ΜOVING FORWARD: STRONTIUM ISOTOPE MOBILITY RESEARCH IN THE AEGEAN

Abstract

Provenance, residential mobility and migration are recurrent themes in archaeological research. Since the 1980s, initially in America and Northern Europe, strontium isotope analysis of archaeological skeletal remains has revolutionized research on provenance and mobility. Nevertheless, such research normally identifies migration and mobility simply as events, rather than processes that need to be further characterized into their particulars. In Aegean Archaeology, more than ten years following the first ever announcement of strontium isotope results from Greece at the 10th Cretological Congress in 2006 and the first papers using this methodology, new to this context research teams have started to contribute into an ongoing scholarship in the field. Given the growing interest in this type of research, it is high time that we critically reviewed the data in hand. To this end, this paper discusses the more than 450 samples the author has analysed for strontium isotope ratio from the Aegean and reviews the potential and limitations of strontium research in this context. Drawing examples from published work, common pitfalls are flagged up with the intention to help strontium research to move forward. Further, in order to more effectively and systematically characterise past mobility and migration with a view to better understanding its motivations and consequences, we propose to combine a methodologically sound research with a theoretically informed social bioarchaeology of migration. We argue that the way forward for research of this kind is to move beyond a mere fingerprinting of migration/relocation episodes, towards an investigation of these themes in the ancient world through a different paradigm, wherein the individual is central and migration and mobility are studied themselves as multi-layered processes.