The Linguistic Legacy of the Pitted Ware Culture

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 Scandinavian hunter-, fisher- and gatherer-based Pitted Ware culture is chronologically situated in the Neolithic. However, it challenges our traditional view on cultural and social evolution by representing a return to an otherwise abandoned hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In general, the Pitted Ware culture must be seen as an offshoot of the "Sub-Neolithic" societies inhabiting wide parts of northern and northeastern Europe in the fourth and third millennium B.C.E.

Isotopic and aDNA studies have shown that people of the east Swedish Pitted Ware culture, both dietarily and genetically were distinct from the early farmers in this region, the Funnel Beaker culture. Isotopic data shows a marked predominance of seal in the diet, which has given the Pitted Ware people the nickname "Inuit of the Baltic".

As regards language, it is to be expected that people practicing a Pitted Ware lifestyle spoke a non-Indo-European language. In fact, there is some linguistic evidence that can support this claim. It is conceivable that both the Germanic and Finnish word for "seal" were ultimately borrowed from a language spoken in a Pitted Ware context. Once more, the linguistic evidence turns out to offer important information complementary to that of archaeology and archaeo-genetics.

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): 26263