The mutability of mobility

This collection of papers amply illustrates the potentials of different engagements with concepts of mobility in Africanist archaeology. All five are impressive examinations of a variety of different research issues from different parts of the continent and their authors provide new and interesting perspectives on those research questions. All involve well-thought-out but straightforward and quite accessible research methodologies: I want to note this latter point because of the increasing dangers of two-tier archaeology in Africa (and elsewhere), where very advanced and expensive research methodologies are not available to all researchers. At the same time, these papers work with concepts of mobility in the plural, with quite different research orientations and datasets, and it is difficult for me at least to detect common threads that would allow these projects to be united under a single analytical framework centred on some unifying concept of mobility. They do good things individually, but the question is: what do they all do in common, besides making use of the term 'mobility'? I first consider usages of the concept of mobility in each paper and then come back to this question at the end of this short review.......