Dispersals and Diversification: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on the Early Stages of Indo-European

by Matilde Serangeli (Editor), Thomas Olander (Editor)

Dispersals and diversification offers linguistic and archaeological perspectives on the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of the Indo-European language family.
Two chapters discuss the early phases of the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European from an archaeological perspective, integrating and interpreting the new evidence from ancient DNA. Six chapters analyse the intricate relationship between the Anatolian branch of Indo-European, probably the first one to separate, and the remaining branches. Three chapters are concerned with the most important unsolved problems of Indo-European subgrouping, namely the status of the postulated Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Armenian subgroups. Two chapters discuss methodological problems with linguistic subgrouping and with the attempt to correlate linguistics and archaeology.

Genres: Linguistics

290 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very enjoyable collection of thirteen papers that combine linguistics and archaeology to determine the prehistory of the Indo-European-speaking peoples. The papers focused mainly on the archaeological side the recent archaeological turn pioneered by David W. Anthony and extend it even further, and Anthony’s own contribution here draws on the ancient DNA evidence that is now beginning to be used by scholars. Some of the papers are more narrowly focused on comparative-linguistic issues, such as Schrijver’s on the inflection of the verb es- ‘be’ and Italo-Celtic, and Rasmus Thorso’s paper on two Balkan IE loanwords.

In spite of progress made in the linguistics–archaeology interface, it is amusing that two of the scholars here proposed essentially opposite explanations for how the Anatolian branch of Indo-European reached Anatolia.