David Rohl's "Lords of Avaris" is an interesting read and the last section focuses on the Sea Peoples incidents. Rohl, of course, believes that the Third Intermediary Period following the collapse of the Ramessid Empire in the wake of the Sea Peoples invasions has been reconstructed improperly by making concurrent dynasties sequential, thus adding a couple of extraneous centuries. This lowers Ramesses II from circa 1250 BCE to circa 920, and does the same for the Sea Peoples and the Minoans.
Anyway, in Rohl's reconstruction of events, based on Minoan artifacts in Second Intermediary Period contexts, not only was it the Indo-European peoples of the Aegean rim who attacked Ramesses III, but their distant ancestors had done the same thing centuries prior. He identifies the myths of Io and Danaus along with a wall painting in one of the surviving rooms at Thera that seems to have historical content as a garbled memory of the conquest of Upper Egypt by the Hyskos, who he identifies as a confederation of seafaring Minoans, Syrian Hurrians and lastly Semitic Canaanites. The group ultimately came to be dominated by the Minoan element, and were subsequently expelled from Egypt and set up shop in Mycenae, where they brought the mummies of their ancestors and buried them with a load of leftover gold from Egypt in the burial shafts at that citadel, bringing about the legend of the Mycenaean founder Danaus.
The eruption at Thera would have caused a severe dislocation in Crete, and the Minoan civilization was subsequently conquered by a Mycenean elite, the actual "Dynasty of Minos".
At any rate the Sea Peoples themselves got moving in the aftermath of the Trojan War as refugees from Northwestern Anatolia picked up refugees from further along down the coast until it reached Egypt, the expedition being lead by the mythical figures of Mopsus and Amphilochus, Mopsus having stopped to set up a kingdom for himself in Cilicia along the way.
Rohl identifies the Sea Peoples as follows:
1)Peleset - Philistines. BUT, not the Philistines you're thinking of. As far as the Biblical writers were concerned, any Indo-European settler living in the cities by the Mediterranean was a "Philistine". The Davidic Philistines were descendants of the Minoan/Hurrian adventurers who had been driven out of Egypt by the native Pharaohs and were subsequently forced to submit under Thutmose III. (David is placed contemporaneous with Akhenaten by Rohl, who was too busy doing his own thing to pay attention to that lovable little Hebrew scamp raising hell in the periphery of his empire.) These latter Philistines were mixed in with the previous population and probably gave its name to it, but the Hebrews in the hills persisted in calling all the previous inhabitants of these cities Philistines when they wrote their history down a century or two later. Rohl believes that what the Sea People group actually would have called themselves is "Pelasgians", in agreement with Herodotus.
2) Teresh - Classical Tursenoi of Lydia, who emigrated and became the Etruscans (Herodotus's Tyrrhenians).
3) Ekwesh - Achaens, nothing mysterious about these dudes.
4) Tjekker - Teucrians, either the greater ethnic group the Trojans belonged to or the followers of Teucer the half-Greek/half-Trojan hero who led a colony to Cyprus at about this time. (I'd guess the latter.)
5) Weshesh - People from the Miletus area of Anatolia called Ouassos or Iassos, or from the area south of Troy called Assuwa, or "Asia".
6) Shekelesh - Pirates, probably from later Sagalassa, AFTER the attack on Egypt, they sailed west and became the Sikels or Sicilians.
7) Sherden - These were Arzawan warriors from the area around Sardis who, after being driven off from Egypt, went to Sardinia.
8) Lukka - Lycians. (Everybody agrees on that.)
9) Denyen - Danaans. Specifically the Greeks who were following Mopsus and later settled in Adana.
10) Khara - Carians
11) Dardany - Dardanians/Trojans.
So the Sea Peoples started out on the Aegean Rim, went in a big glop to go and conquer Egypt, where there was no shortage of food, and then were dispersed, ending up in various parts of the Western Mediterranean, mostly.
Rohl reconstructs the sequence of events in the Bronze Age collapse as something like this:
Troubles start with agricultural failure en mass, probably aggravated by deforestation in the Mycenaean/Hittite civilized areas. The Mycenaeans get MORE warlike and a sequence of attacks are launched on Thebes. The Hittite Empire disintegrates. Without the Hittites protecting the Trojans, the Mycenaeans gang up on Troy. Heroics ensue. In the generation succeeding the war a confederation primarily consisting of Anatolians but also including some Greeks and Greekish islanders is put together by Mopsus et al and launches and attack on Egypt, which is repelled by Ramesses III. The Anatolians immediately begin founding somewhat less than urban settlements in the Western Mediterranean. The Archaic period ensues immediately, the Greek Dark Age being a trick of stratigraphy and a confused absolute chronology. Dorian Greeks/The Heracleidae invade mainland Greece and Crete. Mycenaean/Ionian Greeks invade and colonize Anatolia and then quickly begin to set up colonies in the west in competition with their mainland brethren. Phoenicians (not Philistines) are doing the same thing. And maybe... just maybe, a plucky group of Trojan refugees makes its way by ship to an obscure part of the Italian coast, becoming the ancestors of... Well you know!