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2. Migration in Fluid Social Landscapes
- University Press of Florida
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2 Migration in Fluid Social Landscapes Wesley R. Bernardini The minimal definition employed in this volume describes migration as “oneway residential location to a different ‘environment.’” This definition conceptualizes migration as a transgressive phenomenon involving the crossing of social boundaries. But what if both social boundaries and the groups we envision crossing them are less discrete than we had imagined? This chapter presents a cautionary note regarding boundedness in migration studies based on ethnographic and archaeological data from the U.S. Southwest, where precontact social borders were relatively fuzzy, units of migration were small and surprisingly unstable over time, and migration consisted not of singular disruptive “events” but rather a multigenerational sequential process. These conditions characterize what I term “fluid” social landscapes, and they present an analytical and conceptual challenge to even the minimal definition of migration utilized in this volume. Normative Models Migration is often assumed to occur in a social landscape with firm political boundaries and well-established ethnic identities. Prehistoric populations are understood to have had clear notions of “us” and “them,” of a homeland and “foreign” territories. Yet many ancient landscapes were more politically and ethnically continuous than discontinuous, complicating normative views of migrating groups and the process of movement (Bernardini 2005a). The notion that prehistoric social landscapes were divided into territorial blocks occupied by distinctive cultures has been common in both North American and European archaeology, though the origins of these normative models were slightly different. The emphasis in early European archaeology on finding ancestors of modern (state) populations and on tracing the cultural developments leading to modern ethnic/national groups led to widespread use of migration (and diffusion) as means of spreading “peoples” across the landscape. Such “wave-of-advance” models (Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza 32 Wesley R. Bernardini 1984) were used to explain the spread of a material culture, the presence of which was generally assumed to mark the spread of a known group of people (Clark 1994). In North America, in contrast, the view of indigenous populations as holdovers from the Stone Age led researchers to focus on defining the geographic boundaries of these timeless cultural units (Trigger 1989). That is, Native American tribes were viewed as “social fossils” whose development had stagnated at an early stage of cultural evolution and whose cultures and territories had persisted essentially unchanged across the centuries. Nevertheless, the end result in both the Old and New Worlds was similar, in that archaeological reconstructions depicted well-bounded culture areas often assumed to be equivalent to modern tribes (Duff 2002). In North America, then, much early twentieth-century archaeology was primarily descriptive and classificatory. In the U.S. Southwest (Figure 2.1), cultural taxonomy became not just a method but a set of assumptions about the nature and scale of human social organization as behavioral characteristics (common language, ideology, esprit de corps) were assigned to the populations of culture areas. Duff (2000, 2002) has charted the development of taxonomic concepts in the American Southwest, demonstrating that although researchers who first defined culture areas rarely made explicit statements about economic , social, or political integration of the populations living within them, subsequent researchers often assumed that a culture area was the prehistoric equivalent of a tribe. In a landscape partitioned by quasi-tribal boundaries (e.g., “Anasazi”1 or “Mogollon”), migration was conceptualized primarily as the movement from one culture area to another. The discovery of apparently intrusive “Anasazi” settlements in central Arizona (e.g., Haury 1958) provided support for this view. Culture areas were an important heuristic early archaeologists of the Southwest developed for establishing order in an ancient landscape about which very little was known at the time. They were not, however, explicitly designed for the purposes of investigating issues of cultural identity and population movement, at least as these questions are posed today. Assumptions about clear social boundaries between populations with deep historical roots are increasingly in conflict with data that demonstrates the fluidity of the prehistoric southwestern social landscape. Researchers have found, for example, that site-unit intrusions such as the classic example described by Haury (1958) were the exception rather than the rule in the long history of southwestern population movements (Cordell 1995). Much more common was the incremental movement of smaller groups of immigrants who did not express their identity in overt material culture at their destinations (Adams 1996; Cameron 1995; Dean 1970; Kintigh 1996; Lipe 1995; Marshall and Walt 1984; Reid 1989; [44.202.183.118] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:11...