Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on how Indo-European was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia

TY - JOUR

T1 - Talking Neolithic: Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on how Indo-European was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia

AU - Iversen, Rune

AU - Kroonen, Guus

PY - 2017/10

Y1 - 2017/10

N2 - In this article, we approach the Neolithization of southern Scandinavia from an archaeolinguistic perspective. Farming arrived in Scandinavia with the Funnel Beaker culture by the turn of the fourth millennium B.C.E. It was superseded by the Single Grave culture, which as part of the Corded Ware horizon is a likely vector for the introduction of Indo-European speech. As a result of this introduction, the language spoken by individuals from the Funnel Beaker culture went extinct long before the beginning of the historical record, apparently vanishing without a trace. However, the Indo-European dialect that ultimately developed into Proto-Germanic can be shown to have adopted terminology from a non-Indo-European language, including names for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates. We argue that the coexistence of the Funnel Beaker culture and the Single Grave culture in the first quarter of the third millennium B.C.E. offers an attractive scenario for the required cultural and linguistic exchange, which we hypothesize took place between incoming speakers of Indo-European and local descendants of Scandinavia's earliest farmers.

AB - In this article, we approach the Neolithization of southern Scandinavia from an archaeolinguistic perspective. Farming arrived in Scandinavia with the Funnel Beaker culture by the turn of the fourth millennium B.C.E. It was superseded by the Single Grave culture, which as part of the Corded Ware horizon is a likely vector for the introduction of Indo-European speech. As a result of this introduction, the language spoken by individuals from the Funnel Beaker culture went extinct long before the beginning of the historical record, apparently vanishing without a trace. However, the Indo-European dialect that ultimately developed into Proto-Germanic can be shown to have adopted terminology from a non-Indo-European language, including names for local flora and fauna and important plant domesticates. We argue that the coexistence of the Funnel Beaker culture and the Single Grave culture in the first quarter of the third millennium B.C.E. offers an attractive scenario for the required cultural and linguistic exchange, which we hypothesize took place between incoming speakers of Indo-European and local descendants of Scandinavia's earliest farmers.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - Bronze Age

KW - Linguistics

KW - Neolithic period

KW - Prehistory

KW - Europe

KW - Western Europe

KW - 3rd millennium BC

KW - Corded Ware culture

KW - Indo-European

KW - Archaeology

U2 - 10.3764/aja.121.4.0511

DO - 10.3764/aja.121.4.0511

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0002-9114

VL - 121

SP - 511

EP - 525

JO - American Journal of Archaeology

JF - American Journal of Archaeology

IS - 4

ER -