Anika Walke

Imaginations of sedentism as the norm, either in the past or in the present, are seriously flawed; as Leslie Page Moch writes, “People were on the move, and where and why they traveled tells us a good bit about the past and about the pressures and processes that produced the world with which we are familiar.”5

Migration is typically understood to mean a move across a specified border or boundary from one location to another, usually with the aim of redefining one’s main place of residence

Within these movements, scholars distinguish between unidirectional and multidirectional, temporary and long-term, labor and educational, voluntary and forced, and settlement and return migrations

We have specified mobility as a subject of interest in its own right, because the ability to move is a precondition for people’s travels and cultural change, and it determines their scale and extent.7

Expanding the view to mobility, thus, integrates analyses of “large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and information . . . as well as the more local processes of

daily transportation, movement through public space and the travel of material things within everyday life