{"id":48578,"date":"2022-06-16T09:02:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-16T08:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cupblog.bluefusesystems.com\/?p=48578"},"modified":"2022-06-15T13:12:17","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T12:12:17","slug":"understanding-migration-through-ancient-dna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2022\/06\/16\/understanding-migration-through-ancient-dna\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding migration through ancient DNA"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One of the most exciting developments in archaeology over the past few years has been the rapid growth in population-scale studies using ancient DNA. Genome-wide analysis of ancient individuals can now provide extraordinary insights into issues of population diversity, movement, and continuity in the distant past, enabling us to address (and even settle) some long-standing archaeological questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last year, we published a paper in Antiquity<\/a><\/em> dealing with the impact of aDNA analysis on our understanding of the spread of the Beaker Complex into Britain from Continental Europe in the mid-third millennium BCE. This period, which saw the introduction of copper metallurgy, distinctive beaker pottery, and a range of other cultural changes, can now also be shown to have witnessed a massive genetic turnover. Indeed, by the end of the third millennium there was a replacement of a minimum of 90% of the gene pool in Britain. It is fair to say that this represents a far higher genetic impact than any of our team had expected. This result is even more remarkable since the same study shows that the Beaker Complex in Continental Europe spread across communities with very different genetic profiles. But in Britain it was accompanied by the movement of people on a substantial scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Image
Beaker vessel from Wetwang Slack, East Yorkshire (Wetwang\/Garton Slack archive)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The idea that major cultural changes were routinely caused by population movement has largely fallen from favour amongst archaeologists in recent decades. In part, this was due to the over-use of migration as an explanatory concept in the early days of the discipline, when almost any new burial rite, technology or pottery form could be ascribed to the arrival of new people. Such \u2018invasionist\u2019 interpretations were clearly open to political exploitation, most notoriously in the case of Gustaf Kossinna, whose theories on Germanic ethnicity and expansionism were used to justify Nazi territorial claims in the 1930s. With the development of processual archaeology in the 1950s and \u201860s, this reliance on migration as an explanatory tool was increasingly seen as simplistic and misguided.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is this legacy that has perhaps caused archaeologists to under-theorise migration and to downplay the impact of population movement in prehistory. With the advent of aDNA analysis, however, this is no longer an option. Demographically transformative population movements can now be identified at key points in European prehistory. The westward movement of Yamnaya pastoralists in the third millennium BCE is a notable case in point. The movement of the Beaker Complex into Britain is another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Migration is not reducible to invasion or colonisation by technologically advanced outsiders, as was often implicit in early archaeological writings. In the contemporary world, large-scale migration typically involves marginalised people displaced by conflict or climate change. The challenge for archaeologists now is to contextualise and seek to understand the demographic processes that underlie prehistoric population movements at specific times and places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The return of the Beaker Folk? Rethinking migration and population change in British prehistory<\/a> by Ian Armit and David Reich is out now (open access) in the journal Antiquity<\/em>. The article authors are also the recipients of the Antiquity Prize 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image: Beaker vessel from Wetwang Slack, East Yorkshire (Wetwang\/Garton Slack archive)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the most exciting developments in archaeology over the past few years has been the rapid growth in population-scale studies using ancient DNA. Genome-wide analysis of ancient individuals can now provide extraordinary insights into issues of population diversity, movement, and continuity in the distant past, enabling us to address (and even settle) some long-standing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":822,"featured_media":48608,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2263,6],"tags":[6780,352],"coauthors":[9957,9958],"class_list":["post-48578","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archaeology","category-humanities","tag-aqy","tag-archaeology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/822"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48578"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48611,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48578\/revisions\/48611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48578"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=48578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}