The Invasion Hypothesis in British Archaeology

Abstract

The last 150 years of archaeological writing in Britain have seen the adoption and propagation of many models of thought, of which the most influential, necessary and popular was the technological model of the successive ages of Stone, Bronze and Iron. In this article the Disney Professor of Archaeology in the University of Cambridge, England, examines the majority of instances they will be recognized as the work of Professor Stuart Piggott. ANTIQUITY OFFPRINTSThe first three titles in our new series of ANTIQUITY offprints are now available. These are:

The Beaker phenomenon and the genomic transformation of northwest Europe

“…This idea of a ‘Beaker Folk’ became unpopular after the 1960s as scepticism grew about the role of migration in mediating change in archaeological cultures 26 , although J.G.D. Clark speculated that the Beaker Complex expansion into Britain was an exception 27 , a prediction that has now been borne out by ancient genomic data.…”

Ancient DNA, pig domestication, and the spread of the Neolithic into Europe

“…remain poorly understood despite decades of research. The question of how the Neolithic ''package'' first arrived in Europe has focused on three primary hypotheses that assert that the European Neolithic resulted from (i) the migration of immigrant farmers from the Near East [demic diffusion (1)(2)(3)], (ii) the transmission of ideas through established trade and exchange networks (cultural diffusion), or (iii) the independent development of agriculture (including the domestication of some animals such as pigs and cattle) by indigenous European Mesolithic cultures (4,5), although it has been pointed out that these explanations are not mutually exclusive (6). A separate but related debate has focused on the degree and nature of the interaction between proposed incoming Near Eastern populations and indigenous cultures.…”

The Residue of Colonial Anthropology in the History and Political Discourse of Northern Ghana: Critique and Revision

“…In European historiography, the assumption that change normally resulted from the influx of better endowed peoples was not seriously challenged until 1966, partly because carbon dating made better chronology possible and partly because, in the aftermath of World War II, a new generation of historians grew up who did not share the myths of race and the mystique of empire. 14 In Dagbon, historians and others, beginning with Tamakloe, a southerner in British employ who published one of the first versions of the drum history, have always gone to the capital, Yendi, for authoritative drum history; such recitations are always politically slanted and vary to some extent in different contexts. 15 For Gonja, D. H. Jones offers a thoroughgoing critique of such sources, which are not history as we think of it and are 'clearly as much an historical justification of present rights as an orally preserved memory of past events'.…”