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Talking Neolithic

Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives on How Indo-European Was Implemented in Southern Scandinavia

Bibliographic Data

ID4914325
AuthorsRune Iversen (0000-0001-7618-625X, Sax Institute), Guus Kroonen (0000-0002-3708-0476, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies)
Year2017
Volume121
Issue4
Pages511-525
Publication date2017-10-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Journal of Archaeology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-9114 • E-ISSN: 1939-828X
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.3764/aja.121.4.0511
OpenAlexW2756456654
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited27

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 Farming arrived in Scandinavia with the Funnel Beaker culture by the turn of the fourth millennium B.C.E. It was superseded by the Single Grave culture, which as part of the Corded Ware horizon is a likely vector for the introduction of Indo-European speech.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

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Beaker · Czech · Ethnology · Geography · Horizon · Latvian · Linguistics · Period (music · Quarter (Canadian coin · Terminology · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Language and cultural evolution · Linguistics and language evolution

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Unique citing works17
Citations per year1,89
Citation span2017 - 2026 (10)
Citation velocitycurrent
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 17
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