This paper examines the routes of archaeology. I want to examine how archaeologists understand the past, and in doing so re-engage with a more refined and energetic concept of archaeology. Key to this is opening past movement’s ‘black-box’. The argument is simple. An enriched understanding of past movement is the catalyst for understanding the past in which ‘everyday life’ (the micro) connects with the larger ‘structures of living’ (the macro). However, the way that past movement is pushed into the background has severely hampered its usefulness in archaeology. This is partly because archaeology has constructed a bridge between the past and present by using a linear concept of transformation; the transformation of a living system (the so called systemic record – with all its daily modalities, and social as well as economic transactions) into a static and fossilised system of materials that stand in for the past (the so called archaeological record). What this bridge has, in part, produced is archaeology’s obsession with static and fixed things; what Matt Edgeworth calls a ‘solid material syndrome’. One of its effects is, paradoxically, the creation of an absence of mobility in any attempt to revitalise the past living system because the vital, moving parts of the archaeological record have been removed. In general what this results in is an archaeology in which mobility, and the role it plays in the production of an understanding of past social life and sociality, is rarely considered as a subject in its own right. Instead a whole series of mobile generalities are created; such as universal motivations that lie behind movement; leaving questions about how objects move between places unsolved, as well as the leading to the formation of stereotypes linked to the movement of people (usually en masse). By creating a perspective that is more positive and constructive about the past with movement at the forefront,  some of these routes by following a variety of ‘footprints’ across the landscapes of Iceland and Scotland will be untangled. The paper will set out how on-the-move encounters might help to re-imagine our understanding of past movement and landscapes where movement lies at the centre of our investigations into a dynamic archaeological record.