Making Journeys: Archaeologies of Mobility

Despite notable explorations of past dynamics, much of the archaeological literature on mobility remains dominated by accounts of earlier prehistoric gatherer-hunters, or the long-distance exchange of materials. Refinements of scientific dating techniques, isotope, trace element and aDNA analyses, in conjunction with phenomenological investigation, computer-aided landscape modelling and GIS-style approaches to large data sets, allow us to follow the movement of people, animals and objects in the past with greater precision and conviction. One route into exploring mobility in the past may be through exploring the movements and biographies of artefacts. Challenges lie not only in tracing the origins and final destinations of objects but in the less tangible ‘in between’ journeys and the hands they passed through. Biographical approaches to artefacts include the recognition that culture contact and hybridity affect material culture in meaningful ways. Furthermore, discrete and bounded ‘sites’ still dominate archaeological inquiry, leaving the spaces and connectivities between features and settlements unmapped. These are linked to an under-explored middle-spectrum of mobility, a range nestled between everyday movements and one-off ambitious voyages. We wish to explore how these travels involved entangled meshworks of people, animals, objects, knowledge sets and identities. By crossing and re-crossing cultural, contextual and tenurial boundaries, such journeys could create diasporic and novel communities, ideas and materialities.

Table of Contents

Blurring boundaries and celebrating transience: a movement towards archaeologies of in-betweeness
Catriona Gibson and Adrian Chadwick

Following 'footprints' across an Icelandic landscape
Oscar Aldred

On a Wing: Exploring the Micro and Macro Mobility of Domestic Fowl
Julia Best

Reassessing the Roles of History and Tradition during Social Change among Bronze Age Pastoral Communities on the Russian Steppe, 1700 – 900 BC
James Johnson

Itineraries of pottery: a mixed methods approach to mobility
Caroline Heitz and Regine Stapfer

Making Journeys: Bronze Age Wayfaring and the monumentalised landscape
Catherine Frieman and James Lewis

A walk on the wild side: off-site occupation during the Irish Bronze Age
Kerri Cleary

Moving beyond sites; inter-regional mobility and social reconstruction in the prehistoric Fens
Floor Huisman

Interpretations of strontium isotope ratios of the megalithic population in Falbygden, Sweden
Malou Blank

Travelling lines: linear earthworks and movement on the prehistoric Yorkshire Wolds
Emily Fioccoprile

The role of persistent places in navigation
Yolande O’Brien

From self-sufficiency to interdependence: changes in the Cypriote socio-economic structure in the light of mobility during the Second millennium BC
Francesca Chelazzi

Choreography of existence: landscapes and movement
Dimitriij Mlekuz

Catriona D. Gibson is a post-doctoral researcher on the project Grave Goods: Objects and Death in later Prehistoric Britain, based at the University of Reading, where she also obtained her PhD. She has worked extensively in both commercial and academic archaeology. Her research interests include exploring evidence for connectivity and mobility during later prehistory, and forging stronger links between developer-led and academic archaeology.

Kerri Cleary's research focuses on later prehistoric Ireland, with an emphasis on the archaeology, landscapes and material culture of funerary, ceremonial and settlement sites. Her most recent role was as Research Fellow on the multidisciplinary AHRC-project, Atlantic Europe in the Metal Ages: Questions of shared language.

Catherine J. Frieman is a senior lecturer in European archaeology at the Australian National University, Canberra. She is a specialist in knapped and ground-stone tools and currently has field projects in the Europe and Australia. Her research interests include the nature of archaeological inquiry, the spread and adoption of innovations, skeuomorphism, and the beginning of the Metal Ages.