The Anthropocene Engine at Sea: Archaeolinguistic perspectives on the blue acceleration
What role did fishing and other marine resource use by humans play in the ‘Anthropocene engine’, the historical processes leading to the emergence and expansion of the Anthropocene? Many archaeologists and ecologists have proposed that agriculture was the key driver of land-use transformations from the Neolithic to the eve of the industrial era. Agriculture has been central to archaeolinguistic theory through the ‘farming/language dispersal hypothesis’. It can be said that archaeolinguistics has so far had a terrestrial emphasis stemming from this focus on the spread of languages together with agriculture. However, human use of the sea and marine resources has a deep antiquity. In coastal and island regions, early agriculture spread through maritime networks, although those networks are often poorly understood and some Neolithic societies saw an apparent decline in fishing with the onset of farming. From the Bronze Age, trade in preserved fish was associated with urban provisioning and this trend continued with long-distance Atlantic fisheries in the late medieval and early modern eras. Industrialisation has seen further remarkable transformations in commercial fishing since around 1900 leading to what has been called a ‘blue acceleration’.
This project develops the central research theme of the Language and the Anthropocene Research Group through a focus on long-term histories of marine resource extraction and their archaeolinguistic implications. Issues considered include: (1) the role of the sea and its resources in the spread of human populations and languages; (2) the reduction in biological and linguistic diversity on sea compared to the land; (3) the role of globalisation and long-distance language contact through fisheries; and (4) changing representations of marine resources and entangled seascapes in the art and languages of the human societies involved. Building on previous work within the Language and the Anthropocene Research Group, the project focuses mainly on Northeast Asia and western Europe but also considers other regions of theoretical interest.
