Acknowledgements

This book is, of course, primarily the result of the hard work of the authors of the fifteen chapters. My main contribution as the editor of the book has been to remind the authors of upcoming and past deadlines and to ensure a certain degree of consistency across the chapters. I hope my efforts have resulted in a more coherent overall result.

I am very grateful to the authors for their willingness to contribute to the book and for their patience throughout the process. I also wish to express my gratitude to the editors at and around CUP – Andrew Winnard, Helen Barton, Isabel Collins, Subathra Manogaran and Kilmeny MacBride – for being more patient than one could possibly expect and for their willingness to discuss all kinds of editorial problems, small and large. Furthermore, I am thankful to Pete Westbrook for his meticulous language check of most of the chapters.

My work on this book was made possible by grants from the Carlsberg Foundation for the project The homeland: In the footprints of the early Indo-Europeans (2015–2018), from the Independent Research Fund Denmark for the project Connecting the dots: Reconfiguring the Indo-European family tree (2019–2023), and from Riksbankens jubileumsfond for the project Languages and myths of prehistory: Unravelling the speech and beliefs of the unwritten past (LAMP). The Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, has also facilitated my work on this book by providing a nice and pleasant work environment, which I truly appreciate. The most valuable part of my daily work environment is my colleagues at the Roots of Europe centre, who make every day at work enjoyable, a contribution that cannot be overestimated.

Finally, I am indebted to Jenny Helena Larsson, leader of the LAMP project, for generously providing the funding that has made it possible to publish this book open access.