ABSTRACT
Archaeologists embedded in academia have been expected to go beyond sequences of data to illuminate projected universal "laws" of human existence. "Diffusion", although a respectable necessary term in chemistry and medicine, was laughed out of the arena; it was associated with crackpot non-archaeologists seeing Egyptian sun gods everywhere. History of technology initially was the mirror image of sociologists' studies of diffusion, in that writers focused on inventions and adaptations of technology, but social historians expanded its scope. "Diffusion" continues to be a standard term for spread of people into a new area, for example, Han Chinese moving southward into better farming areas, "diffusing" their genes into the indigenous population, and "male diffusion" into Neolithic Europe. One research paper on genomics cautions that "potential migration movements described from the spreading of some material culture could in fact be revealed to be just the consequence of cultural diffusion".
