Introduction: Mobilities in Contemporary and Historical Archaeology

In praise of outlaws

“…Synthesizing this archaeological work demonstrates that the movement of agropastoralist chiefdoms prior to the lifaqane has been historically understated, creating an overstated contrast in regional historiography between lifaqane -period chaotic migration and earlier sedentism. Such revisions join a more global archaeological turn towards mobility, which critiques equations of demographic shifts with turmoil and aberrant behaviour (Beaudry and Parno 2013; Van Dommelen 2014). One outcome of these interpretive shifts is that narratives of 19th-century southern African political disruptions no longer appear so cataclysmic or so atypical, but rather as variations on or recontextualizations of earlier practices.…”

To the City Up North: African American Migration from Antioch Colony to Austin, Texas, 1900–1940

“…For a discipline that traditionally relies on recovering objects and features as its main mode of analysis into past human action, there are few objects that convey the nature and experience of movement through space (Burmeister ). Thus, an archaeology that considers migration often requires that archaeologists move past static understandings of place, space, material culture, and human action in order to sufficiently address themes of migration (Beaudry and Parno ). To move past these static understandings, however, would require archaeologists to apply their training to a wider array of data sources in order to excavate usages of space, place, and landscapes “buried” within other lines of evidence (Byrne ).…”

Philipp W. Stockhammer and Joseph Maran, eds. Appropriating Innovations: Entangled Knowledge in Eurasia 5000–1500bce(Oxford & Philadelphia: Oxbow, 2017, iv and 268pp., several colour and b/w illustrations and maps, hbk, ISBN 978-1-78570-724-7)

“…Some focus on the movement of things and how these mediated intercultural contacts, social relations, and identities in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East (van Dommelen & Knapp, 2010; Maran & Stockhammer, 2012). Others have a more explicit emphasis on the theoretical underpinnings of what it means to develop an archaeology of mobility, by focusing on the trajectories of people and things (Beaudry & Parno, 2013) and itineraries and biographies of things (Hahn & Weiss, 2013; Joyce & Gillespie, 2015). The transmission/adoption of knowledge has also been addressed in two novel volumes (Roddick & Stahl, 2016; Kiriatzi & Knappett, 2016), both drawing on the influential notion of ‘communities of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991), which addresses how situated learning and communities of practice mediate the emergence of knowledge and relations/connectivity across multiple temporal and spatial scales.…”