Massive Migrations? The Impact of Recent aDNA Studies on our View of Third Millennium Europe

Abstract

New human aDNA studies have once again brought to the forefront the role of mobility and migration in shaping social phenomena in European prehistory, processes that recent theoretical frameworks in archaeology have downplayed as an outdated explanatory notion linked to traditional culture history. While these new genetic data have provided new insights into the population history of prehistoric Europe, they are frequently interpreted and presented in a manner that recalls aspects of traditional culture-historical archaeology that were rightly criticized through the 1970s to the 1990s. They include the idea that shared material culture indicates shared participation in the same social group, or culture, and that these cultures constitute one-dimensional, homogeneous, and clearly bounded social entities. Since the new aDNA data are used to create vivid narratives describing ‘massive migrations’, the so-called cultural groups are once again likened to human populations and in turn revitalized as external drivers for socio-cultural change. Here, I argue for a more nuanced consideration of molecular data that more explicitly incorporates anthropologically informed mobility and migration models.

Re-integrating Archaeology: A Contribution to aDNA Studies and the Migration Discourse on the 3rd Millennium BC in Europe

“…Instead, old models derived from the early 20th century which, although utterly deconstructed on a theoretical level, are still popular in much of archaeological daily practice, were picked, and thus revitalised to make sense of the data. These old models treat archaeological units of classification as representing distinct and closed groups of people and biological populations (as criticised by Müller 2013;Hofmann 2015;Vander Linden 2016;Ion 2017;Furholt 2018a).…”

The genetic prehistory of the Greater Caucasus

“…The role of early Yamnaya groups within this network is still unclear 57 . However, this interaction zone pre-dates any direct influence of Yamnaya groups in Europe or the succeeding formation of the Corded Ware 62, 63 and its persistence opens the possibility of subtle bidirectional gene-flow, several centuries before the massive range expansions of pastoralist groups that reached Central Europe in the mid-3 rd millennium BCE 19, 35 .…”

Reconciling material cultures in archaeology with genetic data requires robust cultural evolutionary taxonomies

“…The difficulties of inferring group coherence or indeed even ethnicity from archaeological material have reemerged with new urgency in the wake of recent publications such as David Reich's (2018) programmatic monograph on archaeogenetics. Foreshadowed by critical reviews of recent archaeogenetic research (Johannsen et al, 2017;Furholt, 2018;Hofmann, 2015), this publication has engendered immediate responses that argue for a more even-handed integration of genomic and archaeological datasets (Linderholm, 2018;Horsburgh, 2018;Vander Linden, 2018;Klein, 2018;Bandelt, 2018;Kirch, 2018). These responses, however, offer little in the way of concrete advice on how such an integration may be achieved methodologically.…”