From Lampedusa to Trieste. An Archaeological Approach to Contemporary Forced Migrations and Identity Patterns

In recent times, the interest shown by archaeologists to the subject of migration has increased considerably. Even ten years ago the popularity of this research topic would have been unthinkable. With the advent of New Archaeology and Processualism in the 1970s, migration was almost completely rejected in most of Western Europe as a research field. This happened especially as a reaction to diffusionist paradigms, which relied heavily on migration as an explanatory tool to track the spread of innovations and new technologies, as well as wider changes to material culture (Trigger 1989). Colin Renfrew, one of the most illustrious advocates of Processualism, was vehemently opposed to the idea that metallurgy spread from the Near East to South-Eastern Europe. He argued instead that metallurgy developed autonomously in the Balkans and Iberia during the Copper Age rather than having been brought to that region, thus downplaying the role that population movements have in the diffusion of innovations (Renfrew 1969; 1970). The adoption of a processualist paradigm in interpreting the archaeological record demonstrated the pitfalls of an overly simplistic explanation for complex phenomena such as social transformation, the adoption and replication of new techniques. However, the one-dimensional results of autochthonism led archaeological researchers to consider migration as a taboo topic.