experiences did have an effect on the models of explanation which they proposed. It is not a coincidence, I believe, that the "Retreat from Migrationism" arose precisely in countries not invaded in either world war - in Britain, America and parts of Scandinavia. However, the return to migrationist explanations in the late 1980s may less convincingly be related to the upsurge of refugees in that decade and the media attention to the numbers of refugees trying to enter "Fortress Europe".

In conclusion, it appears that the first two of Zolberg's crisis periods were coeval with the main period of invasionism / migrationism m archaeological writing, yet the third period postdated the return to migrationism heralded in the late 1980s. There cannot be said to be a simple and straightforward correlation between the two trends. To this extent, the hypothesis investigated here is partially disconfirmed. Far from arguing for a reductionist, deterministic role for the history of invasions in the 20th century on modes of archaeological thinking, I suggest in this paper that the personal impact of migrations and invasions on archaeologists has been a factor much underestimated in past "explanations" of the changing modes of archaeological explanation. I should like to suggest that there is a yet largely untapped reservoir of information and insight about the writing of archaeological texts relating to the subjective experiences of scholars and that, in 18

future, we should gain much from attempting to relate the subjective, the inter-subjective and the objective factors impinging upon changing modes of archaeological theory and practice. Aclrnowledgements

I was challenged to write this chapter as a result of a question that arose in relation to the Bosnian war: namely "Is it possible for a Bosnian archaeologist to write the same kind of archaeology as s/he had written before the war?" I pay tribute to all the Bosnian archaeologists who have endured so much and are now rebuilding the Zemaljski Muzej in Sarajevo and other damaged cultural monuments in that city and throughout Bosnia. References cited

Adams, W. Y., Van Gerven, D.P. and Levy, R.S. 1978. The retreat from migrationism. Annual Review of Anthropology 7:483-532. Bascom, Jonathan. 1993. 'Internal refugees': the case of the displaced in Khartoum. Pp. 3346. In Black, Richard and Robinson, Vaughan. (eds). Geography and refugees. Patterns and processes of change. Black, Richard. 1993. Geography and refugees: current issues. Pp. 3-13. In Black, Richard and Robinson, Vaughan (eds). Geography and refugees. Patterns and processes of change. London: Bellhaven Press. Brown, Terry A. and Brown, Keri A. 1992. Ancient DNA and the archaeologist. Antiquity 66: 10-23. Caldwell, Joseph R. 1959. The new American archaeology. Science 129: 303-307. Carlstein, Tommy. 1982. Time resources, society and ecology. London: Allen & Unwin. Carlstein, Tommy, Parkes, David and Thrift, Nigel. (eds). 1978. Human activity and time geography. London: Edward Arnold. Cavalli-Sforza, Luca L. 1991. Genes, people and languages. Scientific American 26515: 7278. Childe, Vere Gordon. 1925. The dawn of European civilisation. London: Kegan Paul. · . 1951. Social evolution. ---------

London: Watts. Clark, J. Grahame D. 1966. The invasion hypothesis in British archaeology. Antiquity 40: 172-189. Clarke, David L. 1979. Analytical archaeologist. London: Academic Press. Cohen, William. 1991. The Great Migration as a lever for social change. Pp. 72-82. In Harrison, Alferdteen (ed). Black exodus. The Great Migration from the American South. Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press. Collingwood, R.G. 1939. An autobiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daniel, Glyn and Chippindale, Christopher (eds). 1989. The pastmasters. London: Thames and Hudson. Fielding, Anthony. I 993. Migrants, institutions and politics: the evolution of European migration policies. Pp. 40-62. In King, Russell. (ed). Mass migration in Europe. The legacy and the future. London. Harris, David R. (ed). 1994. The archaeology of V Gordon Childe. London: UCL Press. Harrison, Alferdteen. (ed). 1994. Black exodus. The Great Migration from the American South. Jackson, Miss: University of Mississippi Press. Hodder, Ian. (ed). 1991. Archaeological theory in Europe. The last 3 decades. London: Routledge. Irving, T., Melleuish, G. and Gathercole, Peter (eds). 1995. Childe and Australia: archaeology, politics and ideas. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Kemper, Franz-Josef. 1993. New trends in mass migration in Germany. Pp. 257-274. In King, Russell. (ed). Mass migration in Europe. The legacy and the future. London: Bellhaven Press. King, Russell. (ed). 1993. Mass migration in Europe. The legacy and the future. London: Bellhaven Press. Kirch, Patrick V. and Ellison, S. f 994. Palaeoenvironmental evidence for the human colonisation of remote Oceanic islands. Antiquity 68: 310-321. Knabe, B. 1992. Hypothesen zu kunftigen Wanderungsstromen zwischen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland und 19

osteuropaischen Landern (1991 bis 2000). Osteuropaische Faktoren des zu erwartenden Wanderungsverhaltnes. Jnformationen zur Raumentwicklung 11-12. Kossinna, Gustav. 1911. Die Herkunft der Germanen. Leipzig: Kabitzsch. Kristiansen, Kristian. 1989. Prehistoric migrations - the case of the Single Grave and Corded Ware cultures. Journal of Danish Archaeology 8: 211-225. Kulischer, Eugene M. 1948. Europe on the move: war and population changes, 1917-47. New York. Lech, Jacek (ed). in press. V Gordon Childe and the archaeology of the twentieth century. Warszawa: Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology PAN. Marrus, Michael R. 1985. The unwanted. European refugees in the twentieth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montelius, Oscar. 1903. Die typologische Methode: die alteren Kulturperioden im Orient und in Europa. Stockholm: Selbstverlag. Nichols, J. 1992. Linguistic diversity in time and space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Renfrew, Colin. 1987. Archaeology and language. The puzzle of Inda-European origins. London: Jonathan Cape. Renfrew, Colin. 1992. Archaeology, genetics and linguistic diversity. Man N.S. 27: 445-478. Renfrew, Colin. 1994. World linguistic diversity. Scientific American 27011: 104-110. Rouse, Irving. 1986. Migrations in prehistory: inferring population movement from cultural remains. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ruhlen, M. 1991. A guide to the world's languages. Volume I: Classification, with a postscript. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Salt, John & Ford, Reuben. 1993. Skilled international migration in Europe? The shape of things to come. Pp. 293-309. In King, Russell (ed). Mass migration in Europe. The legacy and the future. London: Bellhaven Press.

Schechtman, Joseph B. 1946. European population transfers, 1939-1945. New York. Scott, Franklin D. 1968. World migration in modern times. Englewodd Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall. Special Section: Uttermost ends of the Earth. Antiquity 66: 710-783. Spriggs, Matthew et al. (eds.) 1993. A community of culture: the people and prehistory of the Pacific. Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Australian National University. Occasional Papers in Prehistory 21. Widgren, J. 1990. International migration and regional stability. International Affairs 66/4: 319-332. Zolberg, Aristide R. 1983. Contemporary transnational migrations in historical perspective: patterns and dilemmas. Pp. 1819. In Kritz, Mary M. (ed). US. immigration and refugee policy. Global and domestic issues. Lexington, Kentucky.

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PREHISTORIC MIGRATION AS SOCIAL PROCESS

DAVID ANTHONY Introduction

Migration has been demonized and has mystified Western archaeologists since the rise of the "New Archaeology" in the late l 960's. It has been demonized as a simplistic explanation of culture change that was applied uncritically and inappropriately by a previous generation of scholars to archaeological problems that have subsequently been explained more convincingly in other ways. It has been mystified as a phenomenon that is difficult to detect archaeologically, that occurred sporadically and unpredictably in the past, and that therefore is not amenable to uniformitarian or scientific explanation. For many years, those who incorporated migration into explanations of culture change risked being associated with a form of interpretation that was regarded as normative, simplistic, unsupported by functionalist models of social evolution, and/or impossible to test objectively. Since the late 1980's migration has struggled back into semi-respectability among Western archaeologists. Champion (1990) has observed that processualist and functionalist Western archaeologists never rejected the importance of migrations that could be seen as "regular", and the current revival of interest may have grown out of this refugium within processual archaeology. The seasonal movements of foragers or of pastoralists within a home range, inter-community marriage exchanges, and the annual trading voyages that linked distant partners in the kula ring or the Eurasian caravan trade are examples of movements that have been repeatedly incorporated into functionalist and processualist models. However, until recently the processual dynamics of movement--which sub-groups tended to move, which groups tended to stay, how destinations were chosen, how routes were selected, and the archaeological consequences of all of these constraints on movement--received little attention even in the context of "regular" migrations.

Moreover, it is only recently that migration has again become important in the explanation of discontinuous archaeological culture change, particularly in the study of the spread of material culture complexes across regions. Some examples (not exhaustive) of the recent use of migration in such contexts are: the spread of the Gravettian during the European Upper Paleolithic (Otte and Keeley 1990; Otte 1993; Soffer 1993); the spread of agricultural economies during the initial European Neolithic (Ammerman and CavalliSforza 1984; Renfrew 1987; Sokal 1988; Sokal, Oden, and Wilson 1991; Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994); the movement of migrant workers during the classic Mayan period (Demarest 1988); the emergence of historical tribal groups during the late Mississippian in the American southeast (Hoffman 1994); the movements of late prehistoric communities in the American southwest (Cameron in prep.); and the prehistoric expansions of language families. Some archaeological examinations of migration-linked prehistoric language spreads include studies of the Numic languages in the U.S. (Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982); Austronesian languages in the Pacific (Bellwood 1989; Spriggs 1992; Irwin 1992); and Indo-European languages in Eurasia (Renfrew 1987,1992; Mallory 1989; Anthony 1990, 1991; Sokal, Oden, and Thomson 1992; Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994). The response to this awakening of interest has been mixed. Several writers (Champion 1990; Megaw and Megaw 1992) have noted that the rise and fall of the popularity of migration and diffusion in Western archaeology seems closely linked to the prevailing milieu in politics, national interests, and intellectual trends. Gamble (1993:38) has carried this criticism into the present: "...it is tempting to see the timing of Otte and Keeley's call [for renewed study of Paleolithic migration] as dependent on contemporary concerns in uncertain times--an appeal to the Paleolithic ancestors to show an underlying community of tradition that transcends the old east/west, rich/poor divisions." Such comments seem to reflect a continuing uncertainty about the role of migration studies in archaeology. Similar suspicions about migration are widespread

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among archaeologists despite the fact that demographers, stat1st1c1ans, geographers, and economic historians have studied migration systematically for a century (Ravenstein 1888) and have developed sophisticated models to explain and even predict migration flows. Migration is a well-studied and moderately predictable human behavior. It is regarded quite seriously as an important factor in social and economic change by virtually all social scientists except Western archaeologists. Our recent intellectual isolation in this area should be a source not of satisfaction, but of discomfort. In the following pages, I examine three broad themes in the archaeological study of migration. First, it is not likely that migration can be incorporated successfully into archaeological explanations if it is seen simply as a behavior that occurs in response to locally high population densities. Migration is a social strategy, not an automatic response to crowding. Second, migration behavior tends to be relatively rulegoverned and regular, and it is important that archaeologists know what those rules and regularities are. Third, migration is often discussed by archaeologists in connection with language change. The two need not be related, but in cases where language change is or was associated with migration, it is again vital to understand language change as a social strategy, and not as a mere epiphenomenon of demographic processes (see Milroy and Milroy, this volume). Is migration a density-dependent phenomenon?

Their conviction that migration 1s m essence a density-dependent demographic phenomenon is shared by many archaeologists. While this characterization may be accurate in some cases, it obscures more than it reveals, and it confines human migration to a falsely restricted set of demographic contexts. A truer characterization of migration can perhaps be gained by critically examining density dependence. Density-dependence is, of course, culturally defined and mediated. The population density that can be comfortably supported in any given territory will vary depending on many factors, including basic subsistence strategies (foraging, stockbreeding, farming); technological capacities (irrigation, plowing, cartage, trucking, net-fishing, etc.); resource management practises (manuring, fallowing, herd management, forest firing, etc.); the social organization of labor (communal hunting, child labor practises, large-scale corvee labor, etc.); culturally defined food preferences and choices; culturally defined attitudes toward conflict and cooperation; and culturally defined comfort thresholds for crowding. While 1t 1s in some cases possible to define population pressure in relation to the supply of and demand for a single critical resource (for example, the supply of deer hides for clothing in the prehistoric North American woodlands--see Gramly 1977) this has not been attempted by archaeologists who regard migration as density dependent. Moreover, even if population pressure were better defined it would still be inadequate to explain migration, because many migrations are best explained by factors other than population density.

In 1990, Lindly and Clark published a paper on Paleolithic symbolism and modem human origins. In discussing the Neanderthal/Modem Human transition, they said (Lindly and Clark 1990:252):

The decision to migrate is modeled by most demographers and geographers as the product of an interplay between "push" factors, which are perceived negative conditions in the home region; "...we consider migration to be a densityand "pull" factors, which are perceived positive dependent phenomenon essentially conditions in the destination region; mediated confined to the latest protohistoric and through the availability and cost of transportation historic periods (i.e., those periods when (Lee 1966; Lewis 1982). perceptions of pushes and pulls are in tum partially determined by access to human population densities were locally high in some areas). We simply do not information about potential destinations, so the believe that the physical migration of channeling of the flow of information is another peoples played a significant role in !1.uman important variable that affects the decision to migrate. Some of the most sophisticated macro-evolution ..."

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quantitative migration models are based largely on the analysis of information flows and pull factors (Rogerson 1984). Since the density-dependence view of migration considers only one type of push factor--population pressure--and ignores the effects of pull factors, transportation costs, and information flows entirely, it is apparent that a density-dependence view of migration must fail adequately to account for most migration processes. Push factors and social organization

Population density is not even the most significant push factor, in many cases. In many parts of Africa, social groups of all kinds--kin groups, villages, chiefdoms, and states--show a consistent tendency to fission and throw off migratory offshoots. Kopytoff (1987:18-19) has ascribed this centrifugal tendency to contradictory principles within African social structures that result in younger males being denied the opportunities for prestige and social advancement that are accorded to their older brothers. If a younger brother were ambitious, he often perceived that his best opportunity lay in migration to a new region where he might attract clients and found his own polity. The critical push factor was not population density, but social regulations that favored older brothers over their younger siblings. The Mayanist John Fox (1987,1989) has identified a similar dynamic in Central America. Archaeological and textual evidence, taken together, suggest that elite Mayan groups often expanded through lineage segmentation and the migration of disaffected kin segments to new areas, where they founded new polities. The origin myths for many Mayan royal lineages speak of the lineage founder as a migrant who arrived from a distant country, attracted clients among the local population, and established his own ranked polity. Archaeological evidence at sites such as Copan confirms that the elite were, in some cases, culturally distinct from the local population (Leventhal, Demarest, and Willey 1987). The establishment of new centers encouraged additional immigration of craft workers from neighboring provinces (Demarest 1988), movements that again can be ascribed to politics,

not population pressure. These Mayan migrations were caused not by high population densities or absolute resource shortages, but by shifting labor demands (in the case of the craft workers) or by structural inequities between lineage segments (in the case of the elites). The same principles have been recognized in contexts as diverse as the Hopi clan system of the American Southwest (Schlegel 1992) and the aristocratic lineages of ancient Rome (Fustel de Coulanges 1956). Where privilege and prestige are allotted unequally among kin according to structural position within the kin group, migration offers the prospect of an improved lot for the structurally disadvantaged. Moreover, the migrant generally does not attempt to escape his/her kinbased prestige system, but rather uses migration to gain access to a better position within a familiar institutional framework, often attempting to attract adherents or clients from the home base to the new destination (Kopytoff 1987: 23-28). In Africa, Central America, and the American Southwest, recent research suggests that those kin groups who could claim "founder" or "first-comer" status in a polity could also claim control over higher-prestige offices, ranks, or ceremonies. In stratified social systems these privileges translated directly into political and economic power; in less rigidly ranked societies the first-comer clans might control important ceremonies or the most productive lands. Migration in these cases was not an automatic response to the stimulus of overcrowding, but rather was a social strategy through which kin groups improved their positions in competition for prestige and power. Pull factors, information flows, and transportation costs If the density-dependence view of migration

neglects some important push factors, then what of the pull factors, information flows, and transport costs that it ignores entirely? For many modem demographic geographers, these are among the most critical components in successful migration models. For example, it is quite clear that the probability that x will migrate to y at time t is partially determined by x's level of knowledge about place y; this in turn is largely determined by

the prior history of migration between x and y. Earlier migrants return home carrying information about optimal routes and destinations, and as a result these same routes and destinations are targeted by later migrants. "Chain" migration of this type is focused on specific routes, destinations, and even social settings that are thought to be attractive. Migration, particularly long-distance migration, is channeled by access to information about a limited number of attractive routes and destinations. Migration therefore proceeds in streams toward known targets, not in broad waves that wash heedlessly over entire landscapes. Because information-exchange networks may be represented archaeologically by shared artifact styles and raw material exchange systems, it may be possible in some cases to reconstruct portions of the prehistoric information networks that constrained and enabled prehistoric migratory behavior. At the same time, the probability that migration will occur is not simply a function of knowledge gained through past migration patterns, but also depends upon changes in the "pull", or the perceived attractiveness of place y. Quantitative geographers therefore must attempt to quantify the attractiveness of place y at time t in order to predict migration flows accurately or to explain them. For economists interested in the labor market, the "attractiveness" of place y can be represented quantitatively by a term in which the numerator is a measure of perceived employment opportunities at y, and the denominator is a measure of perceived competition for jobs at y (Rogerson 1984). Archaeologists have not yet attempted to apply similar measures to prehistoric situations, but it could in principle be done. For example, the attractiveness of region y for pioneer agriculturalists might be represented by a term in which the numerator is a measure of the amount and productivity of arable land at y, while the denominator is a measure of the density and hostility of the native population at y. Finally, migration is more likely to occur between place x and place y when transportation/travel costs are low. In general, transportation costs vary directly with distance. The greater the distance, the fewer the migrants. This well-documented

tendency is, however, violated in many specific instances. In cash economies, where workers receive money for their labor, some labor markets can become so attractive that the cash value of working in them outweighs significant transport costs. This is true today of Mexican immigrants, who risk arrest and imprisonment (a significant cost) to travel to U.S. labor markets. It was equally true of pre-industrial European migrant laborers, such as the 20-30,000 northwestern Germans who walked to Holland to cut peat or mow hay for cash every summer during the period 1600-1792, risking great hardship, deprivation, and danger on the road so that they could bring money home to their families (Moch 1992:41). Similarly, some 6,000 stone workers from a small region in the highlands of central France (Haut Marche) walked annually to Paris in the late 17th century to work during the construction season. Demarest (1988) has detected archaeological evidence for a similarly focused recruitment of laborers from Salvador at the Mayan city of Copan. Many ancient cities and perhaps even agricultural provinces that required particularly intensive seasonal labor may have exerted powerful "pulls" that counteracted the frictional effects of distance on migration. Did Sumeria, for example, import migrant laborers from the north and did these contacts channel the information flows that led to the Late Uruk expansion northwards? Transportation costs were affected not only by distance, but also by the level of hostilities along the migration route, and most importantly by transportation technologies. In 1900 more than 100,000 seasonal laborers (called golondrinas, or 'swallows') migrated annually from Spain and Italy to Argentina to harvest crops, while migration from neighboring Bolivia was scant until a railroad was constructed (Whiteford 1976). Steamships made it easier and cheaper to cross the Atlantic Ocean than to walk across the Andes from Bolivia into Argentina. Any significant innovations or improvements in transportation technology, such as the beginning of horseback riding, the invention of wheeled vehicles, or the Aegean development of multi-oared longboats, would have reduced the costs of transportation/travel, thereby lowering the threshold at which migration became an attractive option.

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In summary, the decision to migrate is a function of "pushes", "pulls", the structure of information flows, and perceived transport/travel costs. All of these are mediated through family and household needs, decision-making customs, and local economic structures. For example, the medieval German migrants who mowed hay in Holland did so because northwest German demographic structures and landholding customs left most peasant families with inadequate landholdings, and the structure of their own agricultural work cycle left some household members available for outside work between May sowing and August harvest. Meanwhile, Dutch dairy farmers produced cheese for the international market, and therefore had much larger dairy herds than northwestern Germans. The Dutch needed seasonal workers to help get the hay crops harvested during June (when hay must be harvested) so that the large Dutch cattle herds could be fed over the winter. On the one hand, the Dutch had a specialized, laborintensive economy with a sizable need for shortterm workers. On the other hand, many northwestern Germans were unable to live from their small landholdings, were able to do the work that the Dutch needed, were willing to leave home and bear the difficulty of travel to Holland, and their lives were structured so that their absence could be tolerated (Moch 1992:41). Although population densities clearly have important effects on migration, demographers would find it impossible to investigate migration without incorporating data on pushes, pulls, information flows, and transport costs. None of these need be causally related to population density in the migrants' place of origin. Population density at the destination can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the motives of the migrants. A simple density-dependence view of migration fails to recognize many factors that are among the most important causes of migration. Regularities in migration behavior Demographers and geographers have produced a series of migration models that represent perhaps the greatest potential contribution that demography has made to the archaeological study of migration (Greenwood 1975; Rogerson 1984; Golledge and

Stimson 1987). There are several families of models that differ in their assumptions and goals. Markov models are widely used in demographic studies to predict future migration flows on the basis of past migration patterns. Despite the fact that many of the assumptions underlying the Markov method are quite unrealistic, Markov models are fairly good at predicting migration flows. This predictive success reflects one of the outstanding regularities in migration behavior, which is inertia. Once a migratory flow becomes established between places x and y, it tends to continue even after changes in the conditions that initially prompted the movement. Spatial interaction Spatial interaction approaches make use of gravity models and neoclassic economic theory in an attempt to explain why migration occurred in a particular observed pattern. Typically these models specify and quantify conditions at the place of origin and the destination, and include a relational term such as distance impedance or transport cost. Recent approaches also incorporate terms that measure past migration behavior and reflect dynamic changes in conditions at the destination (Rogerson 1984). Oddly, while spatial interaction models are useful as explanatory devices, they are not very good at predicting migration flows, perhaps because they require that the migrant be knowledgable about real destination conditions and make decisions on the basis of economic rationality. Migrants often seem simply to move to places that are familiar and offer social support, rather than moving to the place that would make the best economic choice. This tendency might be helpful to archaeologists, who would have difficulty reconstructing the best economic choice in a prehistoric landscape but might be able simply to document a sustained migratory flow between one region and another. The literature on spatial interaction models describes a number of other regularities in migration behavior that should interest archaeologists. These include the tendency of migrants to return to their place of origin (return migration) and the fact that the best predictor of migration is a migratory move within the last year

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(migration begets migration). I have suggested elsewhere (Anthony 1990, 1992) that archaeologists might profitably distinguish between short-distance and long-distance migrations, because the constraints that regulate migration and the social effects of migration are somewhat different in these two cases. Other archaeologists have issued pleas for better definitions of migration (Otte and Keeley 1990), or have offered their own definitions of various kinds of migratory movements. Thus Gamble (1993:45) has distingushed migration, dispersal, colonisation, adaptive radiation, and exaptive radiation; Kristiansen (1989) has attempted to separate the movements of entire tribal groups, the movements of select groups, colonizing movements, and coerced movements (slaves, Gypsies); and Renfrew (1987) has discussed colonisation, farming-related dispersals, and elite dominance. While all of these categories may be useful, we would be better served if we at least began with the categories used by historical demographers/demographic historians, who after all know much more about migration than do most archaeologists. Unfortunately demographers have themselves produced numerous different typologies of migration (see Lewis 1982:15-19). Tilley (1978) has suggested the following useful distinctions:

achieve a specific goal, but intend to return. In almost all cases, the motivation is to increase wealth or prestige. Migrant laborers fit in this category. The annual horse-stealing raids of the Blackfeet in the northern U.S. Plains during the early 19th century provide another example. The travels of short-enlistment mercenary soldiers and the trading voyages of the Pacific kula ring are other examples. Exotic "trade" goods discovered in archaeological sites might have been carried by circular migrants. Circular migrants sometimes remain at their destination and become firstcomers in a system of chain migration. Chain migration

Chain migrants follow earlier migrants to a specific destination in an otherwise unfamiliar territory with the intention of residing there for an extended time. In almost all cases the motivation is to increase wealth, security, or prestige. Intervening places will often be leap-frogged because they are unfamiliar. Chain migration brings migrants from a specific home region to a specific destination over a known route, usually to join kin. The first-comers ("apex families" in the words of Alvarez 1987) gain status from providing advice, introductions, and loans to later migrants. Chain migration can therefore provide a context for prestige enhancement and increased social differentiation at the destination, as was discussed above in relation to African chiefdoms.

Local migration

The great majority of migratory moves falls into this category. Local migrants move within a home region or range containing familiar places and people. They may in some cases move considerable distances (pastoral nomads, northern hunters), but remain within a social network of familiar kin, marriage exchange systems, and shared economic/geographic knowledge. This kind of movement is important in the creation and maintenance of regional cultures, including archaeological cultures. Circular migration (or tethered migration)

Circular migrants regularly, perhaps annually, move out of their familiar home ranges in order to

The decision to migrate is strongly affected by access to information both about conditions in the potential destination and about routes for getting there. This information is usually conveyed, even in a world dominated by mass communications media, through kin or co-residents who have gone before in some role that permitted them to act as scouts. Links of kinship and co-residence between the scouts and the migrants define and constrain the pool of potential migrants at the place of origin, sometimes quite restrictively, depending on the social structure of information-sharing. The fact that long-distance migrants usually follow or migrate with kin also has implications for population genetics. Kin-structured migration has long been recognised as a potential cause of

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significant variation between populations in allele frequencies (Rogers and Eriksson 1988). Recent work by Sokal and Cavalli-Sforza in Europe suggests that kin-structured migration during the Neolithic is still detectable in modem European gene distributions (Sokal and Wilson 1991; Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994). Archaeological applications of this and other aspects of migration genetics were a significant part of the "Out of Africa" debate in which Lindly and Clark were quoted earlier (see also a review in Renfrew 1992). Contrary to their opinion, migration must play a role in any reconstruction of human macro-evolution. A close look at chain migration suggests that the "tribal migrations" that appear often in discussions of European prehistory should be discarded. Cultures don't migrate; people do. Even large-scale movements usually consist of numerous clustered episodes of chain migration. People who are moving long distances into unfamiliar regions usually follow people they know to places that have already been visited by kin. Pioneer farmers usually leap-frog into new territories through chain migration (Lefferts 1977). Most of the current immigration into the U.S. is chain migration. Chain migration has implications for archaeology in relation to artifact types, which may reflect only the regional sub-group to which the migrants and the scouts belonged; and in the patterning of settlements, which may develop in isolated pockets around "founder" communities that are separated from the home place of origin by great distances. The European Neolithic Linear Pottery culture probably represents a colonizing series of chain migrations. Career migration

Tilley separates this category of movement from others because the timing and destination of the move is determined not by village contacts or family needs, but by the needs of the hiring institution. Academics will be intimately familiar with this type of migration. The skilled craft workers who emigrated to the great cities of the ancient world may also fall into this category. Any specialist belonging to a hierarchized profession,

including professional soldiers, clerics, artisans, or bureaucrats may be induced to migrate in this manner. Coerced migration

Displaced persons, refugees, slaves, and social pariahs migrate not because they choose to, but because they are forced from their home ranges or regions. There is a body of Marxist thought that suggests that many migrant laborers are indirectly coerced by economic structures (Kearney 1986), but this category is more meaningful if it is limited to direct coercion. In 16th century Europe, the wars and pogroms associated with the Reformation contributed to a level of migration that would not be equalled until the 20th century. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire after A.D. 476 ushered in a similar period of massive coerced migrations by people and groups displaced by war, disease, famine, or economic collapse. Smaller-scale regional conflicts may cause less massive, but locally important population movements. These are not usually mass tribal movements, but rather consist of numerous episodes of chain migration. Even in distress, people do not move about randomly, but follow kin and co-residents to havens that have an attractive reputation. Migration and language shift

The prehistoric expansions of language groups such as Austronesian, Indo-European, and Numic have attracted numerous archaeologists to investigate the relationship between migration and language shift (Mallory 1992; Spriggs 1992; Anthony 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994; Bellwood 1989; Renfrew 1987,1992; Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982). A dominant theme in recent studies is that language shift is very often a density-dependent phenomenon, like migration. People who practise a more intensive subsistence economy (farming or intensive foraging) that supports a higher population density will locally outnumber and outcompete people who practise a less intensive subsistence economy (diffuse foraging), leading to the replacement of the latters' language by the former. While this process has clearly occurred in many places at many times, it would be unwise to accept it as an exclusionary rule.

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Language shift and migration are similar processes in several ways. Both depend upon a conscious decision to make a difficult change. Both are usually reversible decisions; that is, the migrant often may return home and the language shifter will retain competence in his or her native tongue. In both cases, the decision to change is usually prompted by a perception that the change will lead to an improvement in social opportunities and/or economic conditions. Migration and language change can both be seen as self-conscious, intentional social strategies through which individuals and groups compete for social and economic power. A corollary observation is that neither migration nor language shift is necessarily related to population density. The critical factor is not demography, but access to positions of prestige and power. Moreover, because access is the key factor, it follows that vertical social mobility can be more important than status itself. There is little advantage in migrating or in shifting your language in order to attach yourself to a new place or to a social group, even a high-status social group, if you must enter at a low level of opportunity and there is no possibility of improvement. As Mallory (1992:151) has noted, ".. .if linguistic competence isn't one of the ways of prying open access to status positions, there is little incentive for people occupying lower status positions to adopt the speech of the elite." An example of the importance of vertical social mobility in language shift was described long ago by Barth (1981). On the Pathan-Baluch border, in a historical context of chronic warfare that produced many defeated people looking for new homes, it was the lower-status, nomadic Baluch who absorbed most of the refugees (even Pathans) and the Baluch language that acquired new speakers. This happened in spite of the fact that the Pathan were richer, more numerous, better armed, and more respected. The key condition in this situation was chronic warfare, which produced loose social fragments searching for a stable social group to which they might attach themselves. The Baluch segmentary lineage system was open to the attachment of new segments, unlike the Pathan,

who took in outsiders--even other Pathan--only as powerless tenants. The Baluch pastoral economy offered the possibility of rapid growth, unlike Pathan agriculture, which was constrained by highly regulated systems of land ownership. Finally, the Baluch client-patron political system offered the possibility of upward mobility, unlike the system of the Pathan, where status and power depended on land ownership and long-cultivated local alliances with extended kin. Consequently, refugees of any origin were more likely to attach themselves to the Baluch and to learn the Baluch language. Renfrew (1987, 1994) has suggested that most cases of prehistoric language shift were caused either by the migration of cultivators who simply outnumbered the indigenous population (a demographic density-dependence explanation) or by "elite dominance", which subsumes most other cases. As the Baluch example shows, some cases of language shift conform to neither model. Among pre-state tribal soc1et1es, structural openness and vertical social mobility might be equally important as facilitators of language shift. Ranked segmentary lineage systems like that of the Baluch might be particularly likely both to throw off migratory offshoots, as in Africa and among the Maya; and to attract new speakers to their languages, particularly during periods of social unrest. Even in cases where elite dominance seems to have encouraged language shift, archaeologists need to distinguish between different types of elite domination. Conquest and imperial domination by a state system would seem to represent one type of elite dominance, but we must distinguish between the Roman conquests, which did lead to massive language shifts; and the Norman conquest of England, which enriched the native English tongue with French words related to dining, justice, and military administration, but did not result in language shift. Perhaps in the Roman version of elite dominance, the knowledge of Latin was a key that opened access to state positions of prestige and power, while in the Norman version, mere knowledge of French was not. Language shift through elite dominance can occur

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in pre-state societies where the vectors of domination are quite different from those operating in state systems. Atkinson (1989) has described an illuminating example from the 17th-century southern Sudan. Several small immigrant chiefly groups (Luo-speaking) entered the region from what is today Uganda and initiated a process that ended with the widespread adoption of the Luo language in southern Sudan. The Luo chiefly groups achieved dominance by importing and displaying new, exotic symbols of ritual power (stools, for example); marrying into the local population (which spoke several different languages); offering lavish gifts to local lineage heads; providing military assistance for allies in difficulty; taking control of the trade routes through which iron was imported (imported iron objects were necessary for the payment of local bride-price); and enhancing the prestige of some local leaders, while threatening violence to persuade others to join. Eventually the local lineage heads were co-opted to join the chiefly system, becoming sub-chiefs, (a good example of vertical mobility), in which capacity they were required to learn the Luo language. Luo became the language of privilege and power, and was widely adopted. In the Luo case, very little migration occurred, but the migrants deployed a powerful combination of enticements and punishments that encouraged language shift. These were: a. a powerful and attractive new chiefly ideology supported by exotic symbols of ritual power; b. wealth expressed in generous giftgiving; c. military intimidation and alliance; d. occupation of strategic places that facilitated control over external trade, which was critically important in marriage relations; and e. alliance and marriage with powerful local lineages. Once the process of change acquired momentum there were collective benefits in becoming associated with the the larger sociopolitical units that the new chiefdoms represented. Ultimately language shift occurred on a regional scale, and a

new ethnicity evolved, uniting what had been a region of many distinct social and linguistic groups. Another example of language shift, recorded in the Philippines (Bentley 1981), displays many of the same features: a small group of Tausug-speakers became powerful by becoming early converts to Islam, which supplied them with a new and attractive ideology; and by gaining control over the marine export trade, which supplied them with substantial wealth. The spread of Islam and the expansion of marine trade took place in a political context of segementary patron-client alliances that facilitated the shift to the Tausug language and the widespread emulation ofTausug ethnicity. In the absence of states, it is not likely that a small group of immigrants could bring about substantial language shift merely by attacking, defeating, and enslaving the indigenes (witness the Normans in England and the Celts in Galatia). Those who shift to a new language must see a clear advantage in doing so, and must have enough contact with speakers of the target language so that they can learn that language. In "plantation" situations, where the indigenes are enslaved, denied access to positions of power, and excluded from social contacts with the conquerors, creoles may develop on the plantations, but these may or may nor be widely adopted beyond. In the case of the AngloSaxon migrations that brought English (not a Celtic-Germanic creole, but a purely Germanic language) to Britain (see both Hamerow and Crawford, this volume), if the Germanic immigrants were few in number we might expect to see evidence that they deployed the kinds of small-group strategies enumerated above. That evidence appears to be lacking, which perhaps makes a demographic explanation--massive immigration and population replacement--more likely. As Moch (1992:1) has noted, our understanding of history and prehistory alters dramatically with the realization that its actors were not sedentary. Migration is not an exception, but a constant; it is embedded in human social and economic organization and is one of the principal strategies through which individuals and kinship groups

29

compete for positions of power and prestige. If archaeological cultures have any social meaning (Chapman and Dolukhanov 1993), they have meaning as regional migration networks. Migration is one of the principal prehistoric behaviors through which regional artifactual styles were created and maintained. Migration is a central fact of social life. As such, it deserves the renewed attention it is receiving from archaeologists. References Cited

Ammerman, A. J., Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. 1984. The neolithic transition and the genetics of populations in Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Anthony, D. W. 1991. The archaeology of IndoEuropean ongms. Journal of lndoEuropean Studies 19 (3 & 4):193-222. Anthony, D. W. 1994. The earliest horseback riders and Indo-European origins: new evidence from the steppes. In Die lndogermanen und das Pferd, ed. B. Hansel, S. Zimmer, pp. 185-97. Budapest: Archaeolingua. Anthony, D. W. 1990. Migration in archaeology: the baby and the bathwater. American Anthropologist 92 (4):895-914. Atkinson, R. R. 1989. The evolution of ethnicity among the Acholi of Uganda: the precolonial phase. Ethnohistory 36(1 ): 1943. Barth, F. 1981. Ethnic processes on the PathanBaluch boundary. In Features of person and society in Swat. Collected essays on Pathans. Selected essays of Fredrick Barth. Volume II, ed. F. Barth, pp. 93-102. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Originally published in G. Redard (ed.), lndo-lranica, Wiesbaden, 1963. Bellwood, P. 1989. The colonization of the Pacific: some current hypotheses. In The Colonization of the Pacific: A Genetic Trail, ed. A. V. Hill, S. W. Serjeantson, pp. 1-59. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bentley, G. C. 1981. Migration, ethnic identity, and state building in the Philippines: the Sulu case. In Ethnic Change, ed. C. F. Keyes, pp. 118-53. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Bettinger, R. L., Baumhoff, M. A. 1982. The Numic spread: Great Basin cultures in competition. American Antiquity 47:485503. Cameron, C. in prep. Migration and the Movement of Southwestern Peoples. Cavalli-Sforza, L., Menozzi, P., and Piazza, A. 1994. The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Champion, T. C. 1990. Migration revived. Journal of Danish Archaeology. Chapman, J., and Dolukhanov P., 1993. Cultural Transformations and Interactions in Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Avebury. Demarest, A. A. 1988. Political evolution in the Maya borderlands: the Salvadoran frontier. In The southeast classic Maya zone, ed. E. H. Boone, G. R. Willey, pp. 335-94. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks. Fox, J. W. 1987. Mayapostclassic state formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, J. W. 1989. On the rise and fall ofTulans and Maya segmentary states. American Anthropologist 91 (3):656-81. Fustel de Coulanges, N. D. 1956. The ancient city: a study on the religion, laws, and institutions of Greece and Rome. New York: Doubleday. Gamble, C. 1993. People on the move: interpretations of regional variation in Paleolithic Europe. In Cultural Transformations and Interactions in Eastern Europe, ed. J. Chapman, P. Dolukhanov, pp. 37-55. Aldershot: Avebury. Golledge, R. G., Stimson, R. J. 1987. Analytical behavioral geography. London: Croom Helm. Gramly, M. R. 1977. Deerskins and hunting territories: compet1t1on for a scarce resource of the northeastern woodlands. American Antiquity 42:601-05. Greenwood, M. J. 1975. Research on internal migration in the United States. Journal of Economic Literature 13:397-433. Hoffman, M. P. 1994. Ethnic identities and cultural change in the protohistoric period of eastern Arkansas. In Perspectives on the Southeast: linguistics, archaeology, and

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ethnohistory, ed. P. B. Kwachka, pp. 61-70. Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press. Irwin, G. 1992. The prehistoric exploration and colonisation of the Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kearney, M. 1986. From the invisible hand to visible feet: anthropological studies of migration and development. Annual Review of Anthropology 15:331-61. Kopytoff, I. 1987. The internal African frontier: the making of African political culture. In The African frontier. The reproduction of traditional African societies, ed. I. Kopytoff, pp. 3-84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kristiansen, K. 1989. Prehistoric migrations - the case of the Single Grave and Corded Ware cultures. Journal of Danish Archaeology 8:211-25. Lee, E. S. 1966. A theory of migration. Demography 3:47-57. Lefferts, H. L., Jr. 1977. Frontier demography: an introduction. In The frontier, comparative studies, ed. D. H. Miller, J. 0. Steffen, pp. 33-35. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Leventhal, R., Demarest, A., Willey, G. R. 1987. The cultural and social components of Copan. In Polities and Partitions, ed. K. M. Trinkaus, pp. 179-205. Anthropological Research Papers. Tempe: Arizona State University. Lewis, G. J. 1982. Human migration: a geographical perspective. New York: St. Martin's Press. Lindly, J. M., Clark, G. A. 1990. Symbolism and modem human ongms. Current Anthropology 31 (3) :233-61. Mallory, J. P. 1989. In search of the IndoEuropeans. London: Thames and Hudson. Mallory, J. P. 1992. Migration and language change. Universitetets oldsaksamlings skrifter ny rekke (Oslo) 14:145-53. Megaw, J., Megaw, M. 1992. The Celts: the first Europeans? Antiquity 66:254-60. Moch, L. P. 1992. Moving Europeans. Migration in Western Europe since 1650. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Otte, M. 1993. Upper Paleolithic relations between central and eastern Europe. In Cultural

Transformations and Interactions in Eastern Europe, ed. J. Chapman, P. Dolukhanov, pp. 56-64. Aldershot: Avebury. Otte, M., Keeley, L. 1990. The impact of regionalism on Paleolithic studies. Current Anthropology 31 :577-82. Ravenstein, E. G. 1888. The laws of migration. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 52:241-305. Renfrew, C. 1987. Archaeology and language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins. London: Jonathon Cape. Renfrew, C. 1992. Archaeology, genetics and linguistic diversity. Man 27(3):445-78. Renfrew, C. 1993. Trade beyond the material. In Trade and Exchange in Prehistoric Europe, ed. C. Scarre, F. Healy, pp. 5-16. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Rogers, A. R., Eriksson, A. W. 1988. Statisical analysis of the migration component of genetic drift. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 77:451-57. Rogerson, P. A. 1984. New directions in the modeling of interregional migration. Economic Geography 60:111-21. Schlegel, A. 1992. African political models in the American southwest: Hopi as an internal frontier society. American Anthropologist 94 (2):376-97. Soffer, 0. 1993. Migration vs interaction in Upper Paleolithic Europe. In Cultural Transformations and Interactions in Eastern Europe, ed. J. Chapman, P. Dolukhanov, pp. 65-70. Aldershot: Avebury. Sokal, R. 1988. Genetic, geographic, and linguistic distances in Europe. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 85:1722-26. Sokal, R., Oden, N., Thomson, B. 1992. Origins of the Inda-Europeans: genetic evidence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US.A. 89:7669-73. Sokal, R., Oden, N., Wilson, C. 1991. Genetic evidence for the spread of agriculture in Europe by demic diffusion. Nature 351:143-45. Spriggs, M. 1992. Archaeological and linguistic prehistory in the north Solomons. In The language game: papers in memory of

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Donald C. Laycock, ed. T. Dutton, M. Ross, D. Tryon, pp. 417-26. Pacific Linguistics, C-110. Tilley, C. 1978. Migration in modem European history. In Human Migration: Patterns and Policies, ed. W. McNeill, R. Adams, pp. 48-74. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Whiteford, S. 1976. Migration in context: a systematic approach to the study of break.down before urbanization. In New approaches to the study of migration, ed. D. Guillet, D. Uzzell, 62:147-62. Rice University Studies . Houston, Texas: William Marsh Rice University.

32

MIGRATION THEORY AND THE ANGLOSAXON "IDENTITY CRISIS"

in detail is a stimulating and controversial book entitled Rome, Britain, and the Anglo-Saxons by Nicholas Higham (1992), who argues that the key to understanding the sudden culture change in parts of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries has relatively little to do with immigration and a great deal more to do with acculturation and indigenous developments. His arguments represent the culmination of some three decades of debate between 'migrationists' who envisage large scale migration and in extreme cases population replacement, and those who argue for a model in which a largely British population was dominated, politically and culturally, by a small Germanic warrior elite (I follow here the definition of 'migration' as 'a simultaneous and permanent movement of substantial numbers of people. . . which might be expected to leave measurable traces in the cultural, linguistic and the skeletal record... .' Adams et al. 1978, 486). This paper examines the ways in which this debate has taken shape and been expressed over the last 30 years or so. The documentary and linguistic evidence should ideally be given parity with the archaeological record, but a properly interdisciplinary approach lies beyond the scope of this brief review.

H.HAMEROW Introduction

Archaeologists studying the origins of AngloSaxon England have viewed the decline in popularity of migration as an explanation for material culture change with an increasing malaise, amounting at times to a veritable identity crisis. The old orthodoxy regarding the inception of Anglo-Saxon England was based on a very small number of sources written up to a few centuries after the events they record; the migrants themselves left no written accounts. These sources tell how, in the early to mid fifth century AD, mercenaries from the regions of northern Germany and Denmark, hired by the rulers of Britain to protect them from barbarian assault after the withdrawal of the Roman army, turned on their employers. Soon, reenforced by a large-scale influx of their compatriots (primarily from three tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes), they took over the south and east of Britain, enslaving, doing in, or driving westward the indigenous Britons. Modem historical interpretation, however, rejects this picture of near-complete displacement of the indigenous population by immigrants. Few archaeologists today would argue that all, or even the great majority, of the people who were buried in 'Anglo-Saxon cemeteries' and who lived in 'Anglo-Saxon houses', were in fact Germanic immigrants or the direct descendents of immigrants. Yet, if that is the case, what proportion were of Germanic stock, and how did 'the rest' perceive and express their ethnic identity? How critical was Germanic immigration in the emergence of a new social order in post-Roman Britain? The implications of these difficult questions for what has traditionally been called early Anglo-Saxon England (that is, from the midfifth to mid-seventh centuries) are, it scarcely needs to be said, profound and far-reaching (see Crawford, this vol.).

The archaeological study of the Anglo-Saxon migrations: a review

The doyens of Anglo-Saxon archaelogy, ET Leeds and J N L Myres, took as the unquestioned starting point for their investigations into the origins of Anglo-Saxon England the accounts of the AngloSaxon settlement given by Gildas (a British monk writing of The Ruin of Britain in the sixth century), the Venerable Bede (an Anglo-Saxon monk writing his History of the English Church and People in eighth-century Northumbria) and the Late S,axon Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. These sources tell of invasions on a scale so massive that, according to Bede, at least one region of northern Germania, called Angulus, was actually depopulated (indeed, there is recent compelling archaeological evidence from Schleswig-Holstein in support of Bede's testimony. See Muller-Wille et al. 1988.). The titles of some of these studies have become cliches of the migrationist tradition

The most recent work to deal with these questions

,.,,., .).)

of relating the distribution of artefacts to the movements of Germanic invaders, for example, Leeds' study of 'The distribution of the AngloSaxon saucer brooch in relation to the Battle of Bedford AD 571' (Leeds 1912). Even their more developed, post-war publications reaffirm the theory of mass population movements of Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Leeds, for example, saw reflected in the distribution of certain types of jewellery an invasion by Saxons into East Anglia followed by 'their unquestionable south-westerly advance en masse by the Icknield Way into Oxfordshire and Berkshire' (Leeds, 1954), a hypothesis which found support in Myres' distribution maps of a certain type of cremation urn, the Buckelurne (Myres 1954; Myres 1969: 101-2, Map 8). The observation of a recent writer, who wonders wryly whether these 'marching pots wore jackboots,' reflects the almost disdainful rejection by many archaeologists over the past fifteen years or so of any suggestion of mass migration (Richards 1988, 145). The next generation of scholars followed in much the same tradition, exemplified by the publication in 1965 of Vera Evison's Fifth-century Invasions South of the Thames. This book was considered innovative, even daring at the time, not because it questioned the scale of the migrations, but rather the direction and process by which the invasion proceeded and its ethnic composition. The influential article published by Hawkes and Dunning in 1961, relating the presence of Late Roman official belt fittings in Germanic graves in Britain to the presence of the earliest Germanic 'soldiers and settlers', followed closely the tradition of Myres and Leeds (Hawkes and Dunning, 1961). This study, however, led to the critical and incontrovertable conclusion that the number of such early fifth-century burials was small, an assessment which still stands after a further thirtyfive years of excavation (Bohme 1986). In the 1970s, several studies were published which argued that sixth- and seventh-century material culture and burial rite on the northern fringes of Anglo-Saxon England (ie Northumbria) represented Anglo-British hybridization in an area where settlers of Germanic stock represented only

a fraction of a population which remained largely British, to judge from place-name, written and archaeological evidence (e.g. Faull 1977). Yet opinion remained divided: did this Germanic minority represent a military elite which achieved political supremacy, as the impressive Northumbrian royal vills at Yeavering and Milfield appeared to suggest (Hope Taylor 1977) or, as was assumed to be the case in the Anglo-Saxon heartlands of the south and east, did they represent 'free' peasant farmers as indicated by more modest settlements such as Thirlings (near Milfield) and the relatively humble nature of most 'Anglian' burials found in Northumbria (Miket 1977; O'Brien and Miket 1991)? In the context of this debate, Miket observed that 'in accepting the mixed nature of society on the thinning fringes of Anglo-Saxon immigration, it follows that a careful reappraisal of evidence for the South East must establish just how ubiquitous this hybridization was' (Miket 1977, 304). Just such a reappraisal took place in the 1980s, most comprehensively in Arnold's Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England (Arnold 1984). His approach was to put aside subjective, politically 'tainted' historical accounts of the Anglo-Saxon migrations and to adopt instead a more objective, quantitative approach to the archaeological record, treating it as 'pure' prehistory (Ibid 5-6). In doing so, he concluded that the transformation from Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England was carried out by 'very small numbers of Germanic immigrants', most of whom belonged to a male military elite (Ibid 161). This model of elite dominance was much criticized then and since and the debate regarding the ethnic origins of Anglo-Saxon England remains central and animated. The 'elite dominance' view has been recently and forcibly reiterated by Arnold in 1988, Hodges in 1989, and now by Higham, all of whom demote the accounts of large-scale migrations virtually to the status of an origin myth promoted by 'a few thrusting chiefs,' emphasising instead indigenous processes of social change. The response has been varied. A prominent group of scholars has vigourously reaffirmed the migration hypothesis and pointed to the sheer

34

weight of the combined archaeological, documentary and linguistic evidence; for Welch, 'the obvious implication (of this evidence] is that considerable numbers of Anglo-Saxons settled in southern and eastern England' although the presence of unknown numbers of Britons buried in 'Anglo-Saxon' cemeteries is readily accepted (Welch 1985, 14; 1992). In his thesis on The Scandinavian Character of Anglian England in the pre-Viking Period, Hines argued that this character is best explained by a complex interaction between processes including trade, exogamy, and assimilation, but fundamentally by 'a substantial movement of people' (1984, 279). In a paper presented to the Theoretical Archaeology Group in 1989, Harke advocated that migrations be restored to their rightful place in the archaeology of early medieval Europe, and cited a series of case studies to counter the 'image of unbroken cultural and governmental continuity in Britain from the fifth to the twentieth centuries' (Harke 1989). On the other hand, a recent book on The First Millennium AD in Europe and the Mediterranean scarcely mentions migrations at all (Randsborg 1991) ! In the 1960s and 1970s, British archaeologists, especially prehistorians, largely abandoned migration theory as politically incorrect due to its association with the European expansionism and militarism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also because it was crude and 'non-explanatory', in favour of more complex, processual models of social change (Adams et al. 1978; see also Anthony, this volume). Certainly, interdisciplinary scholarship of the past twentyfive years has largely put to rest the once undisputed tenet of cataclysm and massive invasion in fifth-century Britain. Yet, in the postprocessual climate of the late 1980s and 1990s, when migration has again become topical as a social process and not merely a 'demographic event' (eg Anthony 1990 and this volume; Collett 1987; Kristiansen 1991; Champion 1990), the debate about the Germanic migrations and the roots of 'English identity', whether explicit or implied, has resumed centre stage.

The Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Migration: Burials In the 1970s and early 1980s, several attempts were made to distinguish the burials of Britons in 'Anglo-Saxon' cemeteries, and thereby assess the extent and nature of indigenous survival after the Anglo-Saxon takeover. These studies focused on prone and crouched burials (believed to be more common amongst the British population), and the inclusion of certain grave goods believed to be of British manufacture (such as penannular brooches) in regions where the presence of indigenous groups could be expected to be particularly marked, as in Northumbria (Faull 1977; Eagles 1979; Arnold 1984). These characteristics, however, have since come to be regarded as inconclusive, for crouched and prone burials are also found in Migration Period cemeteries on the Continent and throughout Anglo-Saxon England, and the presence of 'native' artefacts amongst an otherwise Anglo-Saxon burial assemblage can be explained through a variety of exchange mechanisms (Hirst 1985, 7, 36; Higham 1992, 180; see Crawford, this vol. for a more detailed discussion of the evidence for Britons in AngloSaxon cemeteries). In any case, in Higham's model of acculturation, Britons wishing to have family members buried in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries in order to improve the family's economic conditions and status, would seek to conceal their ethnicity by adopting an 'orthodox' Anglo-Saxon burial rite and they would therefore be difficult to identify archaeologically (Higham 1992, 181ft). Their adoption of Old English was ostensibly motivated by similar aspirations (see Milroy and Milroy, this volume). Yet Higham's model presents a serious paradox for it assumes that Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, which generally contain a mixture of cremations and inhumations with characteristically Germanic dress items and pottery (but inevitably also a proportion, sometimes a substantial proportion, of graves with few or no grave goods), were the preserve of an elite. It follows that the majority of the indigenous British population continued to be buried separately in cemeteries yet to be recognised archaeologically (Ibid. 185). When,

35

however, the socio-economic compos1t1on of contemporary continental cemeteries is examined, it becomes evident that weapons and dress accessories were not 'the exclusive preserve of the kings, eorls and ... the wealthier ceorls... .' and that most English cemeteries look anything but 'elite' in comparison (Ibid.; Hills 1992, 988-9).

were not of Germanic origin; but is such a high degree of assimilation likely to have occurred within a couple of generations? If so, then 'acculturation' is scarcely an adequate term to describe this transformation; if not, where are the hybrid 'Anglo-British' burials which represent the transition from acculturation to assimilation?

The complex and absorbing problem of the archaeological 'invisibility' of the indigenous population of southern and eastern Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries remains to be resolved. It is clear, however, that under certain conditions people may switch their ethnic allegiance, indeed 'change the label by which they are known and know themselves, according to biographical convenience'; the conclusion that large numbers of Britons must have done precisely this in the fifth and sixth centuries seems inescapable (Chapman 1992, 22). Furthermore, hypotheses which mm1m1se the role of migrations in the Germanicization of large parts of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries rarely take into account the fact that these migrations took place over at least a hundred years. They took place, furthermore, under conditions which differed regionally just as much as the historical contingencies which shaped the emergence of Anglo-Saxon overlordship in different kingdoms. Relations between indigenous and immigrant populations would have developed differently in different regions. Indigenous population densities also varied, and the same demographic model clearly will not do for all regions of Anglo-Saxon England.

Of direct relevance to this question and to the rapid adoption of new burial rites and material culture is the topography of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, the overwhelming majority of which are de novo establishments even when they are near RomanoBritish burial grounds. An example is the AngloSaxon settlement complex at Mucking, on the Thames estuary in Essex, which not only contained two Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and over 200 AngloSaxon buildings dating from the early fifth to the seventh/eighth centuries, but also four RomanoBritish cemeteries. The latest Romano-British burials at Mucking are likely to post-date AD350, and some could date to the late fourth- or even early fifth-century (C. Going, pers. comm. 1992). The chronological gap between the latest burials in the Romano-British cemeteries and the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon cemeteries must therefore have been minimal, yet the latter were established as entirely separate and distinct from the former (Hamerow 1993, 94).

According to the model of 'elite dominance' put forward by Arnold and others, the majority of females who were buried wearing 'Anglo-Saxon' dress items, must have been the British spouses of Germanic men who expressed their ethnicity vicariously (Arnold 1984, 122-3, 161-2). The rapid and widespread adoption of Germanic-style dress items which were powerful symbols of group self-consciousness and common descent in the sixth century (and this must include thousands of cremation urns shaped and decorated in a distinctively Germanic style) may be partly explained through their adoption by people who

A small number of exceptions to this rule are, however, known. A recently excavated example of a cemetery apparently in continuous use from the Roman to Anglo-Saxon periods is the mixed inhumation/cremation cemetery at Wasperton, Warwickshire. It began as a small, fourth-century Romano-British cemetery and was still in use in the seventh century (Esmonde Cleary 1989, 201; Wise 1991; the cemetery at Frilford, Berkshire, incompletely excavated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, provides another probable example of the continued use of a Romano-British burial gound into the Anglo-Saxon period. Meaney 1964, 46). Of the 182 inhumations at Wasperton, 36 were characteristically RomanoBritish and 137 were Anglo-Saxon; nine, however, have been interpreted as 'hybrid' burials, exhibiting Roman traits such as hobnailed boots or decapitation but on the same alignment as the

36

Anglo-Saxon burials (S-N or W-E). EsmondeCleary has suggested, therefore, that Wasperton represents a family cemetery spanning the late Roman and Early Anglo-Saxon periods in which changes in burial rite and grave goods reflect changes in available material culture, not a change in population (1989). This interpretation, however, rests on the assumption that there was an absolutely consistent distinction in burial orientation during each period, a thesis which, based on evidence from other Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, seems unlikely. The continued use of a Romano-British burial ground is nevertheless significant. Yet the changes in burial rite and the adoption of 'powerful ethnic symbols' suggest a change more profound than simply an appropnat1on of whatever material culture happened to be to hand; this model implies not merely acculturation, but extraordinarily rapid assimilation of the native population, which came to regard itself as 'Anglo-Saxon'. In recent years, Anglo-Saxon archaeologists have turned increasingly to physical anthropology as a more direct guide to the demographic history of the Migration Period (paradoxically, biologists are now turning to archaeologically and historically attested migrations to explain regional blood group patterning in Britain. See Falsetti and Sokal, 1993). Academics of thirty years ago would hardly have dared consider the possibility of distinguishing 'native' from 'immigrant' based on skeletal evidence. Indeed, this methodology has yet to be adequately tested, and is of course not in itself explanatory. Harke has, however, pointed to an apparent correlation between the weapon burial rite in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, stature and certain epigenetic traits, suggesting that burial with weapons (a rite not confined to the elite, as it was accorded to nearly half of adult males in these cemeteries) was restricted to particular lineages. He has suggested that at least some of those males without weapons may be indigenes (Harke 1989; 1990; 1992). Radiocarbon dating of late Roman cemeteries may eventually also throw light on the question of the scale of the indigenous presence in early AngloSaxon England. The large late Roman cemetery at

Queenford Farm (Oxon.) outside the Roman small town of Dorchester-on-Thames, for example, lies in a region with Anglo-Saxon settlement and burials dating as early as the mid-fifth century (Chambers 1988). Calibrated radiocarbon dates of five of the Queenford Farm burials yielded a mean date of 405-485 cal AD at a 93% probability level, persuasive evidence that the cemetery remained in use well into the Anglo-Saxon period. The Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Migration: Settlements

The study of Anglo-Saxon settlements has also generated lively debate regarding the ethnic identity and social composition of their occupants. Small huts with dug-out floors, known variously as sunken-floored huts or Grubenhiiuser, are virtually ubiquitous in early fifth- to seventh-century settlements both in England and in northwestern continental Europe, and their Germanic pedigree has never been seriously questioned. These huts were originally interpreted by English archaeologists as temporary dwellings for recent arrivals from the Continent, although this theory was largely rejected following the recognition in England of larger, more sophisticated ground-level houses built of timber posts (Fig. la; Jones 1973; Jones 1979). But nowhere in England is the main type of farmhouse found throughout the continental homelands of the Anglo-Saxons to be found: the longhouse, in which cattle byre and living room lay under one massive roof, supported on rows of internal posts. This absence, combined with the apparent scarcity on the Continent of the smaller, simpler type of house found on English settlements, led to a questioning of the ethnic affinities of the 'Anglo-Saxon' house in a series of papers published in the 1980s. The first of these, entitled 'How Saxon is the Saxon house?', published by Dixon in 1982, suggested that continental examples of the small, byre-less 'Anglo-Saxon' house, in which the weight of the roof is borne by the walls rather than on internal rows of roof-supporting internal posts, were 'exceedingly rare' (Dixon 1982, 277). In an article which seeks to define 'An early medieval building tradition' for England, James, Marshall

37

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Figure 1b. Posthole buildings from F.de-,Gelderland. After R.S. Hulst, reproduced with the kind permission of the Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek, Amersfoort

38

and Millett (I 984) list seven settlements dating to the Germanic Iron Age in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands which did consist largely of such small houses without internal roof-supporting posts (James et al. 1985, 199). They note, however, that none of these possessed the subdivision at one end of the house found in some (but by no means the majority) English examples.

features in common, yet the latter finds its closest parallels within the building traditions of continental Europe. A clearly insular building style does emerge at some English settlements in the seventh century, exemplified by the annexed halls found for example at Cowdery's Down, Thirlings, and Yeavering, yet even these appear alongside the simple, rectangular houses.

They go on to suggest that these compartments most likely derive from late Romano-British buildings and that the 'Anglo-Saxon' house is therefore a kind of architectural hybrid (Ibid 203; few examples of late Romano-British farm buildings have been excavated, however, and most of these were constructed not of timber posts but on stone foundations, thus weakening the comparison with the Anglo-Saxon house). A house from one of the Dutch sites on their list, however, exhibits just such a subdivision (James et al., 1985, 203); this example, from Rijnsburg, Zuid-Holland (van Es 1973, fig 3) finds parallels in one of the Dutch examples illustrated by Dixon (1982, fig 2n from Wijster, Drenthe) and at least two houses from the third- to fifth-century settlement excavated at Ede, also in the Netherlands (Fig. lb).

The absence of the longhouse from England nevertheless remains an unsolved puzzle. Why, when other forms of Germanic material culture which acted as distinctive group markers such as jewellery were re-enforced, should the longhouse, for centuries the traditional farmhouse, be given up so readily and so comprehensively while the humble sunken hut was retained? This seeming paradox is still more puzzling in view of crosscultural studies which suggest that architecture 'becomes so identified with groups, cultures and lifestyles that it is essential in order to feel at home' and that 'the re-creation by immigrants of their own architectural forms is an important factor in their adjustment to a new environment' (Rapoport 1979, 16). The debate regarding the ethnic affinities of these buildings has proven inconclusive; perhaps the answer lies in differences in the size, composition and economic base of the resident familial group, the household.

The evidence for continental precursors of the 'Anglo-Saxon' house is thus considerable. A recent study has, furthermore, produced persuasive evidence that the ground plans of at least some English houses correspond closely to the living room end of continental longhouses in terms of the positioning of entrances and subdivisions, end walls and widths, suggesting that continental norms were observed in early Anglo-Saxon England (Zimmermann 1988, 472). Finally, Scull's re-evaluation of the buildings of the first postRoman phase at Yeavering, Northumberland suggests that, even on the northern fringes of Anglo-Saxon settlement, buildings which were once accepted as examples of indigenous British architecture would not be out of place on an East Anglian farmstead of the sixth century (Scull 1991). To sum up, certain late Romano-British buildings and the early 'Anglo-Saxon house' have some

Scholars are in no closer agreement regarding the social composition of the occupants of these settlements than they are regarding their ethnicity. Hodges has asserted that 'Early Anglo-Saxon England is notable for the egalitarian quality of its modest farmsteads' and regards the Anglo-Saxon house as 'an expression of a peasant family/household unit' (1989, 34, 36); in contrast, Higham argues that the inhabitants of settlements such as Mucking and West Stow were 'people of considerable status, ceorls, thegns and kings, rather than peasant farmers'. He goes even further to suggest that the absence of longhouses with byres from Anglo-Saxon settlements indicates that their inhabitants were aristocrats, not engaged in farming but rather living off the produce of indigenous communities (1992, 126). As the preceding discussion of Anglo-Saxon

39

burials suggests, the latter thesis is not supported by the archaeological evidence. In any case, the disappearance of the aisled longhouse, or at least its metamorphosis into something else, is a process which can be observed already in continental settlements of the fifth and sixth centuries (Hamerow 1994b). Indeed generalized changes in settlement layout can be detected widely in northwest Europe in the fifth century. In any case, the absence in England of the large farmyards and longhouses found on continental northwest European settlements, with their capacity to house large, extended families and households should not surprise us; these were small, mixed communities of migrants and indegenes whose extended lineage and household structure would have fragmented, and who would have been unable to command the labour and resources needed to construct longhouse complexes. Land use

Several recent studies deal with animal husbandry, land use and estate structures during the period spanning late Roman Britain and early AngloSaxon England. Some of the most notable of these include Crabtree's analysis of the animal bones from both Romano-British and early Anglo-Saxon contexts at West Stow (Crabtree 1990) and Bourdillon's consideration of the provisioning of the Anglo-Saxon 'proto-town' of Hamwic (Saxon Southampton) with meat from surrounding rural estates during the seventh to ninth centuries (Bourdillon 1988). Finally, Day's study of pollen cores taken near Shotover, north-east of Oxford, an area where archaeology has yet to reveal early Saxon settlement, shows that a cleared, open landscape was maintained throughout the late Roman to late Saxon periods (Day 1991). Because of the nature of their evidence, these studies largely sidestep the historian's preoccupation with national identity and the archaeological pitfalls of trying to disentangle Germanic and British strands of material culture. They suggest a substantial degree of continuity in animal husbandry and land management in many regions, although whether even large-scale immigration would result in the dismantling of the indigenous pattern of land management remains debateable. 'Elite dominance'

does not, furthermore, necessitate a change in settlement patterns, yet such a change did occur in many regions of early Anglo-Saxon England (Hamerow 1992). Conclusion

The problem thus remains of how to reconcile two opposing paradigms. The first regards 'AngloSaxon' material culture as intrusive and a symptom of migration. The second views it as a misnomer applied to essentially indigenous developments in lowland Britain during the fifth and sixth centuries, with a small nucleus of Germanic overlords acting as a catalyst. As this survey has tried to demonstrate, this polarization colours virtually every aspect of archaeological interpretation, whether of cremation urns or the structures of land tenure. Clearly, the material culture of Anglo-Saxon England cannot be explained by denying the impact of the migrations, any more than those migrations are in themselves explanatory. Paradoxically, the greatest danger now is that our perspective may become at once insufficiently inter-regional and too insular. On the one hand, we lack a model which is sensitive to inter-regional variability with regard to the scale and impact of Germanic immigration. On the other, in our desire to distance ourselves from the 'invasion neurosis' and the early preoccupation of Anglo-Saxon archaeology with the continental homelands of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, we risk adopting a parochial perspective which treats all Anglo-Saxon material culture as merely a Germanised version of indigenous antecedents. This view simply does not do justice to the sheer mass of material evidence from Anglo-Saxon cemeteries such as Spong Hill in Norfolk, where one or more communities totalling between c 450 and c 750 people buried their dead in over 2000 cremation urns formed and decorated in a distinctively Germanic style, and reflecting a distinctively Germanic ideology and burial rite during the first two post-Roman centuries (McKinley 1994, 70). Rarely have ethnographic studies of migration been applied to the questions posed at the beginning of this paper. As David Anthony has

40

argued, in this volume and elsewhere (1990), modem demographic, economic and geographic studies suggest that there are regularities in the way in which migrations behave (but see also Chapman and Dolukhanov 1992, 70). AngloSaxonists have generally interpreted archaeological data in ignorance of this patterning, although it is perhaps overly optimistic to suggest that such studies hold the key to resolving the debate about the origins of Anglo-Saxon England. Collett's conclusion that types of material culture change 'cannot be arrayed into a neat typology which links them to types of migration nor the composition of the migrant group' still stands (1987, 114). Certainly, if we are to use ethnographic studies to further our understanding of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries, we must take care to compare like with like, and find examples where the subsistence practices of indegenes and immigrants are similar, as was the case in Anglo-Saxon England. Nevertheless, Anglo-Saxonists would undoubtedly benefit from greater familiarity with ethnographically derived models, not just of the processes of migration, but of acculturation in the face of prolonged series of migrations such as those proposed by Rouse (Rouse 1986). Hypotheses regarding the 'Britishness' of 'AngloSaxon' material culture in the south and east of England must now be rigorously tested by first establishing how patterns of, for example, cemetery composition and building construction of the fifth and sixth centuries both echo and differ from their continental counterparts (see Crawford, this vol., for such a comparison). More sophisticated analyses are needed which reconcile the dual processes of migration and Anglo-Saxon overlordship with substantial indigenous continuity. Hypotheses of extensive British cultural and linguistic assimilation and those of large-scale immigration are in any case not mutually exclusive. While it may be reasonable to argue that the paucity of material evidence for subRoman survival is due in large part to archaeology's shortcomings, to assume that the relatively small number of fifth-century Germanic artefacts in Britain is an accurate reflection of the small number of immigrants 1s perhaps

incongruous (Higham 1992; Hamerow 1994a). In any case, the concept of British 'continuity' in the context of the fifth century, a period when both indigenous and immigrant soc1et1es were undergoing rapid change, is not a particularly useful one. This paper has dealt only indirectly with migrations per se but, as Harke has noted, most of the direct evidence for the Anglo-Saxon migrations themselves is likely to lie at the bottom of the North Sea (especially if both the continental evidence for large-scale emigration and the minimalist view of Anglo-Saxon immigration are correct! Harke 1989 and pers. comm. 1995). Instead, the focus here has been on interpretive perspectives regarding population displacement, acculturation and assimilation. Too much emphasis continues to be placed on speculation (and it can never be more than this) regarding the plausibility of numerical domination as the motor of culture change, and on disentangling the strands of 'Germanic' and 'British' material culture. If, however, regional studies of land use and environmental change can be correlated with detailed studies of individual communities, then the next decade promises major advances in our understanding of lowland Britain during the Migration Period. Note

This discussion represents a developed version of a paper delivered at TAG '93 and subsequently published (H. Hamerow 1994c). References

Adams, W., van Gerven, D. and Levy, R. 1978. The retreat from migrationism, Annual Review of Anthropology 7, 483-532. Anthony, D. 1990. Migration in archaeology: The baby and the bathwater, American Anthropologist 92, 895-914. Arnold, C. J. 1984. From Roman Britain to Saxon England. London: Croom Helm. Arnold, C.J.. 1988. An Archaeology of the Early Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms. London: Routledge.

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Bartlet, A., Kooi, P., Waterbolk, H., and Wieringa, J., 1983. Peelo, Historisch-Geografischen Archeologisch Onderzoek naar de Ouderdom van een Drents Dorp, Mededelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, afd Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel 46, 1, Amsterdam. Behme, H., 1986. Das Ende der Romerherrschaft in Britannien und die angelsachsische Besiedlung Englands im 5. Jahrhundert, Jahrbuch des Romisch-Germanisch Zentralmuseums, Mainz 33, 469-574. Bourdillon, J., 1988. Countryside and town: the animal resources of Saxon Southampton. Pp. 176-96. In Hooke, D. (ed). AngloSaxon Settlements. Oxford: Blackwell. Chambers, R., 1988. The Late- and Sub-Roman cemetery at Queenford Farm, Dorchesteron-Thames, Oxon., Oxoniensia 52, 35-70. Champion, T., 1990. Migration revived, Journal of Danish Archaeology 9, 214-18. Chapman, J.and P. Dolukhanov, 1992. The baby and the bathwater: pulling the plug on migrations. American Anthropologist 94, 169-74. Chapman, M., 1992. The Celts. London: St. Martin's Press. Collett, D., 1987. A contribution to the study of migration in the archaeological record: the Ngoni and Kololo. Pp. 105-116. In Hodder, I. (ed). Archaeology as LongTerm History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crabtree, P., 1990. West Stow: Early AngloSaxon Animal Husbandry, East Anglian Archaeology 47. Day, P., 1991. Post-glacial vegetational history of the Oxford region, New Phytology 119, 445-70. Dickinson, T. 1991. Material culture as social expression: The case of Saxon saucer brooches with running spiral decoration. Studien zur Sachsenforschung 7, 39-70. Dixon, P., 1982. How Saxon is the Saxon House? Pp. 275-286. In Drury, P. (ed). Structural Reconstruction: Approaches to the Interpretation of the Excavated Remains of Buildings. Oxford: B.A.R. (British Series)

110. Eagles, B. 1979. The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Humberside. Oxford: B.A.R. (British Series) 68. van Es, W.A. 1973. Early medieval settlements, Berichten van de Rijksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek 23, 2817. Esmonde Cleary, S., 1989. The Ending of Roman Britain. London: Batsford Evison, V. I., 1965. Fifth-century Invasions South of the Thames. London: Athlone Press. Falsetti, A. and R. Sokal, 1993. Genetic structure of human populations in the British isles, Annals of Human Biology vol. 20.3, 21529. Faull, M. 1977. British survival in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. Pp. 1-56. In L. Laing (ed.), Studies in Celtic Survival, Oxford: B.A.R. (British Series) 37. Harke, H., 1989. 'Germans heading for the· beaches': An old perspective on protohistoric migrations. Paper presented to the Theoretical Archaeology Group, Newcastle. Harke, H. 1990. 'Warrior graves'? The background of the Anglo-Saxon weapon burial rite, Past and Present 126, 22-43. Harke, H., 1992. Changing symbols in a changing society: the Anglo-Saxon weapon burial rite in the seventh century. Pp. 149-165. In Carver, M. (ed). The Age of Sutton Hoo. The seventh century in north-western Europe. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Hamerow, H., 1992. Settlement on the gravels in the Anglo-Saxon period. Pp. 39-46. In Fulford, M. and Nichols, L. (eds). Developing Landscapes of Lowland Britain: the Archaeology of the British Gravels. London: Society of Antiquaries of London. Hamerow, H. 1993. Excavations at Mucking, Vol. 2: the Anglo-Saxon settlement. English Heritage Archaeological Report 21. London: English Heritage. Hamerow, H. 1994a. Review of Higham, 1992, Early Medieval Europe 2 (2): 172-173. Hamerow, H. 1994b. The archaeology of rural settlements in early medieval Europe.

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Early Medieval Europe 3 (2), 167-79. Hamerow, H. 1994c. Migration theory and the Migration Period. Pp. 164-77. In Vyner, B. (ed) Building on the Past. London: Royal Archaeological Institute. Hansen, T. E., 1987. Die Eisenzeitliche Siedlung bei N0rre Snede, Mitteijutland: Vorla.ufiger Bericht, Acta Archaeologica (Copenhagen) 58, 171-200. Hawkes, S., and Dunning, G., 1961. Soldiers and settlers in Britain, fourth to fifth century, Medieval Archaeology 5, 1-70. Hedeager, L., 1992. Iron Age Societies: From Tribe to State in Northern Europe, 500 BC to AD 700. Oxford: Blackwell. Higham, N., 1992. Rome, Britain, and the AngloSaxons. London: Seaby. Hills, C., 1992. Review of Higham, 1992. Antiquity 66: 988-989. Hines, J., 1984. The Scandinavian Character of Anglian England in the Pre-Viking Period. Oxford: B.A.R. (British Series) 124. Hirst, S., 1985. An Anglo-Saxon lnhumation Cemetery at Sewerby, East Yorkshire. York: University of York. Hodges, R., 1989. The Anglo-Saxon Achievement. London: Duckworth. Hooke, D. (ed). 1989. Anglo-Saxon settlements. Oxford: Blackwell. Hope Taylor, B. 1977. Yeavering: an AngloBritish Centre of Early Northumbria. London: DoE. Hvass, S. 1983. Vorbasse: the development of a settlement through the first millennium A.D., Journal of Danish Archaeology 2, 127-36. James, S., Marshall, A., Millett, M. 1985. An early medieval building tradition, The Archaeological Journal 141, 182-215. Jones, M. U. 1973. An ancient landscape palimpsest at Mucking, Essex Archaeology and History 5, 6-12. Jones, M. U. 1979. Saxon sunken huts: problems of interpretation, The Archaeological Journal 136, 53-9. Kristiansen, K. 1991. Prehistoric migrations: The case of the Single Grave and Corded Ware cultures, Journal of Danish Archaeology 8, 211-225.

Leeds, E. T. 1912. The distribution of the AngloSaxon saucer brooch in relation to the Battle of Bedford AD571, Archaeologia 2nd ser. 13, 159-202. Leeds, E. T. 1954. The Growth of Wessex, Oxoniensia 19, 45-60. McKinley, J. 1994. The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham vol. VIII: The Cremations, East Anglian Archaeology 69. Meaney, A. 1964. A Gazetteer of Early AngloSaxon Burial Sites. London: George Allen & Unwin. Miket, R. 1980. A re-statement of evidence for Bernician Anglo-Saxon burials. Pp. 289306. In Rahtz, P., Dickinson, T. and Watt, L. (eds). Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries. Oxford: B.A.R. (British Series) 82. Muller-Wille, M., Dorfler, W., Meier, D., and Kroll, H. 1988. The transformation of rural society, economy and landscape during the first millennium AD: archaeological and palaeobotanical contributions from northern Germany and southern Scandinavia, Geografiska Annaler 70, 5368. Myres, J.N.L. 1954. Two Saxon urns from Ickwell Bury, Beds. and the Saxon penetration of the East Midlands, Antiquaries Journal 34, 201-8. Myres, J.N.L. 1969. Anglo-Saxon Pottery and the Settlement of England Oxford: Oxford University Press. O'Brien, C. and Miket, R. 1991. The early medieval settlement of Thirlings, Northumberland, Durham Archaeological Journal 7, 57-92. Randsborg, K. 1991. The First Millennium AD in Europe and the Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rapoport, A. 1979. Cultural ongms of architecture. Pp. 2-20. In Snyder, J.C. and Catanese, A.J. (eds). Introduction to Architecture. New York: McGraw-Hill. Richards, J. 1988. Style and sociopolitical organisation: a preliminary study from early Anglo-Saxon England. Pp. 128-144. In Driscoll, S. and Nieke, M. (eds). Power and Politics in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

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Press. Rouse, I. 1986. Migrations in Prehistory: Inferring Population Movement from Cultural Remains. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schmid, P., and Zimmermann, W.H. 1976. Flogeln: zur Struktur einer Siedlung des l. bis 5. Jh. n. Chr. Probleme der Kustenforschung im Sudlichen Nordseegebiet 11, 1-78. Scull, C. 1991. Post-Roman phase I at Yeavering: a re-consideration, Medieval Archaeology 35, 51-63. Sherlock, S., and Welch, M. 1992. An AngloSaxon Cemetery at Norton, Cleveland C.B.A. Research Report 82. London: CBA. Waterbolk, H. 1982. Mobilitat von Dorf, Ackerflur und Graberfeld in Drenthe seit der Latenezeit: archaologische Siedlungsforschungen auf der nordniederlandischen Geest, Offa 39, 97137. Welch, M. 1985. Rural settlement patterns in the early and middle Anglo-Saxon periods, Landscape History 7, 13-24. Welch, M. 1992. Anglo-Saxon England. London: Batsford. West, S. 1985. West Stow: the Anglo-Saxon Village, 2 vols., East Anglian Archaeology 24. Wise, P. 1991. Wasperton, Current Archaeology 126, 256-9. Zimmermann, W.H. 1988. Regelhafte Innengliederung prahistorischer Langhauser in den N ordseeanrainerstaaten: ein Zeugnis enger, langdauernder kultureller Kontakte, Germania 66, 465-89. Zimmerman, W. H. 1992. Die Siedlungen des I. bis 6. Jahrhunderts nach Christus von Flogeln-Eekholtjen, Niedersachsen: Die Bauformen und ihre Funktionen, Probleme der Kustenforschung im Sudlichen Nordseegebiet 19.

44

BRITONS, ANGLO-SAXONS AND THE GERMANIC BURIAL RITUAL

SALLY CRAWFORD 'There is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be' (Freeman 1888, 74). If Freeman believed he was offering the last word on the problem of British survival in Anglo-Saxon England, he was sadly mistaken. The debate on the topic has raged on over the intervening century, and the twists and turns of the argument have been admirably summarised by Scull (1995), Higham (1992) and Hamerow (this volume). Suffice it to say that few archaeologists today would agree with Freeman's declaration that the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the native British in the southeast of the country, linguistic evidence notwithstanding, and the most favoured current paradigm asserts that the British co-existed with the Germanic incomers. Some go so far as to suggest that there were really very few of these incomers, and that changes in artefacts, building styles and burial rituals in fifthcentury Britain primarily reflect internal developments rather than the arrival of immigrants (eg Higham 1992). The idea that the British survived in reasonable numbers is far more palatable (and plausible) than the concept of mass emigration by British refugees, or worse, genocide by the Anglo-Saxons. There still remains the problem, however, of lack of archaeological evidence for British survival. Attempts have been made to identify a British presence in the AngloSaxon burial ritual, but with little success -- is it reasonable to search for the missing British in the graveyards of the English?

A useful approach towards understanding changes in ethnicity in general and the relative numbers of British survivors in England in the fifth and sixth centuries in particular would be to establish the size of the population before and after the arrival of the Germanic incomers. Attempts to estimate the population size and demographic make-up of early Anglo-Saxon England must, however, be

doomed to failure, both in principle -- since a burial assemblage is a cultural product and may therefore be unrepresentative of the living population -- and because of the limited recovery of skeletal remains from this period (Acsadi 1957; Arnold 1984). What is clear is that the number of known Anglo-Saxon burial grounds increases sharply from the fifth to the sixth century, as does their geographical range. Between the early/mid fifth century, when the first distinctively Germanic burials appeared in Britain, and the sixth century, the cemetery population had grown markedly. Campbell has argued that this rise must be due to a combination of three factors (Campbell 1982, 36). The most important, in his view, is continuing migration, followed by a natural increase in the population, and then 'possibly, but if so very importantly' the adoption by the native British of the Anglo-Saxon burial ritual. More recently, the third explanation has been moved up the list of probabilities: Higham in particular has scotched the first two options altogether and has stressed the paramount importance of the last (1992, 180-2). If the British did continue to live in large numbers alongside the newcomers, they must also have died and been disposed of in some way, yet no British cemeteries from this period have yet been identified. Were the British, then, buried among the Anglo-Saxons? The Anglo-Saxon burial ritual is a complex affair with many variations in the method of disposal, the orientation of the body and the grave goods included in the burial. It is generally accepted that these variations have symbolic meaning, representing both social identity (e.g. gender, age, status) and regional identity (Pader 1980; Richards 1987). If the British did survive in any numbers, and if those survivors retained some form of separate identity (as Anglo-Saxon laws which refer specifically to Britons indicate), then there could well be signifiers within the Anglo-Saxon burial ritual of a British or, perhaps more accurately, a hybrid Anglo-British presence.

Most commentators accept that the Anglo-Saxon burial ritual essentially follows a Germanic tradition. According to Richards, 'the message of the Anglo-Saxon burial ritual in the fifth century is

45

of a homogenous society pract1smg Germanic forms of burial' (Richards 1995, 56). It has been pointed out (eg by Higham 1992, 180) that it would be impossible to spot the difference between British and Anglo-Saxon burials if the British had adopted Anglo-Saxon culture. Scull has emphasised that Britons must almost inevitably be invisible in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries because the relatives of any Briton who had acquired enough status to be buried according to the highly public Anglo-Saxon burial ritual would want to assert that status by conforming to AngloSaxon norms (1995, 78). Britons who had not attained this status would probably have been slaves within Anglo-Saxon society (as indicated by written sources), and may not have merited burial in the community cemetery anyway. Studies of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have clearly demonstrated that some sectors of society were largely excluded from the burial grounds, for example children (Crawford 1993), and given our current state of knowledge we cannot assume that the least members of what was, according to contemporary law codes, a highly hierarchical society, were buried in the same cemeteries that contained the wealthier classes. As at least some Britons were slaves in AngloSaxon society, it has sometimes been argued that they are the occupants of those graves without grave goods. The discovery of burials at Snape containing prestige items such as drinking horns made entirely of organic material (which does not usually survive in the archaeological record) is, however, a warning that graves which appear to lack grave goods cannot be assumed to contain the poorest members of the society (Filmer-Sankey 1992). Other possible signifiers of a British presence in the burial ritual have been suggested. Burials with weaponry have been argued to be those of the dominant Anglo-Saxons, and a marginal difference in height between those males buried with weapons and those without has been offered as a case of the tall, Germanic warrior buried with his status-denoting weaponry alongside the smaller, less well-nourished Briton buried without weapons (Harke 1990, 40). If this apparent height difference can be substantiated, there are, of course, other possible explanations,

not least that the warrior elite in Anglo-Saxon society, as in any other, would tend to have a better diet and exercise more vigorously than the general population, whether Anglo-Saxon or British. More plausible might be the suggestion that anyone buried with such a symbol of power as a weapon in the Migration Period would be unlikely to belong to the lower echelons of society. If the British were slaves, then it is unlikely that a Briton would be buried with a weapon. Even to say this is to assume much. Anomalies in grave orientation and body posture have also been seized upon as possible evidence of a British presence on the basis that such burials were not 'typically' Anglo-Saxon (Faull 1977). These three aspects of the inhumation ritual -- deposition with or without grave-goods, positioning with or without weapons, and variation in the deposition of the body and the grave goods -- are the focus of the cemetery analyses which follow. The socio-economic composition of the earliest Germanic immigrants must have had a great impact on their relationship with the native inhabitants of Britain. Four main hypotheses regarding this composition have been put forward: Were the newcomers for the most part farmers seeking agricultural land who would have had little impact (at least initially) on the administrative structures and urban life of Late Roman and postRoman Britain (cf Myres 1986 and Hawkes 1982)? Were they refugees fleeing from their homelands, who came in overwhelming numbers and simply swept all before them (cf Arnold 1984, 17)? Were they a warrior class elite, towering over smaller, weaker natives, few in number but dominating through fear (cf Hodges 1989 and Harke 1992)? Or were the migrants 'surplus' members of Continental communities, dispossessed or without inheritance, looking for prospects of improvement in Britain, acquiring status by both infiltrating the Romano-British power structure and manipulating it (Hawkes 1986)? One method of testing these hypotheses is to see how the social structure reflected in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries compares to that of their continental counterparts. For the purposes of this study, I shall concentrate on the inhumation ritual rather than on

46

cremation; inhumations are arguably more likely to reveal a British presence given that the common Romano-British burial practice at the time of the migrations was inhumation. There is a case for saying that Britons would therefore have been more willing to inhume their dead than to cremate, assuming they had any say in the matter. If the Germanic mortuary ritual was modified in any way by the British, perhaps one method of identifying such modification would be to examine the burial ritual practised in the Continental homelands of the Anglo-Saxons before and during the period of the migrations. Such a comparison would test whether some seemingly 'anomolous' attributes of Anglo-Saxon burial that are at present tentatively ascribed to British influence are genuinely unique to Britain, or whether similar phenomena occur in Continental cemeteries.

There is nothing new in the suggestion that AngloSaxon and Continental burial rituals bear comparison, but in practice relatively little comparative work has taken place. One major barrier to this is language and the reluctance of anglophone archaeologists to tackle the wealth of information on Continental cemeteries of this period now available. The sites presented in this paper, for example, are published in Danish, Dutch, German and French. They were selected on the basis that they were excavated to a reasonable standard and that the excavation reports include details of grave furniture and some analysis of the skeletal material. Sites were also chosen from regions where archaeological and written sources indicate different degrees of Germanic presence and/or influence, for example western Denmark, where the population was presumably wholly Germanic, and northern France, where the population may have been largely Gallo-Roman even during the Frankish period. If nothing else, I hope by bringing these sites to the attention of Anglo-Saxonists, to offer a timely reminder of how early English cemeteries do and do not differ from their Continental counterparts. A thorough comparison of Continental and early English social structure based on cemetery evidence is not possible within the confines of a short paper, but what can be done

is to illustrate some of the methods and principles relevant to such a study, and to highlight the way in which historical assumptions lead to different interpretations of similar archaeological phenomena in different countries. This is a crucial point that has yet to be addressed by Anglo-Saxon archaeology, where the solution to the problem of the 'invisible British' seems, as Higham ably demonstrated in the introduction to his book, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons (1992), to be largely dependant on current political fashions. Continental Migration-Period Cemeteries 1 Frenouville, Normandy The cemetery of Frenouville lies about 10km southeast of Caen, Normandy (Fig. 1; Pilet 1980). It appears to have been in use from the end of the third century AD and to have been abandoned in the seventh century in favour of the graveyard at the church of St. Martin, about a kilometre to the northeast. The cemetery is situated on a slight slope bounded by two dry valleys. The underlying geology is Jurassic limestone which, while having a devastating effect on the skeletal material, allowed for easy identification of grave cuts and other archaeological features. The site was completely excavated in the 1970s, and 801 burials were identified. Due to the intercutting of the burials and the poor state of skeletal preservation, only 717 of the burials are sufficiently well catalogued to be used in the following discussion. Of the burials, 112 have tentatively been identifed as male, 125 as female. Only a handful of burials four or five - could be identified as children. The cemetery is closely paralleled, both in size, gravegoods and layout, by other Merovingian cemeteries such as Herouvillette (Decaens, 1971), Lavoye (Joffroy 1974) and Giberville (Lemiere 1976). Indeed, work by Young has demonstrated the homogenous structure of Merovingian cemeteries in eastern France (1984). During the centuries of burial at Frenouville, the arrival of the Germanic Franks attested in documentary sources must have affected the local 1All the cemetery plans illustrated below show inhumation burials only. Cremations have not been illustrated.

47

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Fig. I.% omission of the intervocalic dental consonant in words of the type bother, brother.

76

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network strength scale quantified the extent to which speakers interacted with others in the community and the strength of the ties contracted there, it could be interpreted as a measure of the pressure exerted by the close-knit network upon its members. A series of statistical tests revealed a strong correlation between personal network structure and patterns of language use, even allowing for the interaction of other social variables such as the age and the sex of the speaker; the strongest dialect speakers were those whose informal social ties were the strongest. Figure 1 illustrates this relationship in Ballymacarrett, in showing a tendency for speakers who are plotted high on the vertical axis also to be plotted towards the right of the graph. The linguistic behaviour at issue is the presence versus absence of the consonant [o] intervocalically in such words as mother, brother. Deletion scores for each speaker, whose age group and sex are also specified, are plotted as percentages against his or her network strength score. It is on the basis of such language/network relationships that the closeknit network may be viewed as an important social merchanism of dialect maintenance, encouraging the long-term survival of nonstandard and socially disfavoured language varieties. Following the work in Belfast described above, a number of other sociolinguistic studies of the relationship between language variation and change and social network structure have been published. Chambers (1995) provides a summary and evaluation of many of these, such as LippiGreen's (1989) account of linguistic change in an Austria! Alpine community and BortoniRicardo's (1985) study of changes in the language of rural migrants to a Brazilian city. BortoniRicardo examines the weakening of premigration network ties as individuals are integrated into their new urban environment, and her main hypothesis about change in social structure associated with the change from rural to urban life is that it involves a move from an 'insulated' network consisting largely of kinsfolk and neighbours to an 'integrated' urban network where the links will be less multiplex and associated with a wider range of social contexts. The linguistic counterpart of this process is analysed as one of dialect diffuseness - a movement away from the norms of the migrants' stigmatised Caipira dialect. It is to the importance

of such weakening network ties for a socially accountable theory of linguistic change that we now turn. The next section will concentrate on the theoretical implications of the link between a close-knit network structure and language maintenance and its obvious corollary - that a loosening of close-knit ties is likely to be associated with linguistic change. Social network, weak ties and language change

A general methodological problem associated with the use of the network concept in sociolinguistics is that although it can be readily operationalised as described above to study speakers whose networks are of a relatively closeknit type, it cannot easily handle socially and geographically mobile speakers whose personal network ties are not predominantly dense or multiplex. However, such persons make up a substantial proportion of the population in a postindustrial society, particularly in cities. Looseknit networks are hard to deal with chiefly because social network analysis involves comparing speakers who differ from each other in certain respects - let us say in respect of the multiplexity of the ties which they have contracted at the workplace - but are still similar enough in other related ways to make such a comparison meaningful. For example, it is evident that relative to someone who has changed employment and place of residence several times, the networks of the Belfast inner-city speakers described in the previous section are all closeknit. While one might make this general point and follow through its implications in a comparison of, for example, these speakers with residents of lower middle class areas of the city, it is much less easy to see how the relatively looseknit network structures of individual lower middle class speakers might might meaningfully be compared with each other. This problem was encountered in an attempt to apply social network analysis in the prosperous Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf (Dittmar and Schlobinski 1988). Although they are thus difficult to analyse empirically (but see Bortoni-Ricardo 1985), looseknit networks are likely to play an important part in a theory of linguistic diffusion and change.

77

Following Granovetter (1973), Milroy and Milroy (1985) have argued that 'weak' and apparently insignificant interpersonal ties (of 'acquaintance' as opposed to 'friend' for example) are important channels through which innovation and influence flow from one closeknit group to another, linking such groups to the wider society. To support this argument, a detailed quantitative analysis of the history and present day distribution of three Belfast phonological variables is presented. The spread of one of them apparently across sectarian lines of demarcation to penetrate the dialect of young speakers is difficult to explain except in such terms. The change involved is a realisation of a limited set of lexical items such as pull, put, foot with an unrounded rather than a rounded vowel (i.e. rhyming with cull, cut, shut). This weak-tie model of change and diffusion is also applied to account for the tendency of some languages to be more resistant to change than others. The general argument is that a type of social organisation which is based on overlapping closeknit networks will inhibit change, while one based on mobility (for whatever reason), with a concomitant weakening of network ties, will facilitate it. Interestingly, this conclusion is in line with the traditional assumption of historians of language that the emergent, mobile merchant class were largely responsible for the appearance of Northern (and other) dialectal innovations in Early Modem (Standard) English (see, for example, Baugh and Cable I 978: 194). In general, languages appear to be maintained with relatively slight internal changes in situations where internal solidary ties are strong, and where they remain strong for generations or even centuries. The example we have used here is Icelandic (Milroy and Milroy 1985), which has undergone only slight structural changes since around 1200 and which has not split up into divergent dialects despite the difficulties of climate and terrain that isolate the scattered communities. Iceland was settled by Norwegians in the Middle Ages, so it is not surprising that colonial situations should be of general interest here. It is well known, for example, that when the English language is transplanted to a new country, such as Australia, it becomes structurally very uniform throughout an extensive territory, even though the original settlers may have spoken a variety of dialects. Agreement on norms seems to

be facilitated in such situations by the existence of numerous weak ties between individuals and groups. On the basis of such observations, we have argued that in various situations of language contact and shift, change is in general made possible through numerous weak ties, and we have proposed a general principle, which can be stated as follows: Linguistic change is slow to the extent that the relevant populations are well established and bound by strong ties, whereas it is rapid to the extent that weak ties exist in populations (Milroy and Milroy 1985). It is suggested that this general principle can be projected on to situations of language shift and change, both at the present day and in the past, in order to help to account for patterns of relatively rapid and relatively slow change. In situations of massive upheaval and abrupt social change, the model predicts that pre-existing strong networks will be disrupted and weak-tie situations will predominate. In such a situation, there may be quite rapid language shift (one language replacing another), or rapid change within the 'host' language (an example of this is English in the Middle Ages when it was massively influenced by Danish and Norman French after the incursion of foreign populations). Conversely, in periods of social stability, social networks remain relatively strong, and linguistic change within a language (or indeed a dialect of a language) is relatively slow. The important point to note here is that linguistic change, through language contact, does not come about through strong ties between the relevant populations, but through ties that are uniplex and weak. As Granovetter (1973) suggests, it is these weak ties that form the 'bridges' through which innovations flow. Thus - paradoxically - strong contact between two languages actually comes about through numerous weak ties between two populations, for while strong ties encourage local integration, they give rise to overall fragmentation. Internal ties within each group may be relatively strong, but the ties between them are for the most part not solidary and may be described as weak, although they are likely to be very numerous and frequent (as in trading or other service encounters). 78

In the course of time, as the changes are accepted by speakers into the linguistic system, new coalitions and solidary groups are formed and newer linguistic structures maintained by solidary pressures and/ or influenced by new variants communicated via new weak ties. It may be this time-related aspect of the argumentation that is most immediately relevant to archaeological theory, in that changing social circumstances permit changes in patterns of identity and solidarity over time. In linguistic change, it is these new solidary patterns that permit the stabilization of a change in the community. Evidence in support of the position outlined here can be adduced from a number of language situations at various levels of generality. In Present Day English, for example, there is evidence that certain non-standard features - some of them apparently based in London - are spreading from one city to another, missing out the intervening countryside. The pronunciation of words like thin and mother as 'fin, muvver', for example, has been noted widely in younger speakers in Norwich, Sheffield and Leeds (Trudgill 1988; Wakelin 1972), and the glottal stop (as in butter, what) is certainly spreading rapidly from city to city and into middle-class social groups who have only weak ties with the working-class innovators (Milroy, Milroy and Hartley, 1994). An evaluation of this 'weak tie' theory of linguistic change is provided by McMahon (1994). In bilingual situations of language shift also, it appears that the incoming language is first adopted by those who have relatively weak internal ties. This is suggested by, for example, work on the migrant Chinese community in Tyneside (Li, Milroy and Pong 1992), where Cantonese, the community language, is maintained most effectively by those whose internal ties are most solidary. 6 Riagain (1992) associates the much longer term language shift in the west of Ireland with the decline of localised networks. This decline is itself associated with major changes in employment patterns from a predominantly agricultural community to one where employment is less homogeneous and mainly non-agricultural.

Conclusions

The maintenance/ change model that we have proposed, relying as it does on the idea of varying degrees of solidarity within and between communities, is intended to offer a basis for explaining patterns of linguistic change. The existence of numerous weak ties is a precondition for linguistic change to take place. But it is not in itself sufficient to explain all situations in which linguistic change or shift takes place. Two broad scenarios may be suggested. In scenario 1, the solidary group has some external contact through weak ties, but is resistant to external influence: it is norm-maintaining and conservative. It is of course likely that the broader social structure of the relevant community is in some way involved here. For example, the networks that maintain the language may also hold economic and political power. It is also likely that in this scenario the changes that take place may have the effect of differentiating the in-group from external contact groups, and the effect of such changes may be to maintain or assert the different identity of the ingroup. In scenario 2, the group admits external influence more readily, and contact changes or language shifts are the result. Again, it seems reasonably clear that the broader structure of society may be involved here, as some such rapid changes (such as those affecting English in the Middle Ages) have involved weakening of centralized power in the in-group. As 6 Riagain points out, a major weakness of network analysis is its focus on small group interactive patterns, without reference to larger-scale social and political structure. While he himself relies extensively on Hechter's (1978) concept of the cultural division of labour to relate changes in network structure to larger scale social and economic changes, he also provides a useful general account of frameworks which allow network structure to be related to larger scale social patterns (1995:1 lff). An independent attempt has beem made to tackle this problem inherent in network analysis. Milroy and Milroy (1992) suggest that weak ties function to link small-scale solidary group and larger-scale social and economic groupings. It is assumed that links between the different social classes will

79

be by definition weak and uniplex, and that most changes will therefore be diffused vertically through numerous weak ties. It has been clear to sociolinguists for some time that in contemporary industrialised soc1et1es innovations do not generally flow from either the highest or the lowest stratum (at both extremes relatively close-knit, solidary networks are likely), but that they are diffused in the relatively mobile and non-solidary middle strata of societies (Labov 1972, 1994). This idea has been further developed with reference to H0jrup's (1993) analysis of 'lifemodes', which, like Hechter's notion of the cultural division of labour, provides a link between different types of social network and larger scale social and political groupings (for details of the significance of this work for theories of change, see Milroy and Milroy 1992). As for backward projection of these ideas on to past language states, the main advantage seems to be that they provide a framework for dealing with language shift and change by using a process model rather than a model that envisages languages as separate quasi-physical entities. Various broad processes, including pidginization, koineization, contact, shift, divergence and convergence, can be incorporated within this general maintenance/ change model and described in terms of it. The main difference between change in language and changes in archaeological artefacts over time appears to arise from the fact that language is an abstract object, whereas artefacts are concrete. Languages do not appear to improve over time (as artefacts may sometimes do) - they do not become easier to learn or easier to use - they simply change. An important point of connection between archaeological theories and a network-based approach to language change appears to be in what linguists have called the indexical function and what archaeologists have called the symbolic function. The key to understanding change lies ultimately in the shifting and changing affirmations of identity and solidarity by human beings in social groups.

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