Tracing population movements in ancient East Asia through the linguistics and archaeology of textile production.

Sarah Nelson,Martine Robbeets,Tao Li,Mark Hudson,Irina Zhushchikhovskaya

doi:10.1017/ehs.2020.4

Abstract

Archaeolinguistics, a field which combines language reconstruction and archaeology as a source of information on human prehistory, has much to offer to deepen our understanding of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Northeast Asia. So far, integrated comparative analyses of words and tools for textile production are completely lacking for the Northeast Asian Neolithic and Bronze Age. To remedy this situation, here we integrate linguistic and archaeological evidence of textile production, with the aim of shedding light on ancient population movements in Northeast China, the Russian Far East, Korea and Japan. We show that the transition to more sophisticated textile technology in these regions can be associated not only with the adoption of millet agriculture but also with the spread of the languages of the so-called 'Transeurasian' family. In this way, our research provides indirect support for the Language/Farming Dispersal Hypothesis, which posits that language expansion from the Neolithic onwards was often associated with agricultural colonization.

Highlights

The Language/Farming Dispersal Hypothesis makes the radical and controversial claim that many of the world’s major language families owe their premodern distribution to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers (Bellwood 1984; Renfrew 1987; Bellwood and Renfrew 2002; Diamond and Bellwood 2003; Bellwood 2005, 2011; Robbeets and Savelyev 2017)
We show that the transition to more sophisticated textile technology in these regions can be associated with the adoption of millet agriculture and the spread of the so-called ‘Transeurasian’ language family
Whereas pre-agricultural societies such as the Boisman (4825–2470 BCE) in the Russian Far East, the Incipient Chulmun (8000–6000 BCE) populations on the Korean Peninsula and the Jomon (10000– 900 BCE) in Japan showed no evidence for weaving, spindle whorls appear with the transition to agriculture

Summary

Introduction

The Language/Farming Dispersal Hypothesis makes the radical and controversial claim that many of the world’s major language families owe their premodern distribution to the adoption of agriculture by their early speakers (Bellwood 1984; Renfrew 1987; Bellwood and Renfrew 2002; Diamond and Bellwood 2003; Bellwood 2005, 2011; Robbeets and Savelyev 2017). The standard technique to test this hypothesis for a given language family is to use reconstructed words with an agricultural meaning as a way of determining whether the ancestral speakers were familiar with agriculture. This method has been used to support or reject agriculture-driven language spread for a wide range of language families such as Indo-European (Comrie 2002; Anthony 2007; Kroonen 2012; Iversen and Kroonen 2017; Kümmel 2017), Sino-Tibetan (Sagart et al 2019), Austronesian (Blust 1995, 2013; Pawley 2002), Austroasiatic (Sidwell and Blench 2011; van Driem 2017), Trans-New Guinean (Schapper 2017), Bantu (Philipson 2002; Bostoen and Koni Muluwa 2017), Arawak (Aikhenvald 1999) and Otomanguean (Kaufman 1990; Brown 2015). Recent assessments have shown that even if the historical relationship between the Transeurasian languages is heavily marked by borrowing, there is a core of reliable evidence for the classification of Transeurasian as a valid genealogical grouping (Robbeets 2005, 2015, 2020b, c)

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