Lecture | Language and the Human Past
One language = one archaeological culture? Peruvian evidence for a richer interface between language and archaeology
- Date
- Friday 20 March 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Language and the human past
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
Historical linguistics is replete with attempts to link prehistoric languages, including reconstructed proto-languages, to archaeological cultures or to archaeological evidence more generally.
Detractors reject such links at the archaeology–(genetics)–language interface outright as unscientific (Kristiansen 2006). Even when the appraisal is less skeptical, however, there are grounds for concern: There are no general methodological standards or best practices that constrain proposals in terms of plausibility, nor are there explicit felicity conditions that define what a successful match should look like. For example, does the incongruence between the timing of the Secondary Product Revolution in Eurasia and Bayesian dates for Indo-European terminology in Heggarty et al. (2023) invalidate their narrative (Kroonen et al. 2023)? How should we evaluate the mismatch between the phylogeographically inferred homeland for Sino-Tibetan near the eastern Himalayas in Zhang et al. (2019) and the homeland actually argued for by the authors in the Yellow River Basin?
In this presentation, I examine a related issue in linking prehistoric languages with archaeological cultures or genetic populations, one that likewise invites reflection on conceptual frameworks and foundations: the often implicit assumption of a one-to-one relationship between an attested or reconstructed linguistic entity and a prehistoric “culture” visible in the archaeological record. In its unexamined form, this may represent a conceptual carryover from Romantic language ideologies that posit an equivalence between language and ethnicity, reified as a bounded “people” with a coherent material cultural expression identifiable archaeologically. Yet our growing understanding of the language ideologies that operate when so-called traditional societies negotiate linguistic difference (Pakendorf et al. 2021) demonstrates that such an equivalence is not universally warranted. While close links between language and culture are indeed observed in some non-state contexts, such as Australia, other settings are characterized by multilingual configurations in which a particular confluence of languages, rather than the exclusive use of a single privileged language, defines societies (Irvine and Gal 2000). In still other cases, linguistic differentiation maps onto divisions within societies rather than between them.
Under uniformitarian assumptions, we should therefore recognize that relationships at the language–archaeology interface are diverse, and that multiple modes of alignment between language and archaeologically visible phenomena are possible. To illustrate this point, I discuss two cases from ancient Peru in which I have argued precisely this (Urban 2018, 2021, 2024). First, I reinterpret the contact relationship between the Quechuan and Aymaran languages, along with its cultural context, as grounded in a differentiation of Andean societies into herders and cultivators. These groups functioned as opposing poles within societies, distinguished by economic specialization, mythological places of origin, and semiotically active cultural attributes, including language. Second, I turn to the often neglected linguistic history of Peru’s coast, where the distribution of the Mochica and Quingnam languages in the earliest historical period likewise suggests an alignment with distinct cultural trajectories rooted in subtle differentiation within the broader Moche cultural sphere.
References
- Heggarty, Paul et al. 2023. Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages. Science 381: eabg0818. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg0818
- Irvine, Judith T., and Susan Gal. 2000. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In Paul V. Kroskrity, (Ed.): Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities, 35-84. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
- Kristiansen, Kristian. 2006. What language did Neolithic pots speak? Colin Renfrew’s European farming-language-dispersal model challenged. Antiquity 79 (305): 679-691. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00114607
- Kroonen, Guus, Thomas Olander, Mikkel Nørtoft, Rasmus G. Bjørn, Adam Hyllested, Benedicte Nielsen Whitehead, Birgit Anette Olsen, Simon Poulsen, and Tobias Mosbæk Søborg. 2023. Archaeolinguistic anachronisms in the Indo-European phylogeny of Heggarty et al. 2023. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0818#elettersSection
- Pakendorf, Brigitte, Nina Dobrushina, and Olesya Khanina. 2021. A typology of small-scale multilingualism. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(4), 835-859. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069211023137
- Urban, Matthias. 2018. Sprachlandschaften. Über die Rolle von Sprache in der Beziehung zwischen Mensch und Umwelt. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
- Urban, Matthias. 2021. Linguistic and cultural divisions in pre-Hispanic Northern Peru. Language Sciences 85: 101354. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2020.101354
- Urban, Matthias. 2024. Language ecologies and dynamics in the ancient Central Andes. In: Matthias Urban (ed.): The Oxford Guide to the Languages of the Central Andes, 725-738. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Zhang, Mengzhan, Shi Yan, Wuyun Pan, and Li Jin. 2019. Phylogenetic evidence for Sino-Tibetan origin in northern China in the Late Neolithic. Nature 569: 112–115. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1153-z