The Agricultural Lexicon of Western Indo-European: Crop Names

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The first speakers of Indo-European languages who entered Europe brought with them a fairly coherent agro-technological package. This is clear from the significant agreements that can be shown to exist in the lexicon describing the ard and its subparts among the Western Indo-European languages. Additionally, the absence of substratal words in this lexical field suggests that the bearers of Indo-European speech did not adopt much technology from the agricultural peoples already in place throughout Europe. In this talk I will examine the lexicon for crop names in the Western Indo-European languages. Archaeological evidence suggests that the speakers of PIE were familiar with ‘barley’ and ‘wheat’, yet no single lexical item referring to a specific species of grain can be reconstructed for the highest node of PIE. In light of this situation it is worthwhile to examine the lexicon for specific crop names in the Western Indo-European languages. What innovations can we identify? To what extent can these innovations be attributed to the sub-nodes Proto-Italo-Celtic or Proto-Western Indo-European? To what extent can these innovative names be attributed to substratal influence?

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24701