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3 - Agricultural origins

What linguistic evidence reveals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
Christopher Ehret
Edited by
Graeme Barker  and
Candice Goucher
Graeme Barker
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Candice Goucher
Affiliation:
Washington State University
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Summary

The reach of the currently available linguistic evidence on early agriculture also extends back to the middle or the later middle Holocene for the Middle East, India and Mesoamerica. The essential foundation for the linguistic recovery of history is a systematic reconstruction of the relationships and phonological histories of the families of languages spoken in the regions whose human histories one wishes to investigate. Two major originating centres of food production lay in Africa, one in the far eastern Sahara and the other far to the west, in West Africa, along with a probable third centre in the southwestern Ethiopian highlands. The lexicons of subsistence in the first several periods in the history of the Nilo-Saharan language family reveal an extended, stage-by-stage history of shift from food collection to food production. A new stage in the evolution of West African agricultural practices began by no later than the fifth millennium BCE.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 55 - 92
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further reading

Anthony, D.W. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Assefa, S. Omotic Peoples and the Early History of Agriculture in Southern Ethiopia. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of California, Los Angeles, 2011.Google Scholar
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Brown, C.H. ‘Glottochronology and the chronology of maize in the Americas.’ In Staller, J.E., Tykot, R.H., and Benz, B.F. (eds.), Histories of Maize: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehistory, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize. Amsterdam and London: Elsevier Academic Press, 2006. 647–73.Google Scholar
Brown, C.H. ‘Prehistoric chronology of the common bean in the New World: the linguistic evidence.’ In Staller, J.E. and Carrasco, M.C. (eds.), Pre-Columbian Foodways in Mesoamerica. New York: Springer, 2010. 273–89.Google Scholar
Ehret, C. History and the Testimony of Language. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Ehret, C. ‘Linguistic archaeology.’ African Archaeological Review, 29/2 (2012), 109–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehret, C. ‘A linguistic history of cultivation and herding in northeastern Africa.’ In Fahmy, A.G., Kahlheber, S., and D’Andrea, A.C. (eds.), Windows on the African Past. Frankfurt: Africa Magna, 2011. 185–208.Google Scholar
Ehret, C. ‘Linguistic stratigraphies and Holocene history in northeastern Africa.’ Chlodnicki, In M. and Kroeper, K. (eds.), Archaeology of Early Northeastern Africa. Posnan Archaeological Museum, 2006. 1019–55.Google Scholar
Ehret, C. and Posnansky, M. (eds.). The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuller, Dorian Q. ‘An agricultural perspective on Dravidian historical linguistics: archaeological crop packages, livestock and Dravidian crop vocabulary.’ In Bellwood, P. and Renfrew, C. (eds.), Examining the Farming/Language Dispersal Hypothesis. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2003. 191–214.Google Scholar
Ross, M., Pawley, A., and Osmond, M. (eds.). The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The Culture and Environment of Ancestral Oceanic Society, vol. i: Material Culture. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, 1998.Google Scholar

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