Talk:Migrationism and diffusionism

terminology
I have a hard time figuring out what is going on.

Before WWII, it seems that "diffusionism" means what is now meant by "migrationism", i.e. the explanation that culture spreads. The debate seems to have been if culture does, in fact, spread at all, or if it "evolves" in parallel due to parallel pressures (especially in the context of the Marxist idea that societal development is predetermined anyway, so no wonder cultures resemble one another, they are all on the same trajectory). Since pure "evolutionism" seems pretty untenable, Childe's "moderate diffusionism" meant that yeah, societies develop on their trajectory as per Marx, but let's admit that there was some external influence.

Now, by the late 1970s, it seems that everyone accepts that archaeological cultures show a pattern of being derived from one another. The question is now, is it "migrationism", i.e. people walk from A to B and take their culture with them, or is it "diffusionism", i.e. people hear of a good idea or buy some nice piece of pottery, and start imitating this in their own country. Note that "diffusionism" pre-WWII covered both the "migrationism" and "diffusionism" of the 1970s. So "migrationism" is now a new subset of Childe's "moderate diffusionism", but the position now held by (Marxist?) purists becomes "diffusionism" in the sense of "there was no migration".

Now add to this the suggestion that "migrationism" can also refer to the mainstream (not purist Marxist-progressive) approach held in the late 20th century that migration always played a role, but you were well-advised to assume the absolute minimum of migration that was at all compatible with your data. Here, "migrationism" contrasts with "invasionism". This use of terminology was in the article as I found it, but I haven't really been able to verify it. --dab (𒁳) 13:47, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

I found some more sources on the topic and I think I got it right now. The problem was that the previous content in these articles was extremely misleading, or false. It would have been easier and quicker for me to start from scratch. --dab (𒁳) 14:19, 19 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Thanks. Some other sources:,, , and . Doug Weller (talk) 15:19, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
 * The second link is especially interesting, phrasing it as a "retreat from migrationism". This topic is absolutely typical, it appears all of the historical or anthropological sciences are simply suffused by 1970s revisionism, it regularly goes this way: early 20th century scholarship was extremely erudite and made surprisingly accurate predictions based on the material available then. In the 1970s, Marxist or "postmodernist" theory gained the upper hand in western academia, and everything was thrown out as outmoded, imperialist, etc.; the new "consensus" lasted for a mere 20 years, during the 1970s and 1980s, before it was again thrown out as ideological delusion by mere weight of evidence in expert literature, but for some reason, what should have been a weird post-war ideological interlude apparently manages to hold on in popular literature to the present day, and is presented as "mainstream" even now, more than 20 years after it became untenable, simply because mainstream ideological prejudice has cast what turned out to be factual as somehow political inopportune or "incorrect". This archaeological topic is just an example for this, but perhaps a fortunate example, because it isn't poisoned by popular interest attached to anything remotely connected to "race" or "colonialism" (it's mostly Eurasians invading other Eurasians, so no political correctness conditioning is triggered). I have only become aware of the immense size of this problem in recent years (not least due to Wikipedia, and Wikipedia-inspired further reading); academia has lost at least 30 years to this, and it's still not fully recovered. As I was intellectually socialised in the 1980s and 1990s, I had to come to terms with pretty much everything I had been taught as "consensus" being a short-lived ideological disturbance of actual academic tradition. --dab (𒁳) 11:37, 22 August 2015 (UTC)