Editing Migrationism and diffusionism (section)

==History==
"[[Diffusionism]]", in its original use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, did not preclude migration or invasion. It was rather the term for assumption of  ''any'' spread of cultural innovation, including by migration or invasion, as opposed "evolutionism", assuming the independent appearance of cultural innovation in a process of [[parallel evolution]], termed "cultural evolutionism".

Opposition to migrationism as argued in the 1970s had an ideological component of [[anti-nationalism]] derived from [[Marxist archaeology]], going back to [[V. Gordon Childe]], who during the [[interwar period]] combined "evolutionism" and "diffusionism" and argued an intermediate position that each society developed in its own way but was strongly influenced by the spread of ideas from elsewhere. 
In contrast to Childe's moderate position, which allowed the diffusion of ideas and even moderate migration, Soviet archaeology adhered to a form of extreme evolutionism, 
which explained all cultural change from the class tensions internal to prehistoric societies.<ref>"it was assumed that technologies develop because of internal contradictions within societies. This required that in any explanation of cultural change the principal emphasis had to be on the development of society. The standard series of technological ages was replaced by a unilinear sequence of social stages, each of which was characterised by distinctive productive forces, relations of production, and ideology. [...] Migration was ruled out as a mode of explaining changes in the archaeological record, and strong emphasis was placed on independent parallel development." Trigger, Bruce, ''Gordon Childe: Revolutions in Archaeology'' (1980), p 93</ref>

"Migrationism" fell from favour in mainstream western archeology in the 1970s. Adams (1978:483f.) described migrationism an "ad hoc explanation for cultural, linguistic, and racial change in such an extraordinary number of individual cases that to speak of a migrationist school of explanation seems wholly appropriate". Adams (p.&nbsp;484) argued that the predominance of migrationism "down to the middle of the last [19th] century" could be explained because it  "was and is the only explanation for culture change that can comfortably be reconciled with a literal interpretation of the Old Testament", and as such representing an outdated "[[creationist]]" view of prehistory, now to be challenged by "nonscriptural, anticreationist" views.
Adams (p.&nbsp;489) accepts only as "inescapable" migrationist scenarios that concern the [[early human migrations|first peopling]] of a region, such the first settlement of the Americas "by means of one or more migrations across the Bering land bridge"  and  "successive sweeps of Dorset and of Thule peoples across the Canadian Arctic".

While Adams criticized the migration of identifiable "peoples" or "tribes" was deconstructed as a "creationist" legacy based in biblical literalism, Smith (1966) had made a similar argument deconstructing the idea of "nations" or "tribes" as a "primordalistic" misconception based in modern nationalism.<ref>Anthony D. Smith, ''The Ethnic Origins of Nations'' (Oxford, 1966) pp. 6ff, coined the term "primordalistic" to separate these thinkers from those who view ethnicity as a situational construct.</ref> Historian [[Alex Woolf]] notes that "in the minds of some scholars, immobilism was charged with a left-wing caché {{sic}}<!--Google Books at https://books.google.com/books?id=oNWqBgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=immobilism%20was%20charged%20with%20a%20left-wing&f=false shows that the misspelling was original-->; those who showed too much interest in the ethnic or racial origin of the people they studied were, it was hinted, guilty of racist tendencies."<ref>Alex Woolf, ''From Pictland to Alba, 709-1070'' (2007: Edinburgh University Press), pp. 291</ref> 

While mainstream western archaeology maintained moderate scenarios of migrationism in spite of such criticism, it did move away from "invasionism". The mainstream view came to depict prehistoric cultural change as the result of gradual, limited migration of a small population that would consequently become influential in spreading new ideas but would contribute little to the succeeding culture's biological ancestry.

Thus, the mainstream position on the [[Neolithic Revolution]] in Europe as developed (notably by the German archaeologist Jens Lüning) since the 1980s, posits that "a small group of immigrants inducted the established inhabitants of Central Europe into sowing and milking" in a process spreading "in swift pace, in a spirit of 'peaceful cooperation'"<ref name="Milk"/>
Migration was generally seen as being a slow process, involving family groups moving into new areas and settling amongst the native population, described as "demic diffusion" or "wave of advance", in which population would be essentially [[sedentism|sedentary]] but expand by the colonisation of new territory by succeeding generations.

The question remained intractable until the arrival of [[archaeogenetics]] since the 1990s. The new field's rapid development since the 2000s has resulted in an increasing number of studies 
presenting quantitative estimates on the genetic impact of migrating populations. In several cases, that has led to a revival of the "invasionist" or "mass migration" scenario (in the case of the [[Neolithic Revolution]] in Europe<ref name="Milk">
Matthias Schulz, [http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/neolithic-immigration-how-middle-eastern-milk-drinkers-conquered-europe-a-723310.html Neolithic Immigration: How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe], ''[[Spiegel Online]]'' (2010).</ref>) or at least suggested that the extent of prehistoric migration had been underestimated (e.g. in the context of [[Indo-European expansion]], it was estimated that the people of the [[Yamnaya culture]] in Eastern Europe contributed to 73% of the ancestry of individuals pertaining to the [[Corded Ware culture]] in Germany, and to about 
40–54% to the ancestry of modern Central & Northern Europeans.<ref name=NYTimes>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/science/dna-deciphers-roots-of-modern-europeans.html |title=DNA Deciphers Roots of Modern Europeans |date=June 10, 2015 |first=Karl |last=Zimmer |newspaper=[[New York Times]] }}</ref><ref name=Nomads >[https://www.science.org/content/article/nomadic-herders-left-strong-genetic-mark-europeans-and-asians "Nomadic herders left a strong genetic mark on Europeans and Asians"], 10 June 2015, By Ann Gibbons, Science (AAAS)</ref>)

In British archaeology, the [[Anglo-Saxon migration debate]] has notably pitted the two schools against each other on the subject of the [[Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain]]. The traditional [[Anglo-Saxon migrationist]] view was that of a mass invasion in which the Anglo-Saxon incomers drove the native Romano-British inhabitants to the western fringes of the island. This was challenged in the latter half of the 20th century with [[Anglo-Saxon diffusionist|the hypothesis]] that only a small Anglo-Saxon "warrior elite" migrated who gradually acculturated the [[Romano-Britons]].<ref>Ward-Perkins, Bryan. [https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-pdf/115/462/513/9762424/513.pdf "Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British?"] The English Historical Review 115.462 (2000): page 523. [https://web.archive.org/web/20210927041727/https://academic.oup.com/ehr/article-pdf/115/462/513/9762424/513.pdf Archived] 27 September 2021 at the [[Wayback Machine]].</ref> This has moderated recently partly due to genetic studies of British populations with most scholars in Britain have returned to a more migrationist perspective and noted that the scale of both the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons and the survival of the Romano-Britons likely varied regionally.<ref>{{cite web|last=Dark|first=Ken R.|title=Large-scale population movements into and from Britain south of Hadrian's Wall in the fourth to sixth centuries AD|year=2003|url=https://www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/GCMS/RMS-2003-03_K._R._Dark,_Large-scale_population_movements_into_and_from_Britan_south_of_Hadrian's_Wall_in_the_fourth_to_sixth_centuries_AD.pdf}}</ref><ref name="Härke, Heinrich 2011">Härke, Heinrich. [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heinrich-Haerke/publication/272308208_Anglo-Saxon_Immigration_and_Ethnogenesis/links/5de5235092851c83645cda30/Anglo-Saxon-Immigration-and-Ethnogenesis.pdf "Anglo-Saxon Immigration and Ethnogenesis"]. ''Medieval Archaeology'' 55.1 (2011): 1–28. [https://web.archive.org/web/20210926033244/https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heinrich-Haerke/publication/272308208_Anglo-Saxon_Immigration_and_Ethnogenesis/links/5de5235092851c83645cda30/Anglo-Saxon-Immigration-and-Ethnogenesis.pdf Archived] 26 September 2021 at the [[Wayback Machine]].</ref>