I have recently read through the first several chapters of Sparta and Lakonia A regional history 1300–362 BC by Paul Cartledge, and while as far as I can tell it does an outstanding job of addressing the topic above, really in quite specific detail as it relates to Laconia, and in general summarizes and engages with the existing literature regarding the topic in what to me appears to be a thorough and comprehensive manner, the lack of information available left a lot of unknowns and a lot to guess work.
Cartledge himself certainly provided, either through direct recommendation or his citations, plenty sources to look at for additional information and contrary opinions on the subject. But the book is almost twenty years old now, and my question is is there any new scholarship that has come out since then related to this topic that has been able to shed some new light onto this subject, or which has furthered the discussion in some way? I suppose if Cartledge specifically omitted or overlooked something glaring that wouldn't be bad to know either, though I would think someone would raise that in a publication in response, and therefore get lumped in with the new scholarship.
I certainly understand there just might not be anything new out there because nothing new has been found. And so far, I haven't been able to find anything since then on Google or Jstor.
Thanks in advance.
Cartledge's book was published in 1979; it doesn't seem like he bothered to update it much for the 2002 edition, certainly not as far as his chapter on the Dorians is concerned (which still refers to Chadwick's "recent" hypotheses, published in 1976!), which is, shall we say, curious but not atypical, as few books that are decades old are thoroughly updated for new editions. As far as Sparta is concerned, the authority you should consult nowadays is not Paul Cartledge, but rather Stephen Hodkinson.
I recently answered a question about current scholarship regarding the "Sea Peoples", which is pertinent here. In any case, the most up-to-date monograph on the Bronze Age collapse is Eric Cline's 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014). Cline does a good job of summarizing the debate surrounding the collapse -- what Robert Drews dramatically referred to as the "Catastrophe" in his book The End of the Bronze Age (1993). Cline also did an AMA here you might want to check out.
Discussions about the "Dorian Invasion" keep popping up from time to time. The ancient Greeks of the historic era invented this invasion to explain the distribution of the ancient Greek dialects in their own time. It doesn't have much merit as an actual thing that happened in the past, but that hasn't stopped historians who know little about the archaeology of the Dark Age to graps for straws anyway. Regarding ancient Greek dialects, as well as some of the problems associated with "migrations", you may also want to read my comments in this thread.
More specifically regarding the Dorian Invasion, I think Oliver Dickinson sums it up well in his The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age (2006), p. 11:
Sometimes, the ‘Dorian invasion’, ‘Ionian migration’ and related population movements reported in the Greek traditions have been treated as historical events that can be approximately dated and used as chronological signposts in the earlier part of the period. But, even if these traditions could be accepted as containing genuine information, the basis for dating them is shaky indeed. [...] such movements were essentially dated by reckoning downwards from the Trojan War, but this was not fixed; very varied dates were calculated for it by ancient scholars, all of whom must have based their work on varying interpretations of the genealogies that linked historical persons with famous heroes. But it has long been recognised that these genealogies, among which those of the Spartan royal families are the best known, are too short to fit any possible chronology, if the ‘age of heroes’ is assumed – though this is a very questionable assumption – to have a historical basis in the world of the Mycenaean palaces [...].
In short, we can't really treat the fiction that the ancient Greeks of the Archaic period and later came up with as in any sense more historical than e.g. the stories about Perseus and Heracles without further corroborating evidence. And the archaeological evidence suggests that there was nothing quite so neat as a "Dorian Invasion".
Jonathan Hall, in the second edition of his History of the Archaic Greek World (2014), has a whole section entitled "Gauging the historicity of the Dorian Migration" (pp. 44-51). He essentially echoes what Dickinson wrote:
There can be little doubt that the collapse of the political and economic system centered on the Mycenaean palaces provoked a climate of instability and insecurity and that some people – whether for reasons of safety or economic necessity – decided to abandon their former homes and seek a living elsewhere. But it is also clear that the developed literary narrative for the Dorian migration is the end product of a cumulative synthesis of originally independent traditions. As such, it need not reflect a dim and hazy memory of a genuine single movement of a population from north to south, even if it captures the general instability and mobility of this period. Rather, it seeks to establish a common identity for a plethora of communities whose pedigrees were undoubtedly far from uniform in origin.
If you're interested in the period, you should definitely pick up these two books by Dickinson and Hall. They have a lot to offer, and Hall in particular guides the reader through thorny issues regarding Archaic Greek history.