Archaeology and Language: Why Archaeologists Care About the Indo-European Problem--in European Archaeology as Anthropology: Essays in Memory of Bernard Wailes ed by P.J. Crabtree and P. Bogucki (original) (raw)
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This project examines methods for learning about prehistoric languages that have left no written records. It focuses on the origins and expansion of the Indo-European language family (the world’s largest by total speaking population, today including most languages between Iceland and India) and its associated speakers, who likely emerged from someplace in eastern Europe or western Asia during the Neolithic . There are two competing hypotheses regarding the origins of these languages and the so-called Indo-Europeans themselves: 1) that they arose via the expansion of agriculture out of Anatolia and into Europe, c. 5000 BC; and 2) that the languages spread through migrations of highly mobile pastoralists outward from the Black Sea steppes at the end of the Neolithic, c. 3000 BC. The latter is now generally favored. This project will explore the developing interface between archaeology, genetics, and linguistics in prehistoric resarch by taking the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a case study. It covers three main areas: (1) the background and historical context of Indo-European studies; (2) methodological interaction among archaeology, linguistics, and genetics; and (3) recent archaeological, genetic, and linguistic data as they pertain to the understanding the origins of the Indo-Europeans.