Paleolinguistics and archaeolinguistics

There’s an absolutely fascinating post over at Language Log, by guest blogger Don Ringe, on the hypothetical-but-not-completely-unknowable state of linguistic diversity in Europe ‘between the end of the last ice age and the coming of the Indo-European languages’. It’s the sort of thing that absolutely should be read by anyone interested in the topic of paleolinguistics (the study of prehistoric languages) or more narrowly in Indo-European studies. I certainly plan to present it to my students, many of whom are archaeology students taking linguistic anthropology as part of a broad four-field anthropological education. Of particular importance is Ringe’s insistence that the once-popular notion that single languages (like proto-Indo-European) were spoken across wide areas of prehistoric Europe cannot be true, because populations that are not in contact with one another diverge linguistically without any specific motivation or cause. Linguistic diversity was certainly characteristic of all of European prehistory.

One challenge in getting linguists and archaeologists to talk to one another is that the sorts of data that they find persuasive are rather different. Paleolinguists look for evidence of regular patterns of phonetic change to reconstruct proto-languages like Proto-Indo-European, and use the existence of reconstructable words as evidence for the origins of particular languages and language families (as in the first paragraph of the section ‘The spread of Indo-European languages’). Archaeologists, on the other hand, focus on material cultural signatures of ethnic identity, demographic and subsistence shifts that correlate with migrations, and increasingly, DNA evidence. This presents some serious challenges to paleolinguistics as traditionally conceptualized as a part of historical linguistics, but also gets involved in ‘race-language-culture’ debates that not only raise epistemological issues for the study of the past, but also political ones. Absolutely no European scholar has forgotten the perils of assuming correlations between biology, language, and material culture of the sort typical prior to World War II. These issues have always been around, and aren’t going anywhere. At the same time, we know that linguistic evidence alone is only going to get us so far – we need good anthropological and archaeological knowledge about the way that societies (linguistic communities) work, in order to think meaningfully about the way that prehistoric social formations would have (and could not have) related to languages.

A fair amount of the literature that Ringe is citing reflects a sort of uneasy dance; Ringe’s own article focuses primarily on the linguistic evidence from reconstructed PIE as well as the early attested inscriptional evidence of Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages. There are, and always will be, huge evidentiary gaps in our direct knowledge of prehistoric languages, however, and the archaeological record must have something to contribute to filling those gaps. Since developing and teaching a course at McGill in early 2007 on the prehistory of language and the mind, I have been giving a lot of thought to this issue, and Ringe’s post has given me more to think about.

Pseudo-archaeo-linguistics in review

Happy New Year! I’m hoping to be posting at least once a week over the next term, so stay tuned. I have a couple of longer posts in various states of semi-composition, but for now I wanted to mention to you that over at Archaeoporn, there is a fascinating list of the top 10 pseudo-archaeological subjects of 2008. Of particular note for readers of this blog, or in general for those interested in pseudoscience related to archaeological decipherment, are #5 (the earliest Hebrew writing), which I wrote about, and which is pseudoarchaeological only in the sense that some of the claims lavished upon this poor ostracon are so wild, and #1 (the purported Sumerian clay tablet documenting the Köfels ‘impact’ in Austria), which I haven’t written about, but which is so bizarre as to defy any sensible explanation (check out this skeptical essay, for instance).

Script typology and print-capitalism

But these varied idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits, into print-languages far fewer in number. The very arbitrariness of any system of signs for sounds facilitated the assembling process. (At the same time, the more ideographic the signs, the vaster the potential assembling zone. One can detect a sort of descending hierarchy here from algebra through Chinese and English, to the regular syllabaries of French or Indonesian.)

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 43-44

I’ve been rereading Anderson for the first time in at least a dozen years, and found this little gem which has bearing on much of the work I do (which requires that one replace ‘algebra’ – a technique – with ‘numerals’ – a representational system). Here he’s asserting that the process of standardization that accompanies the rise of capitalism and printing is most invasive where the script being printed is more ideographic rather than more phonetic. Numerals, being thoroughly trans-linguistic, should spread as widely as possible. One central argument of my forthcoming book holds that the present domination of Hindu-Arabic (Western) numerals is largely not a product of technological ‘natural selection’ but is dependent on a set of social processes accompanying the rise of the world-system in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

But I’m still dissatisfied with Anderson’s proposition, because it goes beyond his detailed consideration of early modern social, economic and technological processes (which he calls ‘print-capitalism’) and postulates a generalization (dare I say ‘law’) about the role of script type (and orthographic-phonetic correspondence) generally correlates with the tendency of script traditions to become standards across wide regions. This may be intuitive, and invites evidentiary justification, but is, as it stands, ‘not proven’ in the Scottish legal sense. As far as I know, no one has actually attempted to demonstrate Anderson’s proposition (which is, if not central to his thesis, certainly not incidental), but it is this sort of empirical work, unifying the technical study of writing systems with the sociopolitical interests near and dear to Anderson’s heart, and mine.

Review: Archaeoastronomy

Archaeoastronomy, the subdiscipline, is the study of the relationship between ancient material culture and ancient beliefs and behaviours with respect to phenomena in the sky. Archaeoastronomy, the blog, is the web presence of Ph.D candidate Alun Salt, who is a classical archaeoastronomer (Salt and Boutsikas 2005) and in my opinion, one of today’s finest public thinkers on matters related to ancient science. I’ve never met him nor even corresponded with him, but the Archaeoastronomy blog (in its various incarnations over the years) has been a regular source of interest for me for some time.

The trick about archaeoastronomy is that it is really an effort to reconstruct prehistoric cognition, which is a very tricky task given the limitations of the archaeological record. It is thus generally a part of the broader subfield of cognitive archaeology (Renfrew and Zubrow 1994) and cognitive anthropology (d’Andrade 1995), of which I consider myself to be a part. It is practically self-evident that the cross-cultural study of astronomy and the cross-cultural study of mathematics have much in common. The central issues of cognitive archaeology are epistemological in nature. How do we reliably obtain knowledge of ancient astronomical concepts given only the record of megalithic architecture, pictographic star-charts, and (if we are very fortunate) ancient (but easily misinterpreted) texts? And how do we, as fallible scientists, distinguish patterns that were meaningful to ancient peoples from the archaeological equivalent of Rorshach tests, patterns constructed by the archaeologist out of random noise? Establishing that the alignment of a particular archaeological feature with a particular astronomical event was intentional and meaningful is exceptionally difficult, which is one of the reasons why archaeoastronomy is more heavily burdened with pseudoscientific nonsense than practically any other endeavour.

This, I think, is why the Archaeoastronomy blog is so timely: it doesn’t retreat from this challenge, but instead helps the reader to see how the act of interpretation is fraught with peril, and yet it can be done. Alun Salt’s description of the field is perhaps the clearest I’ve ever read. Beyond this, it illustrates the political and social dimensions of interpretation in a field where attributing great works to one’s putative ancestors is part of keeping the public’s interest. And beyond that still, it’s a well-written and sometimes hilarious blog that neither sinks to the lowest common denominator nor appeals only to the specialist. It hasn’t been as active lately as one would like (something about finishing a dissertation, I hear …) but it is an extraordinary and fascinating resource.

Posts of interest
Monet the astronomer
The Antikythera Mechanism
Inspired by Nebra

Works cited
Aveni, A. F. 2001. Skywatchers. University of Texas Press.
D’Andrade, R. 1995. The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge University Press.
Renfrew, C., and E. B. W. Zubrow. 1994. The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology. Cambridge University Press.
Salt, A., and E. Boutsikas. 2005. Knowing when to consult the oracle at Delphi. Antiquity 79, no. 305: 564-572.

Oard 2008: Re-entering an age of orality?

I’m in the middle of end-of-term panic, including two simultaneous job searches in my department and a harried effort to get my book manuscript off to the publisher, but I thought I’d pop my head up to mention a fascinating post by Mark at The Ideophone about a brief and ridiculous little note in Science from a couple of months ago that I should have seen at the time, but apparently didn’t. In it, Douglas Oard (2008) re-invents the well-worn argument that modern humans began as an oral species, made a great leap to literacy, and now with new media are returning to orality. This claim is related to the assertions of theorists in ‘media ecology’ such as Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Edmund Carpenter, Harold Innis, Jack Goody, David Olson, Jacques Derrida, Robert Logan, Julian Jaynes … oh, I could go on, but Oard’s doesn’t cite any of this expansive literature, which limits its utility as a study of changing ways of information storage – a very important subject in literacy studies. But all of this also reminds me of another post that I have been long overdue in making, and which I desperately hope to get to this weekend.

Works cited

Oard, Douglas W. 2008. Unlocking the Potential of the Spoken Word. Science 321, no. 5897 (September 26): 1787-1788.