These days prehistorians don’t really like invasions. That was not always the case: the idea that major cultural changes observed in the archaeological record could only be explained by the movement of people held sway for about a century, before being challenged from the 1960s by the development of calibrated radiocarbon dating, which undermined the chronological frameworks of culture history; and by more sophisticated understandings of material culture, which came to be seen as active and meaningful rather than a simple marker of ethnic identity. Thus the 'megalithic people' and the 'Beaker folk' were replaced by interpretations foregrounding the spread of ideas and local adoption.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that when a new group armed with sophisticated and prestigious technological innovations spreads rapidly through the archaeological record, prehistorians become concerned - yes, I’m talking about the invasion of the geneticists.

They have certainly made an impact. A new study of ancient DNA has suggested that the Beaker people (or 'Dutch hordes', as the Guardian termed them) might have existed after all. The idea that Mesolithic groups played a significant demographic role in the transition to farming in Britain has also been challenged by the DNA evidence. Not to mention the numerous genetic insights into our earlier evolutionary history.

But can the arrival of the Neolithic and of the Bronze Age in Britain really be explained entirely by migration? The archaeological backlash against the revival of such ideas has been relatively muted. A Nature article notes that some prehistorians are 'concerned by sweeping DNA studies that they say make unwarranted, and even dangerous, assumptions about links between biology and culture’ or criticise the genetics papers for failing to reflect the complexity of past human actions. An editorial piece, also in Nature, calls for 'geneticists, archaeologists, historians and anthropologists to understand exactly how their skills and insights complement each other’s’.

The debate is therefore relatively civilised, showing that at least some scientists welcome collaboration and are thinking about the impact of their work on archaeological narratives, including how that might inform more problematic claims about ancestry and territory. And prehistorians have never shied away from questioning established theories and assumptions, so in that respect the genetic evidence is welcome.

However, the feeling that this 'mutual understanding' is actually somewhat unequal was articulated by the palaeoanthropologist John Hawks’ recent blog post arguing that the disciplines of archaeology and genetics work in entirely different ways, akin to the ‘Two Cultures’ of C. P. Snow. Hawks concludes that 'as has been the case in the 1950s, the side perceived as "science" is winning and the more "humanities" side losing a struggle for hearts, minds, and funding'. Hawks’ conclusions are worrying, even though his characterisation of archaeologists writing individually authored books rather than collective papers is misleading. Certainly the media fascination with archaeological science at the expense of more interpretative research is a concern.

In the paper on the Beaker Complex the authors conclude that 'Our results raise new questions and motivate further archaeological research to identify the changes in social organization, technology, subsistence, climate, population sizes or pathogen exposure that could have precipitated the demographic changes uncovered in this study’. It is worth noting a number of things: firstly a recognition that the genetics themselves do not explain anything, but also the more subtle suggestions that a simple cause-and-effect explanation is available and that the geneticists are now setting the agenda for archaeologists. But what if the debate didn’t have to take place entirely on archaeological ground? Might insights from archaeology inform the ways geneticists present, analyse and interpret their data. After all, for many prehistorians a new twist in the old debate over migration versus acculturation may not be of such great significance as the media clamour suggests. They are thinking in very different terms.

The new focus on genetic identities of individual people in the past, and the interpretation of that data in terms of ethnic groups, comes at a time when archaeological theory is turning away from such bounded concepts. The emergence over the last decade of the 'material turn’ or the post-human, combined with slightly earlier ideas around embodiment, personhood and performativity, has produced a diverse set of approaches that share a concern to decentre the traditional human subject, at least if that subject is conceived as an individual of modern, Western type embedded in contemporary sorts of power and gender relations.

The impression that current theoretical perspectives are diametrically opposed to genetic studies predicated on the individual human body as a privileged site of historical insight is only strengthened by the way the new data is presented in terms of old-fashioned migrationist and determinist narratives. The geneticists also tend to talk in the language of natural science, with their hypotheses and models, a discourse which archaeologists largely discarded thirty years ago, in the post-processual reaction to the New Archaeology.

So what might a truly collaborative, two-way approach to archaeogenetics look like? Perhaps it would include narratives generated from the interweaving of theory and data, rather than the problem-method-data-conclusions trope of the scientific paper. Maybe interpretations would start with concepts of the alterity of the past and consider different modes of personhood, rather than positing identity as a direct reflection of someone’s genetic inheritance. Perhaps the investigation of variation at more local levels might help deconstruct rather than reinforce broad cultural concepts like the ‘Beaker Complex' or 'early farmer’, interpreting them not as fixed groups of individuals with shared genetic traits but as ever-changing assemblages of people, objects, animals and landscapes.

More radically, could we even hope to see a 'post-human genome project', where genotypes are reinterpreted as cultural constructs rather than some underlying biological ‘reality'; or where DNA is itself considered as material culture, and subjected to analysis in relational terms? After all there is nothing ’natural’ about those parts of the genome which are the subject of this research. They are the products of marriage rules, meetings, exchanges and ceremonies, fundamentally entangled with all the other aspects of our social and material worlds.

Although there has been only limited contact so far between the ‘indigenous' theorists and the genetic ‘invaders', there is potential for genuine collaboration to produce a new synthesis that is not rooted in scientism but draws on innovative insights from both sides of the ’two cultures’.