Archaeologists and Migrations

Abstract

A close look at the attitudes of Anglophone and German archaeologists towards the question of migrations suggests that they have been shaped by factors which have more to do with the present than with the archaeological past. The changes in British attitudes are perhaps most clearly linked to the political, social, and intellectual context. By contrast, German archaeologists' views on this subject have changed much less, and there is still a strong migrationist undercurrent, rarely reflected upon, in their thinking. The link between migrations and political context becomes most obvious in cases where archaeologists' political masters took an interest in past migrations and proposed or even dictated attitudes and explanations concerning this question. Cases in point are the migrationism of Nazi archaeology and the immobilism of Soviet archaeology.