Making Journeys

Despite notable explorations of past dynamics, much of the archaeological literature on mobility remains dominated by accounts of earlier prehistoric gatherer-hunters, or the long-distance exchange of materials. Refinements of scientific dating techniques, isotope, trace element and aDNA analyses, in conjunction with phenomenological investigation, computer-aided landscape modelling and GIS-style approaches to large data sets, allow us to follow the movement of people, animals and objects in the past with greater precision and conviction. One route into exploring mobility in the past may be through exploring the movements and biographies of artefacts. Challenges lie not only in tracing the origins and final destinations of objects but in the less tangible ‘in between’ journeys and the hands they passed through. Biographical approaches to artefacts include the recognition that culture contact and hybridity affect material culture in meaningful ways. Furthermore, discrete and bounded ‘sites’ still dominate archaeological inquiry, leaving the spaces and connectivities between features and settlements unmapped. These are linked to an under-explored middle-spectrum of mobility, a range nestled between everyday movements and one-off ambitious voyages. We wish to explore how these travels involved entangled meshworks of people, animals, objects, knowledge sets and identities. By crossing and re-crossing cultural, contextual and tenurial boundaries, such journeys could create diasporic and novel communities, ideas and materialities.

This volume adds an excellent contribution to renewed interest in mobility and movement, particularly in going some way to bridging the theoretical gap between ‘here’ and ‘there’ and demonstrating the importance of the journey.

Catriona Gibson is a post-doctoral researcher on the project Grave Goods: Objects and Death in later Prehistoric Britain, based at the University of Reading, where she also obtained her PhD. She has worked extensively in both commercial and academic archaeology. Her research interests include exploring evidence for connectivity and mobility during later prehistory, and forging stronger links between developer-led and academic archaeology. Kerri Cleary's research focuses on later prehistoric Ireland, with an emphasis on the archaeology, landscapes and material culture of funerary, ceremonial and settlement sites. Her most recent role was as Research Fellow on the multidisciplinary AHRC-project, Atlantic Europe in the Metal Ages: Questions of shared language. Catherine J Frieman is the Lecturer in European Archaeology at the Australian National University. Her research primarily concerns the transition from Stone Age to Metal Age via the close study of Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age lithic artefacts. She has ongoing collaborations in Australia, Japan, Vietnam and Britain where she is currently coordinating the excavation and survey of later prehistoric sites in south-eastern Cornwall.