New technologies rewriting language history
Significant technological innovations in prehistory, such as the wheel and wagon or the ability to extract silver from ores, instigated a technological movement that is ongoing to the present day. Transforming regional economies, increasing mobility and fueling extensive trade networks, these human-created innovations impacted not only the earth sphere but also human culture and language.
Not only do we study the impact of these new technologies on language, we also use language to complement archaeology in clarifying how these technology spread. The comparative analysis of languages produces relative chronologies of linguistic evidence that can be mapped onto datable innovations such as these inventions. Our project thus integrates linguistic data to answer question such as where and when a technological innovation was invented, along which trajectories it spread and to which extent it impacted human culture and environment.
In the Andes, for instance, Potosí's 16th-century "silver rush" triggered multilingualism in the mines and the emergence of a mixed language consisting of elements from Spanish, the colonial language and local Andean languages spoken by the miners. Much deeper in time, the wheel and wagon are tied to the early split and spread of the Indo-European family, 6000 years ago. The latter example is the topic of a scientific collaboration of our group with our former doctoral researcher Rasmus Björn and Thomas Olander at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
Climate change is one aspect of population movements and corresponding language dispersals in Eurasia but we are also interested in how these movements were technologically driven and in how they were tied to political economy.
