Bronze Age Transitions in Their Own Words: Central Asian Interfaces

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Loanword analysis is a unique contribution of historical linguistics to our understanding of prehistoric cultural interfaces. As language reflects the lives of its speakers, the substantiation of loanwords draws on the composite evidence from linguistic as well as archaeology and genetics through triangulation. The Bronze Age of Central Asia is in principle linguistically mute, but a host of recent independent observations that tie languages, cultures, and genetics together in various ways invites a comprehensive reassessment of diagnostic loanwords that are associated with the Bronze Age and shared between Indo-European, Uralic, and Turkic, and sometimes reaching Old Chinese, Yukaghir, and other East Asian languages. The successful identification of the interfaces for loanwords can help settle long-standing debates on languages, migrations, and the items themselves. With reference to the archaeological record, I argue that at least six distinct cultural phenomena (including trade, metallurgy, horses, honey, and new social structures) can be dated to have entered Central and East Asian speech communities from immigrant Indo-European languages spoken in the Afanasievo and Andronovo cultures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35965.0