The Bath Refilled: Migration in Archeology Again

Abstract

Chapman and Dolukhanov have produced a brief criticism of my theoretical stance on migration and a long dissection of the case study I used as an illustrative example. Their criticisms of my specific theory derive largely from misunderstandings, in my view, and therefore do not affect the model I proposed. They also question my basic theoretical premise, which is that uniformitarian models are necessary if we are to understand the archeological record. It is a great irony that in the current climate of anti-uniformitarian particularism, migration (almost a taboo word among processualists) should emerge as a phenomenon that is surprisingly amenable to processual, uniformitarian analysis. Contrary to Chapman and Dolukhanov, uniformitarian arguments have not been falsified as a class. A great many biophysical laws are accepted as relatively stable propositions about how the world works, even in archeology, and higher-level uniformitarian approaches, such as evolutionary theory in biology, have been modified over time without being rejected. Generally, it is the ecologicalfunctionalist uniformitarian theories that have been attacked in archeology with the most success, but this does not mean that all uniformitarian approaches are false. Neither do uniformitarian theories necessarily ignore history and local context; evolutionary theory in biology only served to emphasize the importance of local ecological conditions and population dynamics. The model I proposed correlates variables that might be considered ahistorical economic categories (focal as opposed to diffuse subsistence strategies, presence or absence of spatial unevenness in economic development, and cost of available transportation technologies) with contextspecific factors (the nature of social integration in the donor region, change in goal orientations between chronologically successive migrant groups, the importance of kinship linkages in defining the flow of information about the destination region, and the significance of ideology as a complicating factor in identifying proximate causes for migrations). In essence, I have argued that migration tends to be a patterned, structured behavior partially because it reacts to localized patterns in the flow of information about potential routes and destinations. Since so much human behavior