Translocal Communities - Exploring Mobility and Migration in Sedentary Societies of the European Neolithic and Early Bronze Age

The aim of this paper is to explore the consequences of a new emphasis on migration and mobility to our views of European Neolithic societies. As a starting point, the modern notion of wholeness as a premise for our conceptualisation of social groups (such as settlement communities, or cultures) and social phenomena (such as migration) is criticized as a constituent flaw governing current approaches used to interpret prehistoric social organisation and its connection to the archaeological record. This critique results in the proposition of an alternative view on prehistoric social organisation in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Europe as well as a novel approach to the relation between distribution patterns of material culture found in the archaeological record and prehistoric spatial social organisation. By using a practice theoretical approach to material culture manufacture, two hypotheses are proposed: namely that 1) the social composition of Neolithic communities should, in general, be seen as socially heterogeneous and fluid and that 2), in opposition to what is widely assumed, a marked homogeneity of material culture in a region (the basis of definitions of `archaeological cultures') must be read as an expression of marked social heterogeneity within local settlement units. Instead of reifying archaeological cultures and taking their regional homogeneity as an indication of social homogeneity, it is proposed that the homogeneity of material culture in a region corresponds to the rate of population circulation resulting in a more socially heterogeneous composition of local residence groups. Finally, to complement this generalised view, a methodological approach by which to further explore the potentially very diverse phenomena of population circulation is proposed by using the data available in the archaeological record and the rich anthropological literature on migration and mobility.