Theoretical developments in Anglophone archaeology since the 1960s have been accused of being “immobilist”(Hawkes 1987: 203) or “anti-migrationist”(H�rke 1998: 19). New Archaeology’s critique of earlier culture-historical methods and theories apparently also caused migration to be permanently abandoned as a useful concept. On the other hand, scholars from the European continent confidently, though evidently mistakenly, continued attributing all change in the past to the effects of migration. It has been suggested that migration has only recently become a valid field of enquiry again (H�rke 2004: 453), in part due to advances in genetics and stable isotope analysis. Scientific methods appear to provide answers to questions that previously seemed unanswerable, such as ‘how can we identify migrations in the archaeological record’or, more specifically,‘what was the impact of the migrations of X into the area of Y?’However, when we review the role of migration in archaeological thought it becomes clear that it is a central concept which has been challenged periodically by approaches that emphasise evolutionary or autochthonous developments. Throughout most of its intellectual history, migration has been used as an explanatory device, that is, as a concept