What is archaeolinguistics?

Apparently my post ‘Paleolinguistics and archaeolinguistics’ is currently the #2 result for the keyword ‘archaeolinguistics’ (and #4 for ‘paleolinguistics’). Paleolinguistics is a fairly well-known term among linguists): it refers to the extension of historical linguistics deep into prehistory, often using methods that are not accepted by the majority of historical linguists. But while archaeolinguistics hasn’t achieved the same fame (or at least, not Wikipedia noteworthiness!), that’s the topic I want to discuss.

Archaeolinguistics lies at the interdisciplinary intersection between archaeology and linguistics – including but not limited to the interaction of linguistic and archaeological anthropology. I want to distinguish linguistic analyses of prehistory that do not use the archaeological record (paleolinguistics) from those that do. Moreover, much of archaeolinguistics has nothing to do with historical linguistics at all, but rests on different sorts of intersections between the two disciplines.

Archaeolinguistics includes several distinct topics of study:
– The study of the evolution of language and symbolic behavior through the integration of Paleolithic archaeology (lithics, art, notations, etc.) and studies in cognitive linguistics. This has virtually nothing to do with ‘paleolinguistics’ as an extended form of historical linguistics, but it requires a good foundational knowledge of both archaeology and linguistics, and also of hominin evolution.
– The study of prehistory through the comparative use of historical linguistics and archaeology, e.g., to reconstruct proto-language homelands, prehistoric migrations, subsistence patterns, the diffusion of technology, and the like. Where two independent sources of information converge on the same answer, it is more likely to be correct than when one line of evidence alone is used. This is ‘paleolinguistics plus’: the archaeological record is (dis)confirmatory and serves as a check on wild speculation.
– Archaeological decipherment: the decipherment of ancient texts recovered in archaeological contexts. This relies on quantitative analysis of texts and their signs, as well as more interpretive aspects of decipherment that rely on knowledge of social contexts that can mainly be known archaeologically. Maya script decipherment is a classic example of this ongoing process; without the archaeological record, our understanding of the hieroglyphic texts would be substantially hindered.
– The use of written texts to complement the archaeological record of literate societies to discuss topics of interest to linguistic anthropologists: literacy, cognitive categories, language contact, dialectal variation, and so on. In contrast to decipherment, here the script is well-known, and the questions that are being asked are using textual material holistically with archaeological material to talk about linguistic aspects of ancient life.
– The use of the characteristics of written texts to date archaeological material, and vice versa. Paleographic changes in scripts can be highly suggestive if not definitive of the age of texts, and of associated archaeological material. Conversely, archaeological materials that are datable radiometrically can put associated texts in their temporal context.

If this seems big and vague, maybe it is. All that these things have in common is that they require some knowledge of archaeology, and some knowledge of linguistics. But I guess what I’m trying to do here is to make the case that when there are so many areas that require knowledge of both fields, that it is valuable, from a scholarly perspective, to train students who are knowledgeable in both fields, and to publish work that reflects that intersection.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be meandering through a series of posts on some of the specific topics mentioned above, and more generally on methodological, conceptual, and evidentiary similarities between the two fields that make archaeolinguistics ‘hang together’ better than one might think. I don’t know what will become of these thoughts ultimately – maybe even a short book.

Southwest Script

A slate tablet bearing the longest inscription yet found in the enigmatic Southwest Script has been found in southern Portugal, as reported by the Associated Press today. Although it’s only 86 characters long, it represents a major expansion in the corpus of Southwest Script inscriptions, which all come from southwestern Iberia (hence the name) and date from the 7th-5th centuries BCE. Southwest Script is one of the world’s more obscure semi-deciphered scripts; one can get a sense of this by the fact that about half of the top 20 hits on Google are to today’s news article (although the label ‘Tartessian’ is somewhat more common).

The Southwest Script is typologically complex. As discussed in the article, some of the signs are alphabetic (roughly, one sign = one phoneme, either a consonant or vowel), others are syllabic (one sign = one consonant + vowel combination), and others are of unknown signification – possibly representing whole words (logograms) or something else entirely. The sound-symbol correspondences can be established because the signs are related to several other Iberian scripts and ultimately to a Phoenician ancestor – so it is possible to read some parts of some of the inscriptions phonetically. But this is far outweighed by what we don’t know (yet).

An awful lot of scripts have some such typological complexities; Egyptian and Japanese are well-known examples, but even the modern Latin alphabet has logographic components like @, &, $, and % which would make a script-decipherer’s job much harder. But with the Southwest Script, where there are so few inscriptions (and the ones we have are so short), the problem becomes nearly unsurmountable. The fact that we can’t even reliably associate the script with a language, even though Phoenician has been fully deciphered for centuries, says quite a lot about the state of the decipherment.

One of the real challenges in Southwest Script studies is that the texts found are all extremely short, making computational decipherments effectively impossible. This new find will not eliminate this methodological difficulty, but it will at least make it more plausible to find repeated sequences of signs that occur in other Southwest Script tablets, one of the key aspects of archaeological decipherment. This might allow us eventually to say more about the linguistic context of the tablets and ultimately work, over the next several decades, towards what might be reasonably called a new archaeological decipherment.

Steve #1032

I am extraordinarily pleased to announce that I have been officially inducted into the roster of Steves at Project Steve, maintained by the National Center for Science Education. As Steve #1032, I join at least 1031 of my peers who, in addition to holding doctorates in fields related to evolution, are named Steve, Stephen, Steven, Esteban, Stephanie, etc. My sole duty as a member of this illustrious society is to promote, through undogmatic scientific inquiry, teaching and research about the origin and evolution of life. To which end, I can do no better than to quote from the NCSE itself:

Evolution is a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences, and the scientific evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry. Although there are legitimate debates about the patterns and processes of evolution, there is no serious scientific doubt that evolution occurred or that natural selection is a major mechanism in its occurrence. It is scientifically inappropriate and pedagogically irresponsible for creationist pseudoscience, including but not limited to “intelligent design,” to be introduced into the science curricula of our nation’s public schools. (NCSE, 2008)

Sciencing up the place

I got back late Saturday from the SaSci/SCCR conference in Las Vegas, to be greeted in Detroit by several inches of new-fallen snow … oh joy! Although I hardly had the time or inclination to do any serious gambling while away, I did win modestly at the airport slots due to my flight being delayed for half an hour. My talk was sparsely attended but nonetheless well-received, and it looks like as a result of these discussions, I’ll be presenting next year at the same conference as part of a session on anthropology and numerical cognition (in other words, exactly my field). In general, discussions about methodology in cognitive anthropology have led me to think quite a bit about my upcoming work this summer working with Detroit middle school students and learning about mathematical concept formation. A real challenge in the anthropology of mathematics is that there aren’t very many anthropologists working on mathematics, and because mathematics is a weird sort of domain where referents are often abstract, our methodologies aren’t extremely well developed, as opposed to, say, the study of kinship terms or ethnobotanical knowledge. So I have been spending the past few days thinking a lot more seriously about elicitation tasks and what exactly a mathematics-oriented ethnographic interview ought to look like and how on earth I can/should apply any of the highly theoretical knowledge I have acquired to this very grounded situation. Of course, I won’t really have the slightest clue what I’m doing until I actually start doing it, and possibly not even then.

But more generally, and despite receiving other, unrelated good news while away, it’s hard to be back from this particular conference feeling unmitigatedly positive about my discipline and my particular orientation within it. I’ve always been an oddball (and usually proud of it) in that I refuse to define myself within the usual four-field subdisciplinary taxonomy (physical, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology) common for the past century. I just don’t see any point, insofar as most of what ought to distinguish archaeologists from cultural anthropologists (e.g.) is methodological rather than conceptual. But then inevitably we get caught up in what is versus what ought to be, and the ways in which methodologies affect all other aspects of our work, and then we end up yellling at one another instead of being productive.

On top of that, you add the division between anthropology-as-humanism and anthropology-as-science, where I lean rather heavily towards the latter perspective even though as a ‘labelled’ linguistic anthropologist most of my attributed subfield leans the other way. The Science Wars had enormous fissioning effects on anthropology, such that some departments actually split administratively between humanistic and scientific wings, but some of that fissioning exists at a subdisciplinary level as well: you would be hard-pressed to find a physical anthropologist who rejects the label ‘scientist’, for instance. The Society for Anthropological Sciences is both a symptom of and a potential solution to these issues: it reflects a profound dissatisfaction with the humanistic bent of most cultural and linguistic anthropology, but at the same time by organizing itself in opposition to those trends, does little to convince any non-scientific anthropologists of the merits of the perspective.

For my part, I’m quite happy to use humanistic approaches when relevant, which is often. A lot of the empirical work underlying my forthcoming book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History, examines the social, cultural, and political contexts under which particular numerical systems arose, spread, and declined. Lots of the work is essentially epigraphy as applied to numbers, and the scholars I relate to are linguists, historians, classicists, etc. In terms of much of my analysis, historians would surely recognize it as akin to what they do, even if, by the nature of the subject, it tends to underemphasize the individual personalities involved.

But I can’t escape the feeling that all this humanistic analysis acquires greater relevance when embedded in the broader search for patterns, and within anthropology the analysis of social processes and the comparison of social systems. I am thrilled that the structure of the book retains the basic structure of my dissertation, which has two separate analytical chapters, one cognitive, the other social, neither of which stands alone. But ultimately it is a comparative history, one which seeks to transcend the particular and get at something pan-human underlying it all. For an anthropologist today to admit to being a comparativist, outside of a very small number of venues, is like admitting you’re a cannibal, it seems sometimes. I do think I see some glimmers of hope that the field is becoming methodologically and theoretically more inclusive than when I was a grad student. I guess we’ll see, when the book is out, whether the reviewers agree.

What happens in Vegas

In a couple of hours I’m off to Las Vegas for the 2009 Society for Anthropological Sciences conference, where I’m presenting a paper entitled, “Frequency dependent biases in the transmission of communication technologies”. If any of my readers are going to be there (unlikely though that may be), it’ll be … well, it will be more compelling than the abstract that follows below makes it seem:

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Frequency dependent biases in the transmission of communication technologies

Frequency dependent bias is a form of horizontal cultural transmission bias in which the frequency of a cultural trait influences the likelihood that others will adopt it. Previously seen as a unitary phenomenon, frequency dependence in fact consists of three separate types, each involving distinct decision-making processes and having different patterns of acceptance, retention, and abandonment. In particular, communication technologies, whose popularity determines their utility, exhibit unusual characteristics of cultural transmission. A brief case study from the phylogenetic history of written numerals demonstrates the usefulness of considering the different effects of frequency for the adoption of new communication technologies. More broadly, the prevalence of frequency dependent phenomena in various cultural evolutionary contexts suggests the need to evaluate decision-making processes more rigorously when evaluating the adoption and retention of cultural traits.

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I’ll try to put together something interesting in the way of a blog post while I’m away, provided I don’t get sucked in by the charms of the city. Catch you on the flipside!