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This chapter will explore how children experienced a sense of community and family within the context of migration, focusing on case studies from the nineteenth century and the Viking Age. In particular, the chapter will look at two main migratory contexts: transnational and internal migration. There has been extensive research on migration in diverse contexts and time periods by archaeologists, but the experiences of children of migration have largely been unexplored. Analysis of recent migrations, principally by social scientists, has highlighted the distinctive experiences that children may have of migration, and revealed that children are often important mediators of the ensuing cultural interaction and assimilation, being particularly socially adept at extending adult social networks in new settings. Children can, indeed, be shown to shape the migratory experience in fundamental ways.

Stable isotope analysis is firmly established as a method for the investigation of past population mobility. The distinction between local and non-local individuals within a cemetery population relies on identifying an individual’s place of childhood residence through the analysis of strontium and oxygen isotopes present in human tooth enamel. Traditionally, studies investigating mobility focus on the analysis of a single tooth. More recently, however, it has become apparent that in order to investigate the mobility of an individual during childhood—and thus to consider the importance of children in the migration process—it is necessary to analyse a series of teeth which form at different stages during the early years of life. This chapter will consider the potential of—and challenges surrounding—this scientific approach to the investigation of childhood mobility in the past.

Mobility concerns the ways and logics of movement from place to place. Understanding hunter-gatherer mobility across the landscape is always located in the ontology of the observer, and must therefore take into account the perspectives from which we try to make sense of past mobility. This article explores and critiques past and current approaches to landscapes of mobility, and present future directions, reflecting on implications for how we have come to construct very particular understandings of the past. It concludes by discussing how archaeological modelling constructs its own myths based on ontological pre-understandings, and the role that the archaeology of landscapes of hunter-gatherer mobility has played in this.

Movement is a fundamental concept among Native peoples of the American Southwest, and early archaeologists adopted a strong interest in migration from Native groups with whom they interacted. Over the past two decades, southwest archaeologists have made significant contributions to method and theory in migration studies, including ways of identifying migrants as they move across the landscape, the ways in which migrants interact with Indigenous residents, and the size of migrating groups. Study has focused especially on the vast thirteenth- through fifteenth-century population movements that resulted in dramatic changes in population distribution, particularly in the northern Southwest. The passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) initiated a re-engagement with contemporary Native peoples that has transformed perspectives on the relative importance of movement (and sedentism) and has produced new understandings of how social identity was constructed in the ancient Southwest.

This chapter traces early expressions of symbolic behaviour:—rock art, personal ornaments, occurrences of ochre, notational pieces, and mortuary practices—across the southern arc dispersal route of modern humans out of Africa to Sahul, from some 70–60,000 years ago. These aspects of symbolic behaviour do not display a consistent pattern of appearance along the southern arc, and dates for their appearance/preservation do not become progressively more recent as modern humans moved east out of Africa. These results are explained using the demographic, social, and symbolic framework proposed to account for geographical and chronological patterning observed in the ‘package’ of traits reflecting modern human behaviour. In this model, the appearance of symbolic behaviour is determined by levels of local/regional population pressure necessitating (or not) the need for identity signalling, ‘bonding’ behaviour/open social networks, and ‘bounding’ or emblemic behaviour/closed social networks.