Migrationism and diffusionism

"[T]he rise, fall and recovery of migration models is partly embedded in paradigm shifts in archaeological theory, with all the socio-political factors of academic competition that are entailed. ... The insistent clamour of the homeless, the migrant and the refugee is rarely still and we cannot but face its consequences on an academic as well as a human level."

"Migrationists consider that movement of people is responsible for the movement of pottery assemblages, and they think that it suffices to demonstrate that potteries have moved to demonstrate the migrations."

"There are several generations of archaeologists living in Europe whose life experiences bore the often devastating effects of invasions and migrations in two World Wars and their aftermaths. It is hard to resist the notion that these personal experiences did have an effect on the models of explanation which they proposed... I suggest... that the personal impact of migrations and invasions on archaeologists has been a factor much underestimated in past "explanation" of the changing modes of archaeological explanation. I would like to suggest that there is a yet largely untapped reservoir of information and insight about the writing of archaeological texts relating to the subjective experiences of scholars."

"These interpretations suggest the simple equation that 'material culture = people = language‘... Processual and post-processual developments in archaeological theory have surely enabled us to abandon such crude equations and to acknowledge that the dynamics of material culture, ethnicity and language are far more complex."

"The critical point is that language and ethnic shift can take place without radical change in the material particulars of life and with an amount of change in the gene pool so small as to be for all practical purposes undetectable. We should not replace the fallacy of assigning all significant culture change to migration with the fallacy of thinking that language shift and the spread of new ethnic self-identification occur only with major or radical cultural transformations."

"The linguistic attributes are mapped onto archaeological correlates: artifacts are selected, like the chariot, as well as ecofacts, like agriculture, or whole archaeological cultures (material assemblages). The archaeological correlates become some sort of labels or tags that one may employ in order to trace the supposed Indo-European populations. But, in fact, very little of the illustrative archaeological material actually exhibits specific Indo-European or Indo-Iranian traits; a question therefore arises: what is the relevance of archaeological material if any sort of assemblage present at the expected or supposed time/space spot can function as the tag of a linguistic group?"

"At one time social anthropologists used to complain that their archeologist colleagues had no sense of the overall coherence of human societies. Now [prehistorians] have become committed to a functionalism of a wholly naive sort. They seem to assume that cultural systems and language systems are bonded together and intrinsically stable over long periods of time. If societies are left alone, they stay put; otherwise, they roll across the landscape like impermeable billiard balls. If the archeological record shows that in fact changes have occurred, their occurrence is always explained as the conse­quence of a movement of population that carries with it the products (both material and immaterial) of a preexisting, alien, self-contained culture. As a rule, the alleged movement of people takes the form of a military conquest."

"If we count the gradual increase of china in Indian houses during the recent decades, and sit down to judge as future archaeologists with as mechanical an approach as is evident among those who equate pottery with people, we would find the entire country suffused by a new people. The same inference would be drawn from the sudden popularity of stainless steel followed by aluminum alloy and the like."