Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migration

"Cabana and Clark have chosen to base their research into migration on careful study of how real people actually behave over time and space. We are well served by this rugged empiricism and by the multidisciplinary breadth of their approach."--Dean R. Snow, Pennsylvania State University

"A thorough survey of the ways in which anthropologists across the four subfields have defined and analyzed human migration."--John H. Relethford, author of Reflections of Our Past: How Human History Is Revealed in Our GenesAll too often, anthropologists study specific facets of human migration without guidance from the other subdisciplines (archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics) that can provide new insights on the topic. The equivocal results of these narrow studies often make the discussion of impact and consequences speculative.

In the last decade, however, anthropologists working independently in the four subdisciplines have developed powerful methodologies to detect and assess the scale of past migrations. Yet these advances are known only to a few specialized researchers.

Rethinking Anthropological Perspectives on Migrationbrings together these new methods in one volume and addresses innovative approaches to migration research that emerge from the collective effort of scholars from different intellectual backgrounds. Its contributors present a comprehensive anthropological exploration of the many topics related to human migration throughout the world, ranging from theoretical treatments to specific case studies derived primarily from the Americas prior to European contact.

Graciela S. Cabana is assistant professor of anthropology and director of the Molecular Anthropology Laboratories at the University of Tennessee. Jeffery J. Clark is a preservation archaeologist at the Center for Desert Archaeology in Tucson, Arizona.