ИСТИНА

Migration is a topic with utmost relevance for Europe’s future. The actual scepticism towards the actors of current migrations misses the vital importance of migration narratives for the construction of many present-day European nations’ identities. The spread of Indo-Europeans who hypothetically migrated westward from the Eurasian Steppe in the 3rd millennium BC as nomads has been considered to be the foundation myth of Europe since the 19th century. Research of prehistoric migrations in this epoch has recently gained new relevance through studies of ancient DNA. This interdisciplinary project is intended to scrutinise this migrationistic view of the Eurasian Bronze Age. An international and multidisciplinary team of scholars assembled from Germany, Russia, and Switzerland will be studying this subject with a broad range of bioarchaeological methods, including the analysis of stable isotopes and the anthropological and palaeopathological diagnosis of Bronze Age skeletal material. The bioarchaeological perspective provides glimpses of the realities of historical life of ancient peoples, regardless of the ritual or ideological dimension of their records, and operates at the bounds of human and natural sciences. The selected Bronze Age populations from the north Caucasus originally stem from a region that played a key role in the transfer and development of new tools and ways of life for all of western Eurasia in the 4th to 2nd millennium BC. In combination with the archaeological data, bioarchaeological factors can help distinguish wide-ranging migrations of large populations from local mobility or the transmission of ideas without movement. Comparable cultural phenomena such as the erection of monuments for the deceased as archives of a collective memory can reflect the transfer of a system of ideas. The same would be the result of the migration of groups with such a cultural practice. The search for patterns of mobility, e. g. due to a certain economic system, will focus on prehistoric population’s cultural praxis. The study is also intended to contribute to the current debate on migration and globalisation. A globalised world expedites cultural processes, reduces distances and fosters mobility. Wars and other crises can set off mass migrations with far-reaching consequences and cause the rapid displacement of large groups of people. At the same time, local communities are being confronted with the integration of newcomers. The archaeology of the epochs from the mid-4th millennium BC onward in which Eurasia underwent a first globalisation process with a new intensity of the exchange of ideas and presumably populations as well, demonstrates that such processes were at work also in the past. The foundations of many features of modern European societies, including the narrative of common Indo-European roots brought by immigrants to Europe in the 3rd millennium BC, lie in this distant epoch. Studying the mechanisms and causes of this early globalisation can help us better understand the long-term outlook of analogous processes.