Blurb:

Overview of volume's scope and contents.


The volume springs from two events. One was the session ‘Moving on—colonization as a social process’, organised by Håkon Glørstad, Jarmo Kankaanpää and Ole Grøn at the European Association of Archaeologists conference in Helsinki in September 2012. The other was a conference in Oslo in December 2012, ‘Past mirrors: interaction and integration in the North Sea region in the Bronze and Viking ages’, which was held jointly by the Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, organised by Zanette Glørstad and Lene Melheim. Both sessions encouraged theoretical and methodological discussion about the effects and conditions of human mobility, and the material aspects of cultural encounters in past contexts, prehistoric as well as historical. The authors of the current volume have been invited to share their viewpoints and observations on the viability of cross-period perspectives, as well as on the future of the use of anthropological and historical analogies in archae- ology. The outcome of using such a wide spectrum of perspectives is commented upon in an epilogue by a prudent advocate of comparative methodologies, Matthew Spriggs.

The volume is divided into three parts: (1) Colonisation, examining how to approach and understand various processes of colonisation in prehistory and history; (2) Maritime Interaction, focusing on the maritime environment and the signi cance of the sea as both a physical obstacle and a highway, as well as a mental and ideological threshold; (3) Cultural Integration, explored as a topic in the wake of migrations or as an aspect of societies with a strong maritime focus.