Ancient Migrations

Don’t believe the arrows.

I was looking at a map with a broad red arrow illustrating a migration.  I knew something about this particular movement of people and thought, shaking my head “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”  In the next moment I realized “Y’know, that’s probably true of every arrow on a map I have seen for the last 60 years.  Duh.”  So I am going to explain something to you fairly uselessly, as you either already knew it, or saw the obviousness of it immediately as well.

Most of us have a mind-picture of tribal movements as continuous in one direction at a constant pace. We get this from the conventions of mapping, which illustrate migration with arrows. Broad arrows, line arrows, forking arrows, all look so nice and smooth. It ain’t so. It’s not a complete fiction, as in a pure form, this is sometimes what happens.  One people is invading, or fleeing from invaders, and moves as a group into a new territory.  Or more slowly, one group outcompetes another in some other way, usually better food production, resulting in more descendants, and it gradually moves across the landscape taking the territory of the previous inhabitants, until hits some natural boundary or comes upon a situation where its toolkit is no longer superior and the migration grinds to a halt.  Those things do happen.

But more often it is choppy, with back-migration or remaining in place for a generation or ten before moving on, and not always in the same direction they came in by. This should not be strange to us, because it is what happened in America, both before colonization among the indigenous peoples, and on into the present day.  The main movement is likely solid in one direction.  People had a reason for leaving place A and going to place B, whether a push or a pull, and those often have continuity. They moved south along the Pacific coast because it was getting crowded at the local fishing spots, and a river mouth ten miles down was uninhabited.  Yet even then, people go back to trade, or for ceremonies, or for mates, not always temporarily. Some groups do it more than others.  It still happens among Greek families, of children sent back to live with grandparents for a summer or a few years, while nephews come temporarily to America to work in a restaurant and decide if they like it.  (At least, this was still happening in New England until twenty years ago.  I am no longer contact with many local Greeks.) Several nations have right of return that the last few generations have availed themselves of.  Immigration from all of Great Britain has included back-migration from earliest colonial days, right through to the present.

Our internal migration shows similar patterns. The general trend has been westward, and people usually go where some kinsman or familiarity awaits them, so there are broad trends of Scots-Irish from Appalachia settling the Ozarks and beyond, while Northern Europeans in general moved from New England across the top of the country all the way to Portland, OR,  named for Portland, ME via coin flip. (Boston was the other choice.) But some heading west hit upon a good job in St. Louis, or heard about one in Chicago, or decided decided to head back to Oklahoma Georgia Kansas Tennessee...

Nor are these mutually exclusive. They are new every generation, and in a century a group driving its animals to fresh pasture may in fact be driving it back without realizing it, onto lands their great-grandfathers used as invading space.   We also have a sense of cultural continuity that might not be present. If newcomers adopt the local language, as the Normans did in France, the connection is severed in the third generation.  If a few decide to migrate north again, back across the same sea route their ancestors came, they cannot magically resume speaking Old Norse when they get there, any more than American blacks could automatically pick up Yoruba if they decided to.  Such things happened in prehistory as well.  If you moved inland, your children and grandchildren lost the ability to fish the ocean. Continuity is usual – we speak our parents’ language and adopt a lot of their culture.  But discontinuity is fairly common.The arrows on the migration maps show only the continuities.