Abstract
This chapter introduces the volume’s focus on interdisciplinary approaches to reconstructing the past that draw on both archaeological and historical linguistic evidence. A supplemental approach to interdisciplinary scholarship is introduced. This approach takes into consideration what researchers can learn about the past when archaeological and historical linguistic data agree and, significantly, when the two bodies of evidence disagree. The supplemental approach advocates for a focus on meaning-making in practice in addition to the traditional interdisciplinary focus on origins questions, migration, and diffusion. It demonstrates that partial, indirect archaeological and linguistic evidence of such meaning-making also offers an important resource for the nuts-and-bolts challenge of connecting the archaeological and linguistics records. Short introductions to the foundational principles of each method provide a working knowledge for non-specialists. A review of different approaches follows, exploring case studies that show how previous scholars have worked to connect archaeological and linguistic data, including examples from Africa as well as other world regions. Finally, the implications of a supplemental approach for research that draws on both archaeological and historical linguistic sources are considered, recognizing that it requires not only an examination of how such sources may offer similar or different types of historical understanding, but also the way they were produced.
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Notes
- 1.
Bolded terms in the text are defined in Appendix A, a glossary for non-specialists.
- 2.
The debates turn on whether changes in core vocabulary average out to near-constant rates of change over very long periods of time. Surprisingly, even strident opponents of glottochronology advance alternative methods following the same universalizing logic with respect to rates of language change. See comments in Chap. 5, note 3. For debates on the method in the African context, compare Vansina (1990, 2004) to Ehret (2000, 2011).
- 3.
- 4.
Significantly, many debates about the validity of methods used to reconstruct the meaning of protoforms stem from the limits of older forms of lexical reconstruction and ignore more recent linguistic theories supporting methods of semantic reconstruction. Debates about Indo-European protoforms are particularly good examples of the limits of lexical reconstruction and the potential of the methods of semantic reconstruction undertaken in other world regions (e.g., Fleisch and Stephens 2016).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
In addition to the examples cited above, consider recent debates in the African context about the role of environmental change in determining, to use the researchers’ verb choice, the pace and direction of the expansion of Bantu languages (Grollemund et al. 2015).
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de Luna, K.M., Fleisher, J.B. (2019). Introduction. In: Speaking with Substance. SpringerBriefs in Archaeology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91036-9_1
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