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Migration Studies
Practitioners
Selected Works
Irving B. Rouse
E.G. Ravenstein
V. Gordon Childe
Robert Bettinger
David W. Anthony
Wesley Bernardini
Migration Studies
Practitioners
Selected Works
Irving B. Rouse
E.G. Ravenstein
V. Gordon Childe
Robert Bettinger
David W. Anthony
Wesley Bernardini
The Use of Migration as an Explanatory Concept in Archaeology
David J. Willers
Migration Studies
Migration Studies
David J. Willers, Southern Methodist University E-Mail: dwillers@smu.edu
Irving Benjamin Rouse (1913-2006)
Rouse was an active field archaeologist and spent considerable amounts of time in the field. His fieldwork was largely carried out in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Haiti. He also worked in Florida. After World War II he worked extensively in Venezuela. New England was also the occasional site of his fieldwork.
He was at his core a culture historian who maintained a distinct interest in classification. He is well-known for his ideas about types and modes. The idea of the mode as an archaeological unit of classification is his own. He wrote extensively about phases and types and how they were integrated in time-space frameworks.
He was very interested in migration and how it could be recognized. He calls “the inference of prehistoric migrations from cultural remains” his specialty (Rouse, 1986 p.xi). Dunnell (1999 p.673) argues that although Rouse has been criticized for giving migration too great of a role in the change of cultures and denying independent invention, “his principal contribution has been to curtail the uncritical use of migration in an explanatory capacity by outlining the empirical evidence required to support migration.” His migration views resulted in the publication of his 1986 book, Migrations in Prehistory.
His long career resulted in the publication of numerous articles and books as well as extensive and well catalogued collections in the Peabody museum. He also garnered many awards and positions during his tenure including president of the American Anthropological Association (1967-68) and president of the Association for Field Archaeology (1977-79). He also was editor of American Antiquity from 1946-1950 and was elected to the National Academy of the Sciences in 1962.
He was at his core a culture historian who maintained a distinct interest in classification. He is well-known for his ideas about types and modes. The idea of the mode as an archaeological unit of classification is his own. He wrote extensively about phases and types and how they were integrated in time-space frameworks.
He was very interested in migration and how it could be recognized. He calls “the inference of prehistoric migrations from cultural remains” his specialty (Rouse, 1986 p.xi). Dunnell (1999 p.673) argues that although Rouse has been criticized for giving migration too great of a role in the change of cultures and denying independent invention, “his principal contribution has been to curtail the uncritical use of migration in an explanatory capacity by outlining the empirical evidence required to support migration.” His migration views resulted in the publication of his 1986 book, Migrations in Prehistory.
His long career resulted in the publication of numerous articles and books as well as extensive and well catalogued collections in the Peabody museum. He also garnered many awards and positions during his tenure including president of the American Anthropological Association (1967-68) and president of the Association for Field Archaeology (1977-79). He also was editor of American Antiquity from 1946-1950 and was elected to the National Academy of the Sciences in 1962.
Irving Benjamin Rouse was born in 1913 in New York and died in 2006. He began his studies at Yale in 1930 in Forestry but acquired a job in the Anthropology department cataloguing the collections. This with the encouragement of his supervisor led him to pursue graduate studies in anthropology which he completed in 1938. He spent his entire career at Yale in the Department of Anthropology and the Peabody Museum. He concurrently held curator (assistant: 1947-1954, curator: 1977-1984) or research (associate: 1954-1962, affiliate:1975-1977) positions in the museum and a professorship (instructor:1939-1943, assistant professor:1943-1948, associate: (tenured) 1948-1954, and professor in 1954) in the department. He also served as departmental chair from 1957-1963 and 1979-1980. He often was the only archaeologist on staff at Yale but still trained many prominent archaeologists.