Historical ecology and linguistic reconstruction
Historical ecology is the study of how humans interacted with the environment to shape ecosystems and landscapes over long-term, historical periods. Archaeolinguistics is the reconstruction of unattested languages in the past by integrating archaeology and genetics to reconstruct various aspects of human evolution and culture. Both fields are not only interdisciplinary in nature but they also share an interest in reconstructing a community’ s ecological environment through different windows into the past. In this project, we combine Archaeolinguistics with Historical Ecology to explore human-environmental interrelationships through time and space and aim to understand how these have impacted the formation of languages, cultures and landscapes in the Northern Pacific Rim. In 2025, we organized a workshop “Linguistic prehistory and ecology in the Northern Pacific Rim” at our institute in Jena to explore how the languages in this region can be used as an archive of ecological knowledge.
On the Asian side, the Northern Pacific Rim encompasses the coastal areas of Russia, including Kamchatka and the Kuril Islands, northeast China, Korea and Japan. On the American side, those of Alaska, British Columbia, all the way to northern California. Many species, such as humpback whales, sea turtles, and sharks, use the North Pacific as a corridor to move between Asian and American coastlines for feeding and breeding. Salmon populations often travel across the Pacific, with some species, such as Chinook and Chum salmon, having overlapping habitats in both the Asian and North American side of the Pacific. In the past, these connected ecosystems allowed for the spread of marine resources and facilitated the dispersal of fishing and hunting humans and their languages. In this way, the Asian and American side of the Northern Pacific Rim are interconnected, not only in ecological but also in linguistic diversity.
The Northern Pacific Rim is home to various indigenous cultures and numerous language families and isolates, such as Transeurasian, Sino-Tibetan, Ainuic, Amuric, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskaleut, Na-Dené-Yeniseian, Tsimshian, Wakashan, and Salishan. Whereas some of these languages and families preserve common traits of the ancestral ecological environment, they are also closely interconnected through language contact, reflected in circum-Pacific typology as well as in various interlocking chains of borrowings, including vocabulary for plants, animals and aquatic resources.
In this project, we reconstruct the ecological environment of the ancestral speakers of North Pacific Rim languages, using vocabulary, morphology and typological features as our datasets and investigate how environmental change may have impacted language structure, distribution and mobility in the unrecorded past.
