Five paragraphs on the pentathlon

In news from the burgeoning field of the anthropology of numbers, the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne has decided that the pentathlon will now comprise only four distinct events, combining the shooting and running components into a single event. But this change in structure will not be accompanied by a change in nomenclature, sparking a barrage from the linguistic blogosphere, such as this Language Log post, discussing the change and the inevitable cries of etymological impurity. Now Bill Poser at LL has very sensibly pointed out that since the shooting and running event is a two-event sport (thus a biathlon), three events plus a biathlon is still five separate disciplines and the etymological issue is a non-starter.

These issues involving numerical prefixes are very obvious instances where we think that the etymology should correspond to reality. Of course if something involves the prefix penta-, it should involve five, right? Not so fast. This is really a special case of the logical fallacy known as the etymological fallacy: the notion that the current meaning of words ought to reflect their etymology. It rarely does, and there is no reason we should expect every language user to be a language historian.

The etymological fallacy in English is normally applied only to a particular set of words: scientific and technical vocabulary that form part of the Greek and Latin superstrate introduced into the language from the 16th century onward. Latin and Greek vocabulary is often seen to be logical, rational, and predictable, in contrast to wayward Anglo-Saxon and French elements in the modern English lexicon. It isn’t true, as anyone who has studied classical languages for any period of time will attest. Rather, when borrowing and developing this aspect of the English lexicon, early modern wordsmiths borrowed fairly regular elements (predictable morphemes that could be combined with others), and left a lot of the complexity behind, leaving the illusion that Latin is a purely logical language.

I grant that if someone tried to redefine triskaidekaphobia as fear of the number 11, I might feel a bit put out. The semantic transparency of numerical prefixes contributes to the sensible notion that we should know what they mean unambiguously. But by that logic, we ought to insist that decimate be used to describe only the destruction of one-tenth of something (which earned the word a spot on the annual Banished Words List some years back). And don’t even get me started on the debate between biannual and semiannual. In this case, the ‘quinquemation’ of the pentathlon doesn’t bother me in the least.

(Crossposted to the Phrontistery)

Barasque Obasquema?

In thinking about my post on the debunked Basque inscriptions, the thought occurred to me that the Basques are like Barack Obama. Just as Obama describes himself as “an imperfect vessel for your hopes and dreams,” the Basques are the imperfect vessel for the linguistic and nationalistic dreams of every would-be linguist and pseudoarchaeologist looking for glorious and deep connections to a mysterious past.

Structuralism and comparativism

Yesterday one of anthropology’s most influential and controversial figures, Claude Levi-Strauss, celebrated his one hundredth birthday. Virtually no one is an unalloyed structuralist these days, but Levi-Strauss is nonetheless a figure of unparalleled influence on world anthropology and indeed on much of the humanities and social sciences, more broadly construed. In anthropology, his influence has centrally been in the study of religion and myth, but ranges across fields, from Ian Hodder’s archaeological account of Balkan agricultural origins in The Domestication of Europe (Hodder 1990) to Charles Laughlin’s neurologically-informed biogenetic structuralism (Laughlin and d’Aquili 1974).

I’ve never been much of a fan of Levi-Strauss’ work, which I find too arcane to be of much use to me personally (Levi-Strauss 1963, 1966). I do have a background in structuralism, but it’s the British-influenced structuralism of Rodney Needham, which is more accessible to the novice (Needham 1980, 1983). And I’ve also taken to heart the (equally controversial) criticisms of Dan Sperber, who argues forcefully in Rethinking Symbolism (Sperber 1975) that the patterns Levi-Strauss observes are understandable within a cognitive science of religion and myth, one that seeks to transcend simple issues of ‘culture’ and ‘meaning’ and to understand how human beings process information. No one has ever demonstrated to my satisfaction that the ‘structures’ that Levi-Strauss proposes actually exist in the mind or anywhere else.

But, for me, the real value of Levi-Strauss’ work, one that is too often ignored by structuralists and non-structuralists alike, is that it is an attempt (however imperfect) to build anthropological theory through the comparative use of anthropological data. It is neither a narrow particularism, focused solely on single social contexts, nor does it relegate anthropology to be a constant borrower of grand theory in order to explain its evidence. Instead it takes as a foundational assumption the idea that anthropology is a comparative science, and understanding systematically the similarities and differences among human myths can tell us something about the human condition that cannot be learned otherwise. The (literally) hopeless particularism of much of contemporary anthropology leaves us little to contribute to other disciplines, if we have no use for our data except as part of a general enterprise of data collection.

I am an unapologetic comparativist, and in that fact I feel a real kinship (pun intended) with Levi-Strauss and his work. I believe that it is imperative that anthropologists systematically develop a set of comparative methods to allow us to draw reasonable conclusions about patterns of human behaviour, past and present. Until we do such comparisons, we have no way to judge whether such patterns are common or rare; the retreat into particularism is unjustified, absent the sort of work that Levi-Strauss and others have undertaken. For my part, in my own little realm of number systems, I have, I think, put together good evidence that there are patterns, even (dare I say it?) cultural laws, and if these are not in any sense structuralist laws, they nonetheless bear a great debt to the man whose centenary we are celebrating.

Works cited

Hodder, I. 1990. The domestication of Europe. Blackwell.
Laughlin, C. D., and d’Aquili, E.G. 1974. Biogenetic structuralism. Columbia University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1966. The Savage Mind. University Of Chicago Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. 1963. Structural Anthropology. Basic Books.
Needham, R. 1980. Reconnaissances. University of Toronto Press.
Needham, R. 1983. Structure and sentiment. University of Chicago Press.
Sperber, D. 1975. Rethinking symbolism. Cambridge University Press.

Debunking and de-Basque-ing

For several years I have been deeply concerned with the proliferation of pseudoscience in anthropology. In 2007 I had the remarkable opportunity to teach a seminar on pseudoarchaeology, leading to the Pseudoarchaeology Research Archive. Of particular interest and concern to me is the use and misuse of inscriptional evidence in pseudoarchaeology, because few archaeologists have any expertise in linguistics, and few linguists have any expertise in archaeology. For instance, it is impossible to deal adequately with the work of the late Barry Fell without the ability to work with both sets of methods and data. Given this blog’s focus on the intersection of linguistic and archaeological anthropology, you should expect to read quite a bit about this subject here. Perhaps someday I’ll even write that article on Barry Fell’s cult of masculinity that I’d been meaning to put together.

There is probably no culture or language that has attracted more pseudoscientific attention than Basque. As a language isolate, the ongoing quest to understand the origins and possible cultural affiliations of the Basques, so thoroughly European and yet so foreign, has attracted incredible scholarly attention over the past century and more, with molecular genetics now added to the mix of material culture and historical linguistics as part of the often-misemployed ‘race-language-culture’ triad. One of the more popular theories among some scholars (particularly the geneticists) is that the Basques are the remnants of Paleolithic peoples in Europe who were largely replaced by the Indo-Europeans. This basically relies on the fact that the Basques have higher percentages of certain genetic markers than their neighbours, but there is no other reason to believe that it is true.

Yet there is very minimal textual evidence for the Basque language prior to the eleventh century CE, making it very hard to trace Basque history (and, a fortiori, its prehistory). There are several hundred personal, deity and place-names recorded in Roman inscriptions in a probably-related language called Aquitainian, dating to the 2nd century CE, but no full texts or even phrases. Until 2006, that is, when reports surfaced that a group of 270 inscribed pieces of 3rd and 4th century CE pottery, glass, and brick had been found at the site of Iruña-Veleia in the Basque country with what was clearly Basque(oid) language (see articles here and here).

You will note that the response was not exactly enthusiastic from the academic community. I recall reading the blog post at Language Hat (the second link) and thinking, “Huh, yeah, probably fakes.” This is quite simply the only rational strategy in a field that has been riddled with pseudoscientific language comparison, through the late Dr. Fell’s Epigraphic Society and its claims for widespread pre-Roman transatlantic commerce, through the pseudoarchaeologist Marija Gimbutas’ pseudo-feminist Indo-Europeanism, and many others. And the find was so perfect – evidence not only that Basque was written in the 3rd century CE in quantity, but that the Basques were Christians at a time when most of Western Europe was not. And so when nothing was published following this ‘finding’, and no photos given anywhere (not even in the media) of any of the artifacts, I was neither surprised nor overly disappointed, and presumed that the initial reports were exaggerated and at best, that some new Aquitanian names had been found.

And indeed, word has come out this week in the Guardian that the whole thing is not only a fraud, but a hoax of the most preposterous degree. For instance:

- The glue used on some of the artifacts is apparently modern.
- The Calvary scene depicting the crucified Jesus apparently contains the inscription ‘R.I.P.’, essentially endorsing the heresy that Jesus did not rise from the dead but in fact was dead.
- The presence of (purportedly) Egyptian hieroglyphic writing (essentially extinct by the time) alongside the expected texts in Latin script (recording both Latin and Basque language). This leads to the claim that “The hieroglyphics caused speculation about the existence of third century Egyptologists who might have created the inscriptions to teach children.”
- References to the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti and to the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes (!!!).

Now, this is not the first time that a preposterous hoax has been perpetrated. The Davenport tablets ‘excavated’ in Iowa in 1877 exhibit similarly ridiculous characteristics. But given the degree of scrutiny to which archaeological finds are exposed these days, and given the demands for publication, and the risk to the professional reputation of the excavator, such a shoddy hoax is difficult to explain. For his part, the excavator, Eliseo Gil, is maintaining that the finds are genuine (article in Spanish), although if even half of what has come to light is true, this is an utter hoax. Could we have a new affaire Glozel in the making? Not unless things are much muddier than they now seem to be.

Apologies

My apologies for the lack of recent posts. A combination of some busy committee assignments, a public lecture (just finished today), an unexpected grant proposal deadline, an unusually-busy reference letter writing season, and getting the book off to the publisher have occupied my days to an insane degree. Things should calm down over Thanksgiving and I will have some longer posts next week.

For now though, since it’s floating around the blogosphere, I wanted to draw your attention to the Atlas of True Names, which presents place-names by giving their etymology in English (e.g. “Hillfort” for London or “Sibling Love” for Philadelphia or just “Strait” for Detroit). It can be trite, and the etymologies themselves can be questioned. What I find most fascinating (as a Tolkienophile of some decades) is that they use the toponymy of Middle-Earth as an explicit model justifying the aesthetic quality of the enterprise. For me the most compelling aspects of Tolkien’s nomenclature were the untranslated Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdûl, and Adûnaic (among others), whereas formations like ‘Mirkwood’ were merely passably interesting. I freely admit that my old copy of Robert Foster’s Complete Guide to Middle-Earth quickly became so worn that I had to discard it a couple of years ago after years of abuse.

All of which reminds me of a sad story that I should get off my chest. In my first term at McGill I taught a class on the anthropology of writing systems and literacy, the last week of which was left open for student-directed topics, and the members of the seminar wanted to study constructed scripts, so I gave them a little piece to read on Tengwar (Elvish) and another on Klingon. But on the day we were to discuss those readings, I learned just hours before class that my mentor Bruce Trigger had passed away, and so I cancelled that class, which remains untaught to this day.

Semitic Luwians and other hybrids

After my complaining yesterday, my wife Julia Pope pointed me in the direction of a fascinating article by John Noble Wilford in the New York Times yesterday about the discovery of a stele (inscribed monument) at the site of Zincirli (known as Sam’al in antiquity) in southeastern Turkey. It was found this past summer during the excavations at Zincirli directed by David Schloen at the Oriental Institute, and will be discussed at the American Schools of Oriental Research / Society for Biblical Literature meetings which begin tomorrow in Boston.

The stele dates to the 8th century BCE, and suggests the existence of cultural hybridization between Luwians (Anatolian Indo-Europeans, speakers of a language related to Hittite) and Aramaeans (Semitic-speakers from the Levant). The stele contains Luwian personal names, but the script is Phoenician-Aramaic and records a language that the translator calls Sam’alian, but which is basically an archaic form of Aramaic. We have known for over a century that Zincirli was a major border region where cultural contact took place, but this is pretty good textual evidence that shows that speakers of Indo-European languages were using Semitic languages and writing systems for mortuary purposes (rather than merely for trading purposes, for instance).

And unlike the Shaanxi oracle bones or the paleo-Hebrew ostracon, in this news article we have a very interesting partial translation by Dennis Pardee at Chicago: “I, Kuttamuwa, servant of [the king] Panamuwa, am the one who oversaw the production of this stele for myself while still living. I placed it in an eternal chamber [?] and established a feast at this chamber: a bull for [the god] Hadad, a ram for [the god] Shamash and a ram for my soul that is in this stele.” One of the more interesting features is the use of the phrase ‘my soul that is in this stele’ – this is decidedly unusual for the Near East, to conceive of a soul separate from the body, entombed in stone. No tomb and no mortuary remains have been found at or near the stele, but its iconography depicts a man receiving offerings of food and drink, as is further suggested from the inscription. Whether this actually represents a previously-unidentified religious tradition, no one can say for sure, but the evidence is suggestive.

Although there are no numerals on the stele, I am quite enthused about this find as it relates to my research. I have thought for some years that the Hittite-Luwian written numerals may have played some role in inspiring the Aramaic-Phoenician numerical system that emerged in the 8th century BCE. The earliest numerical inscription ever described as Aramaic is on an 8th century ostracon from Tell Qasile, in which the numeral 30 is expressed as three horizontal strokes ( ≡ ), each stroke with the value of 10 (Lemaire 1977: 280). This is the representation found regularly in Luwian inscriptions (Hawkins 1986). However, it is not the normal form used in later Aramaic inscriptions, where the standard representation would be two horizontal strokes followed by a single stroke: written right to left, roughly -=).

But this isn’t a particularly strong argument, and I don’t make a great deal of this similarity in my forthcoming book – one artifact does not make an absolute case for a cultural borrowing, especially not when the ‘borrowing’ is simply the use of horizontal strokes for 10. The traditional wisdom is that while Anatolian Indo-European speakers received a lot of cultural influence from Mesopotamia and the Levant, their representational systems (writing systems, numerals, etc.) were quite distinct. However, given this new stele, if it turns out that contact between Anatolia and the Levant was greater than we previously anticipated, a Luwian borrowing becomes more strongly supported. I look forward to seeing the publication that will surely emerge from this work, and will keep you updated.

Works cited
Hawkins, J.D. 1986. Writing in Anatolia: imported and indigenous systems. World Archaeology 17(3): 363-375.
Lemaire, André. 1977. Inscriptions hébraiques, vol. 1. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf.

Shaanxi oracle bones

A recent China Daily news story reports on the discovery of inscribed oracle bones (jiǎgǔpiàn) in Shaanxi province, dating to the Zhou dynasty (11th – 7th centuries BCE). Over the past few months inscriptions have been found comprising over 1100 characters in total. (As in modern Chinese writing, each character is roughly the equivalent of a single lexical unit, most often what we would call a word).

Apparently 1100 characters is a ‘new record’, whatever that means. Does anyone else find it odd that so much attention is being paid to the number of characters found? It’s reminiscent of the sort of student (thankfully, rare) who uses word count as a proxy for paper quality when arguing a grade: “But sir, I have 5000 words! How did I get a C?”

I’m also struck by the similarity between this report and my last post on the 10th century BCE Israelite (Hebrew?) inscription. In both cases, the presence of writing (and in this case, the quantity) is seen as being informative on the nature and context of literacy, and the presence of the word for ‘king’ is seen as particularly noteworthy. In this case, however, the Zhou dynasty is several centuries (at minimum) into the history of Chinese writing, and there is no question that the Zhou state was politically and socially complex, featuring high degrees of social stratification. Hey, I understand that archaeologists spend a lot of time looking for exciting stuff like this, and inevitably you want to tell us all about it. But just once, couldn’t we have a news report that talks in detail about the content of the writing and the context of the inscription?

Early Hebrew writing

Over the past couple of weeks there have been a number of news stories about the discovery of a new ostracon (pottery shard) from the site of Khirbet Qeiyafa southwest of Jerusalem, bearing five lines of text that have been identified as ‘Hebrew’. The ostracon was dated (through association with burnt olive pits that could be radiocarbon dated) to around 1050-970 BCE, right around where the traditional timeline puts the Biblical King David. The site is a large fortified urban one, and is located in the Valley of Elah, where it is said that David slew Goliath. If the date holds, and if the claim that this is ‘Hebrew’ writing is confirmed, then this would represent the earliest Hebrew writing known to date.

As a teacher I’ve often found it useful to present news reports to students, and ask them how they would evaluate evidence like this in light of what they already know, or to ask what further questions they would want answered before being satisfied. Because most of us (including most scholars) never go any further than the news reports, and because these reports often precede by months or even years the publication of peer-reviewed material, it’s vital to be able to evaluate this material in terms of its implications for archaeology and epigraphy. So what do we know, and how do we evaluate it?

To start with, let’s collect some articles on the subject, which will constitute our body of evidence:
BBC News, 10/30/2008
Associated Press, 10/30/2008
Mail Online, 10/31/2008
Reuters, 10/30/2008
Telegraph, 10/31/2008
New York Times, 10/30/2008

- There are no published results yet, but that’s not unusual in ancient Near Eastern archaeology, which has a fairly conservative perspective on the pace of peer review, but this is a situation where one could get scooped at any moment, so announcing a find early, to be followed up by potentially years of peer review, is not unusual in this area.

- Dating by association is a well-established archaeological technique: if two artifacts are found in the same layer, they are likely of similar age. I have no reason to think the date is off in this case, but we need to recognize right off the top that if the olive pits and the shard ended up in the same layer for reasons other than that they were deposited at around the same time, the date could be way off.

- It is true that this ostracon predates the Dead Sea Scrolls by up to 1000 years, if the dating is right. True, but irrelevant. The Dead Sea Scrolls are frequently invoked in reporting on biblical archaeology as a benchmark for ‘really old Bible stuff’, but in this case, it gives the misleading impression that what has been found is a lot older than other paleo-Hebrew writings, which is simply not the case. The Gezer calendar, which dates to perhaps 925-900 BCE (based on the paleographic style of the text), is the next oldest well-attested Hebrew inscription and is one of many, many paleo-Hebrew texts from the Iron Age in the Levant. This new find extends the history of the script back another 50-75 years, which is interesting – but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the DSS.

- The claim that this would be the ‘earliest Hebrew writing’ is true but isn’t exactly saying what you think. There are any number of other inscriptions in Semitic languages from this period – for instance, there are Phoenician inscriptions from Byblos dating to around 1000 BCE. The text on the ostracon is apparently in Proto-Canaanite script, of which most of our exemplars are from the late Bronze Age (i.e., around 1500-1000 BCE), used to write any number of ancient Semitic languages, as the BBC article notes. So the script itself is not particularly unusual for the period, and doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

- And this brings us to a significant issue: the ostracon hasn’t been deciphered yet. So how do we know it’s Hebrew? Well, the BBC tells us, “Preliminary investigations since the shard was found in July have deciphered some words, including judge, slave and king.” and that “Lead archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel identified it as Hebrew because of a three-letter verb meaning “to do” which he said was only used in Hebrew.” This is significant because it identifies the language as Hebrew as opposed to something earlier. This one word on an as-yet incompletely-deciphered ostracon is being used to assert that the writer was a speaker of Hebrew, therefore an Israelite, and therefore that this provides evidence for the Kingdom of Israel in David’s time (e.g. the early 10th century BCE). But we would do well to remember that this is very preliminary stuff. Also bear in mind that our corpus of proto-Canaanite writings is small enough that it is impossible to know whether this form of “to do” was only used in Hebrew, or whether it could have been used in earlier Semitic languages as well.

- The claim is being made by several sources that this ostracon provides evidence for the historicity of King David. Not so. Rather, the claim is that the fact that there is such early writing demonstrates a high level of social complexity and a system of scribal education at the period. If true, this would tend to confirm that there was a large state in Israel in the 10th century BCE, and if one wished to associate that with the Biblical David, one could choose to do so without contradicting the evidence. The presence of words like ‘judge’ and ‘king’ in the text (if confirmed) would provide support for this position from within the text. This stands in opposition to the theory that the Israelites were more egalitarian and disunified at this period, as suggested by the heretofore pretty scanty record from the 10th century. If the latter were true, the Old Testament account would be open to more serious scrutiny; this new find doesn’t confirm the validity of anything Biblical, but rather doesn’t disconfirm it. And remember, this is one ostracon only, not an archive or even a small collection – so we have little idea of what it means. Rollston (2006), who is generally supportive of the argument that there was significant scribal education in Iron Age Israel, discusses many of the complexities behind inferring widespread literacy from the epigraphic/paleographic record.

- On the same topic: Hello, journalists? Could I make a suggestion? Just because you are writing an article about Iron Age Israel and a purported connection with King David does not mean you have to invoke Goliath. Seriously. Especially you, Daily Mail, for citing this undeciphered clay shard as evidence that David actually slew Goliath. At least the Telegraph just presents the theory that the David-Goliath story is a metaphor for Israelite-Philistine conflict at the period.

- One thing that is hardly mentioned is that the ostracon is the longest text in proto-Canaanite script yet attested. This could have important implications for our understanding of the script, once the inscription is read completely. Moreover, once it is read thoroughly, the paleographic letter-forms may actually tell us quite a bit about the date of the inscription, which could tend to confirm or refute the radiocarbon date.

- It would be a mistake to ignore the implications for the historicity of the Iron Age Kingdom of Israel for modern national conceptions and ethnic identity in contemporary Israel. The idea that 3000 years ago, there was a strong, militarily powerful unified kingdom of Israelites in that area has enormous symbolic appeal, and is one of the more controversial issues in contemporary Levantine archaeology. This issue was behind the debate over the tenure case of Nadia Abu El Haj at Barnard/Columbia a couple of years back, centrally concerned with her book, Facts on the Ground (Abu el Haj 2001).

In general, though, the presentation of the data is pretty good and the context of the discussion is generally sane. We have a lot still to learn, and I look forward to seeing the publication of the text in the hopefully not-too-distant future.

Nadia Abu El Haj (2001). Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rollston, Christopher A. 2006. Scribal education in ancient Israel: the Old Hebrew epigraphic evidence. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 344: 47-74.

Zotero: a wizard’s companion

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been using Zotero, a free browser add-on for Firefox that allows you to manage bibliographic citations online. I’d tried it months ago on my old, decrepit computer but found it to be slow and clunky, but wow, what a difference it has made to my research. It’s sleek, integrates perfectly with tools like Google Scholar, and allows you to export in virtually any bibliographic format. It seems to allow you to index just about any sort of source, including PDFs and web sites, with ease. Of course, if something is poorly referenced at the source, that won’t help you, but it has clarified a lot of things for me. I have been known to describe myself to students as a ‘wizard’ of bibliographic search, both online and otherwise, and Zotero has already made things much, much faster for me.

It’s striking how fast online research is changing – just ten months ago, when I had my Methods students do bibliographic research on Paleolithic mathematical and calendrical notations, I was wary of Google Scholar’s breadth and advised against using it exclusively, and I didn’t really have any notion of how to advise students to collect references online efficiently. With Zotero, their work would have been much, much faster and easier. So, because I know some of those people are reading this: sorry, guys!

Now if I could only find a way to take the giant Word document of references on numerical notation that I’ve been compiling since 1998, and import it into Zotero (or anything else), that would be pretty handy. But even a wizard has his limits.

Genes, languages, and archaeology

John Hawks has a new blog entry entitled ‘Gene-culture models and reductionism‘, which is a thoughtful response to a 2004 letter in American Anthropologist. The letter adopts a highly skeptical view towards the possibility that genetic information can tell us much about prehistoric population history and specifically that it can tell us much about cultural and linguistic prehistory. Hawks, in contrast, takes a more moderate view that leaves open the possibility that we can use genetic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence in tandem, while acknowledging that naively using one as a proxy for the other two is a serious error. Read it, then come back here. It’s short, and I’ll wait.

This is a subject of some interest to me, as a historically and prehistorically-minded linguistic anthropologist (or a linguistically-minded archaeological anthropologist, I don’t care which). The late Bruce Trigger and I published a chapter in 2004 (perhaps we could have found a better venue for it) in which we talk about the naive ways in which Iroquoian studies have used archaeological evidence to attribute ethnic identification (esp. ‘Iroquoian’ vs. ‘Algonkian’) to sites, and linked this problematic issue to broader problems in the use of archaeology to reconstruct language and ethnicity (Chrisomalis and Trigger 2004). The AA letter rightly points out that identifications of tribes or fixed social structures that correlate with genetic populations – or, unmentioned, languages – is problematic, and the notion that any of these must correspond with overarching ethnic identities is doubly problematic, as Barth (1969) argued persuasively decades ago. And yet …

It has long been recognized (since the 19th century at least) that language families are organized phylogenetically and that biological taxa are phylogenetic. This is partly a reflection of reality, and partly a reflection of the mutual reinforcement of phylogenetic models in linguistics and biology through academic interdisciplinary discourse over the past couple hundred years. But the problem noted by Hawks (and which no one interested in the subject can ignore) is that biological transmission (excepting some viruses) is vertical – you get all your genetic material from your parents alone – whereas cultural and linguistic transmission is both vertical and horizontal – that is, you get a lot of your culture from non-kin, including people who may not be part of your ‘tribe’. This is the sort of work that people like Steve Shennan (2002) are doing, and while I am not always convinced by the answers he reaches (particularly, I remain unconvinced that vertical, parent-child linguistic and cultural transmission is as important as he thinks it is), the research deserves more attention than it is getting.

On Tuesday, I am introducing my class to this subject through Colin Renfrew’s (2000) paper ‘At the edge of knowability: towards a prehistory of languages’. Again, I’m not always in agreement with Renfrew (I’m more of a skeptic than he is), but I’m thrilled that people are asking these questions. As social scientists and humanists, linguists and archaeologists need to forcefully assert the relevance of their data, and not let themselves be run roughshod by geneticists who treat their apex of the triad as the cornerstone of all knowledge in the field. One of my hopes for this blog, and for my research in general, is to be able to contribute to ongoing discussions on this issue. This post is, at best, a preliminary introduction to a topic which I suspect you will see here very often in the months (dare I hope for years?) to come.

Works cited

Barth, F. 1969. Ethnic groups and boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown.
Chrisomalis, S. and B.G. Trigger. 2004. Reconstructing prehistoric ethnicity: problems and possibilities. In In J. V. Wight and J.-L. Pilon (eds), A Passion for the Past: Papers in Honour of James F. Pendergast, pp. 419-433. Mercury Series, Paper No 164. Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Renfrew, C. 2000. At the Edge of Knowability: Towards a Prehistory of Languages. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10(1): 7-34.
Shennan, S. 2002. Genes, memes and human history: Darwinian archaeology and cultural evolution. London: Thames & Hudson.
Wildcat, D., I. Sumi and V. Deloria Jr. 2004. Commentary: A Response to Doug Jones. American Anthropologist 106, no. 3: 641.