New book by Dr Catherine Frieman, Negotiating Migrations: The Archaeology and Politics of Mobility

Daniela Hofmann (Author) , Catherine J. Frieman (Author) , Martin Furholt (Author) , Stefan Burmeister (Author) , Niels Nørkjær Johannsen (Author)

The movement of people, things, practices, and ideas has long been a part of archaeological research. The advent of affordable and fine-grained ancient genetic and biomolecular data has only increased this interest in how and where and when people moved. While these data (and others) make clear that individuals, larger groups, and even whole communities were on the move at different times in the past, there has been little attention paid to the social and political context of these migrations or their impact on the people migrating and those they encountered on the way. This monograph attempts to fill the gap. It develops a framework for understanding past migrations through the lens of small-scale politics, that is the everyday negotiations between individuals and communities. It derives from an international project funded by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo, and (ironically) carried out when the authors were unable to travel to work together in-person due to the pandemic.

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

It's open access and free to download from here: https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781350427693

 Open access was funded by the Centre of Advanced Studies in Oslo.