Content:

Recent large-scale ancient DNA studies have transformed our understandings of past population dynamics and, coupled with multi-proxy approaches such as stable isotope analysis, provide us with new insights into movement and mobility at a number of scales. Particularly striking has been the significance of population movement as a vector of cultural change. For many, this realisation carries uncomfortable echoes of early twentieth century archaeology, when migration, often implicitly presented as violent colonisation by a dominant group, was too easily invoked as the primary driver of change. Migration, however, as we can see from the world today, takes many forms, and can be a long-term process rather than a single event. Movement can be voluntary or forced, and is often undertaken by desperate or marginalised individuals and groups. Migratory pressures are also typically bound up with issues of age, class and gender. Indeed, recent aDNA analyses have demonstrated the major role of female mobility in Neolithic and Bronze Age societies. Traditional interpretations of prehistoric mobility have tended to focus on long-distance, male-dominated networks, but—drawing on the results of recent work on the Middle–Late Bronze Age in southern Britain—this paper argues that female mobility was crucial in instigating significant changes in language and culture. While the large-scale movement of women does not necessarily negate the presence of male-dominated power structures, it forces us to consider the lived realities of these migrants and the ways in which their own agency transformed their host communities from the inside out.

EAA2021: Abstract

Title & Content

authors