that these “peoples” originally lived in or close to the Urheimat, wherever that
may have been, and that eventually each of them made a very long trek—a Volks -
wanderung—from its original home to the land where the subgroup was located
in historical times. Belief in prehistoric folk migrations was supported by the ancient
accounts of actual migrations: of the Cimbri and Teutons expelled from their
homeland by an encroachment of the sea in the second century BC, or of the
Visigoths and other Germanic coalitions fleeing from the Huns 500 years later.
In addition to these historical migrations were fanciful stories about national
migrations, all very familiar to Europeans in the nineteenth century. Herodotos
told several such stories, but more influential was the biblical story of two million
Israelites making their 40-year journey from Egypt to Canaan. In the nineteenth
and early twentieth century, then, the imagined Volkswanderungfeatured a nation
moving solidly together over a considerable distance before finally and violently
seizing a new land in which to live.
Early archaeologists were keen to find evidence for migrations in prehistory.
Destruction of settlements, and even a change in the material assemblage, was
interpreted to mean that a folk migration had occurred. Linguists accepted the
identification of “new pots” with “new peoples,” and so explained the replacement
of one language by another. As Colin Renfrew remarked in Archaeology and
Language, “Sometimes, when reading the earlier literature, you would think that
every time the style of pottery in use in a village changed, the transition must
have been accompanied by a total change of population, and with it of language.”
But the literature has changed, Renfrew continued, and “one of the most striking
shifts in archaeological thought in the past few years has been the realization that
there have been far fewer wholesale migrations of people than had once been
thought.”^13 The prehistory of Britain was once seen as a long series of invasions
from the continent, but in 1966 Grahame Clark argued that from the beginning
of the Neolithic period to the Roman conquest only once had Britain been overrun
by continentals (who brought their Bell Beakers with them). Even a folk migration
to Britain by a Bell Beaker people, Renfrew observed, “would today be discounted
by most scholars.”^14
Belief in prehistoric folk migrations, which should always have been suspect,
began to decline with historians’ recognition that—with a very few exceptions—
nations, or Völker, in antiquity were nothing more robust than language com -
munities. As language communities, they were indeed “as old as history,” as Walter
Bagehot described them, but nationalism and national solidarity certainly were
not: nations as agents in history were not of much importance until the eighteenth
century. This perception began with Marxists, who protested against nationalism
for ideological reasons. Serious study of nationalism was launched in the 1930s
and 1940s, and 40 years later it culminated in books by Ernest Gellner, Benedict
Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. Migrationism was also undermined by a closer
study of the artifacts. Archaeologists found that many of what were initially
regarded as breaks in the material record could be better explained, on more careful
analysis, as evolutions from one technique or one style to another. By the 1960s
archaeologists were sloughing off their belief in prehistoric Völkerwanderungen,
4 Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European