The History and Future of Migrationist Explanations in the Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands with a Synthetic Model o
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The History and Future of Migrationist Explanations in the Archaeology of the Eastern Woodlands with a Synthetic Model of Woodland Period Migrations on the Gulf Coast Thomas J. Pluckhahn1 · Neill J. Wallis2 · Victor D. Thompson3
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Migration was embraced as a general phenomenon by cultural historical archaeologists in the Eastern Woodlands, subsequently rejected by processualists, and recently invoked again with greater frequency due to advances in both method and theory. However, challenges remain in regard to establishing temporal correlations between source and host regions and identifying the specific mechanisms of migration and their archaeological correlates. Bayesian modeling, in combination with insights from recent modeling of migration processes, supports the inference that migration was a causal factor for shifts in settlement observed in the archaeology of the Woodland period (ca. 1000 BC to AD 1050) cultures of the eastern Gulf Coast subregion. Keywords Migration · Bayesian modeling · Woodland period · Gulf Coast
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1081 4-019-09140-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Thomas J. Pluckhahn [email protected] Neill J. Wallis [email protected] Victor D. Thompson [email protected] 1
Department of Anthropology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620‑8100, USA
2
Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611‑7800, USA
3
Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
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Journal of Archaeological Research
Introduction Perhaps no topic is so universal to human societies and yet so vexing to archaeological interpretation as migration (Anthony 1990, p. 895; Baker and Tsuda 2015, p. 3; Burmeister 2017, p. 57; Cabana and Clark 2011, pp. 1–3; Gori et al. 2018, p. 1; Härke 1998, 2004; van Dommelen 2014, p. 477). As Hakenbeck (2008, p. 21) notes, for the past 150 years “the study of migrations in archaeology developed in constant tension with research that favours autochthonous developments as explanation for change.” Cultural historians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries relied heavily on migration and diffusion to explain cultural changes, often equating material culture complexes (mostly ceramic types) with ethnic groups and modeling migrations of these groups en masse across long distances (Cabana 2011, pp. 18–19; Trigger 2004, pp. 153–154). The ensuing “retreat from migrationism” (Adams et al. 1978, p. 483) and interpretive “immobilism” (Härke 2004, p. 453), which developed over the course of the later 20th century have been attributed to shifts in both theory and method. The development of systems and ecological approaches directed attention to the internal dynamics of societies, and the adoption of neo-evolutionary perspectives enforced a perception of more gradual change (e.g., Binford 196
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