As a species, we have always been mobile and migration was a habitual feature of prehistoric life. This open-access volume uses archaeological case studies mainly from the European Neolithic, but also from the Pacific, the US Southwest, the medieval Migration Period and the historical Great Lakes, to discuss how a focus on small-scale inter-personal relations – on the power struggles, negotiations and choices that people make in everyday settings – can help us understand migration events in archaeology. While much archaeological scholarship, using isotopes and aDNA, focuses on migrations as large-scale phenomena and crisis responses, this book offers a new approach by exploring how moving on was embedded in social practice.

This book offers a novel reinterpretation of how the political aspects of migration shaped past people’s worlds in Europe and beyond, drawing on archaeological, historical, linguistic and aDNA evidence. Overall, the conclusion is that a bottom-up approach can help us to understand migration in the past at a variety of scales, in many different regions of the world

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo.

This book exploits the improved level of genetic resolution we have achieved by providing new archaeological and anthropological interpretations with a global perspective. -- Kristian Kristiansen, Professor of Archaeology, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Daniela Hofmann is Professor in Neolithic Archaeology at the University of Bergen, Norway.

Catherine J. Frieman is Associate Professor of European Archaeology at the Australian National University, Australia.

Martin Furholt is Professor of Prehistoric and Social Archaeology at Kiel University, Germany.

Stefan Burmeister is the Director of the Varusschlacht Archaeological Museum, Germany.

Niels Nørkjær Johannsen is Associate Professor of Archaeology at Aarhus University, Denmark.