The migration of the Sea Peoples, the Philistines among them, from the Aegean area to the Levant during the early twelfth century bce is one of the most intriguing events in the history of the eastern Mediterranean. From a cultural point of view, it was a watershed process in which the movement of the populace connected East and West during the great divide between the collapse of the Late Bronze Age civilizations and the beginning of the era of nation-states in the Iron Age. As a product of the very beginning of the Dark Age of Greece, the migration illuminates the earliest efforts to reconstruct social structures in the Aegean after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces. In Cyprus, it contributed to further connect the island to the realm of Aegean culture, which would later lead to Hellenization. In the Levant, the migrants formed their own political communities, separate from both the Canaanite city-state system and the Egyptian empire. Establishing themselves along the coast, the Sea Peoples formed a long-standing cultural and political antithesis to the Israelites in the central hill country, destined to shape the history of the biblical world.

The study of the Philistine migration is also a methodological treasure trove from a point of view of both the archaeology and the anthropology of migration. During the late 1990s, the exponential rise in the theoretical examination of migration in archaeology created a plethora of methodological frameworks, as well as a need for well-documented case studies against which these frameworks could be tested.