There and back again? Migration & the Creation of Europe in the 1st Millennium AD
At the Birth of Christ, the European landscape was divided into three highly disparate zones of social, economic, and political development, distributed broadly west to east: from the Atlantic coastline to the Ural Mts. By the year 1000, though important regional differences remained, much of this degree of difference had eroded. Large-scale and mostly Christian monarchies – several of them plausibly ancestral to modern European ‘nation’ states – ruled most of Europe, while, underneath, many of their constituent populations were engaged in increasingly complex and international economic, social, and cultural interactions. From this perspective, it is reasonable to argue that Europe – understood as a zone of evolving similarity and increasing intensity of interaction – was actually created in the first millennium AD.
When it first became possible to study this extraordinary transformation at all scientifically in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, large-scale closed-group migration was understood to have played a major role in driving the action. Many of the new monarchies were thought to have been established by ancient ‘peoples’ - biologically ancestral to the various European nations currently bidding for recognition and independence – who had carved out their respective homelands in the course of the first millennium: driving out any previous inhabitants. Then, in the half century from about 1960, so much of this vision of the deep European past was called into question by new methods and new bodies of data, that migration – certainly of large groups – was relegated to, at most, a minor walk-on part in the story. In the last few years, however, the study of ADna has brought biology and larger-scale migration back onto the intellectual agenda. So, what is the current direction of travel? Are we returning to an older, migration-heavy vision of the European past, and where does the rise of ADna leave the ever-evolving relationship of history and archaeology?
