Corded Ware is one of the main archaeological phenomena of the third millennium before the common era (BCE), with a wide geographic spread across much of central and northeastern Europe, from Denmark, the Rhineland, and Switzerland in the west to the Baltic and Western Russia in the east, and broadly restricted to the temperate, continental zones north of the Alps, the Carpathians, and the steppe/forest steppe border to the east (Glob 1944; Strahm and Buchvaldek 1991; Furholt 2014).

The aim of this chapter is to establish the semantic field of maritime vocabulary of the Celtic languages, especially that part of the maritime vocabulary that can be reconstructed for Proto-Celtic, the common ancestor of all Celtic languages, and for the prehistoric stages of the Insular Celtic languages. The approach taken in this study is to analyse the relevant lexemes etymologically, and to assess the findings from the point of view of linguistic archaeology. Linguistic archaeology seeks to extract as much information as possible from the synchronic and diachronically reconstructable semantics and morphology of words in order to make inferences about the environment and living conditions of the language’s speakers from a prehistoric and early historic perspective. Maritime vocabulary, which is the focus of this study, includes all elements of the lexicon that refer to the topographical, biological, and economic environment of the sea and the shore, and to human interaction with them.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore one area in which comparative linguistic data can play a role in interpreting late Neolithic and early Bronze Age genetic and archaeological data from western Eurasia. The sharp rise in available samples of ancient DNA enables the establishment of kinship relations between individuals in prehistoric graveyards. It also makes it possible to establish where their ancestors came from. The analysis of strontium, oxygen, carbon, and lead isotopes in the tooth enamel of these same individuals provides information about movements during their lives. When these techniques are combined, we obtain a much better idea about who moved where and when in prehistory. Being able to establish the diet of prehistoric individuals and which diseases they may have suffered from allows archaeologists to set up hypotheses as to why some of the population movements that can be observed in the archaeological data might have taken place. Linguistics can offer a valuable contribution to the discussion of why people moved by shedding light on factors other than diet or disease; it may, for example, help to explain cases in which males appear to have migrated differently from females. In order to understand how, this chapter will take a closer look at the linguistic evidence for kinship relations and the role of gender and age in Indo-European society. At the end of the chapter, hypotheses about mobility, kinship, and marriage in early Indo-European society as based on the linguistic data will be compared to the findings of recent research into ancient DNA and isotope analysis.

The first use of metals in the production of objects among human societies was undoubtedly a defining event with a profound, irreversible impact on craftsmanship, agriculture, trade, warfare, and other cultural and political phenomena. The continuous refinement of metallurgical practice, including the introduction of new metals, has left behind some of the most conspicuous and important archaeological remains. Furthermore, the linguistic and archaeological evidence provided by metals can be combined to cast light on the relative placement of reconstructed languages in time and space through the use of linguistic palaeontology (cf. already Schrader 1883). For the study of the expansion of the Indo-European (IE) languages, examining the inventory of metallurgical vocabulary is thus highly relevant – not only for dating and locating the dissolution of each language, but also for determining the branching and spread of the successive daughter languages, and how they were influenced by foreign languages.

The prehistoric spread of Indo-European languages across Europe and Asia was a process with dramatic consequences that are still being felt in the modern world.1 Today around half the world’s population speak an Indo-European language; some of the most widely spoken are Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, and Russian. The Indo-European languages are grouped into ten major subgroups, or branches: Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, and Balto-Slavic, as well as Anatolian and Tocharian (both extinct). These branches all descend from a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European.

The Yamnaya culture of the Lower Don is a Bronze Age culture dated between 2900 and 2600 cal BC. Its population inhabited the Eurasian desert steppe belt, where their main subsistence activity was pastoralism. The Yamnaya population developed a distinctive economic model based on new principles of pasture rotation, landscape use, and individual mobility. The focus of this study is the analysis of the specific landscapes and geographical features of one of the Eurasian Steppe regions located between the Lower Don and Lower Volga regions, i.e. the Sal-Manych Ridge (Fig. 3.1); it includes the settlement pattern and economic model that the mobile Yamnaya pastoralists developed to adapt to this region, the resources of the steppes they exploited and the system of seasonal migration reflected in the mobility of individual Yamnaya groups.

The present chapter discusses the linguistic evidence for slaves and slavery in Proto-Indo-European, with the Latin lexicon as its point of departure. Slavery, as such, has proven to be quite an elusive field of investigation. Archaeologists in particular have been perplexed to find that, even in historical periods for which literary sources richly document slavery as a vital institution, the archaeological evidence is meager and ambiguous. In a sense, slaves are as invisible to archaeologists as they were anonymous and socially nonexistent in the societies that they helped build and maintain. One of the keys to the archaeologist’s problem is that, being possessions themselves, slaves tend not to own anything, and, given that they are not legitimate members of society, they are not likely to receive elaborate burials – to the extent that they are buried at all. However, there are other scenarios in which the material wealth of slaves was in fact similar to that of lower-class free individuals, rendering it impossible to tell the classes of free and unfree workers apart. For overviews of the complexities of slavery in the field of archaeology, see, for instance, Marshall (2016: 69) and Morris (2018).

We are currently experiencing what could be called the “third science revolution” (Kristiansen 2014). The implications of this revolution are reshaping not only archaeological discourse, but – even more fundamentally – the nature and perception of interdisciplinarity (Stutz 2018). The current reconfiguration offers unique new opportunities for collaboration across the sciences and humanities, as we will show, but can also provoke a strong emotional response. This is apparent from the at times fierce debates about the role of science in archaeological, archaeogenetic, and perhaps especially archaeolinguistic interpretation (Gray, Atkinson, & Greenhill 2011 vs. Pereltsvaig & Lewis 2015; Ion 2017 and 2019; Ribeiro 2019; Sørensen 2016). We also see old debates about the role of historical linguistics in archaeology resurfacing (Hansen 2019).