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Historical narratives about the early Middle Ages have long been focused on migrations, from the “Great Migrations” to the “Viking Diaspora”. Today mobility appears as a multi-facetted phenomenon, not just affecting large groups of people with military, political, or colonizing motives, but also as culturally and socially induced phenomena revealing the entanglement of individual paths with broader societal and economic trends. In the past decades, biochemical approaches have greatly contributed to these questions. These methods, especially isotopic studies, are now reaching an age of maturity, and their contribution to the general historical and archaeological discourse needs to be addressed. Which kinds of mobility do they reveal? How can these patterns be integrated with the facts and theories from related disciplines? How can we expand our work-frame from site-based or regional approaches to supra-regional, comparative syntheses? How can we investigate interconnectivity from the human angle? Are there serious limitations with the methods? With this session, we aim at bringing together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds from different regions of Western Europe in a discussion ofthe way forward for an integrated approach to the study of mobility in the early Middle Ages. Moving beyond the traditional focus on migration, the session has a dual focus, on the one hand exploring aspects of individual mobility / life-story, urban-rural mobility, and social causes of mobility, and on the other addressing methodological challenges for supra-regional comparison and synthesis.This session complements "People of the North Sea", which focuses specifically on the North Sea region.

Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 99, 35-60