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Across Disciplines

Linguistics in Concert with Genetics, Archaeology and History

Archaeology

Archaeology

Linguistics made the first great discovery of prehistory, and shaped archaeology from its beginnings, but both have specialised and grown apart. It is high time to reconverge their complementary insights into a more holistic vision of our past.
Genetics

Genetics

Our genetic lineages, and the lineages of the ‘mother tongues’ we speak, sometimes go together, and sometimes do not. Comparing their complex patterns can help reveal our ancestries and origins.
History

History

Combining history and (historical) linguistics together, into a more coherent view of the past, challenged and enriched by the histories of our languages too.
World Language Prehistory

World Language Prehistory

This monumental work, edited by Colin Renfrew and Paul Bahn, surveys the prehistory of the world, structured into seven macro-regions, and a global, methodological introduction. I was the primary author, alongside Colin Renfrew, of all eight chapters on languages, which together comprise a language prehistory of the world.

Why Across Disciplines?

Humans have always striven to make sense of the past, and their own origins.  Clues survive in many forms:  documents left to historians, material culture uncovered by archaeologists;  our immaterial that and the past languages linguists can partly reconstruct;
 but all of them offers only a very incomplete perspective, of whatever fragmented record of the past survives — whether in material culture left to archaeologists,  or the immaterial that linguists can partly reconstruct;  the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.
My take emerges from linguistics, but the past record can only be properly understood in the context
As  these have long since parted ways as each discipline developed and refined its own very different techniques of the Andes runs back through many millennia of prehistory.  F

Publications

Although always with one foot in the rich potential of language, most of my publications also delve deeply into one or more of the other disciplines of (pre)history, especially archaeology and genetics.  See each of the more focused lists of my publications in the four subsections above:  archaeology, genetics, history and world language prehistory.