ESTABLISHING THE COURSE OF INQUIRY

The great methodological advances in the archaeological identification of ancient migration conducted in the 1990s (e.g., Burmeister 2000; Anthony 1990; 1997; 2000) were achieved by implementing insights gathered from anthropological and historical case studies. The use of explicit and sound methodology to study migration effectively ended the dislike that, in the 1980s, many “new” archaeologists felt for migrationist explanations, which many archaeologists had used until then as magical, catchall explanations for material cultural change.

The theoretical advances in the study of migration have greatly benefited, and still do, from studies of historical archaeology (e.g., Cheek 1998; Deetz 1996; Diehl, Waters, and Thiel 1998). Such studies are an excellent source of specific insights and theoretical approaches for any research dealing with migration. Because this field was practically born in the New World, much of it deals with different aspects of migration and settlement in the Americas and elsewhere. It is therefore traditionally theoretically sensitive to questions of colonial interaction and migration, and it is usually supplemented by much better literary sources than are any of the cases of ancient colonization.