Human Past Fellowship projects
The Human Past Residential Fellowship Program, an initiative by the Center for the Human Past, is designed to foster a collaborative environment where early-stage and established scholars can converge across a wide range of disciplines, such as archaeology, population genetics and historical linguistics. These fields collectively explore the shared history of the world’s populations over the past 10,000 years, a period marked by the advent of agrarian food production, population growth and linguistic changes, as well as the emergence of early civilizations.
The program aims to attract research fellows pursuing research on different aspects of the human past, combining methods and materials from different disciplines. The program’s primary focus is on research work relating to three major migration events: The Indo-European-, Bantu- and Austronesian expansions. We invite scholars interested in exploring archaeological evidence, linguistic changes, or genetic factors associated with any of these major archaeological and linguistic expansions.
The program gives fellows the opportunity to concentrate on their own research interests, free from the teaching and administrative obligations of ordinary university life. Fellows are, however, expected to be active members of the scholarly community of the Collegium and to participate in seminars and other academic events beyond their own fields of specialization. The fellows within the program will also be expected to participate in the activities at the Center for the Human Past.
The Human Past Fellowship Program is funded by the Swedish Research Council as an integral component of the Center for the Human Past, which is recognized as a Center of Excellence.
2024-25
Working and Eating Together – Uralic=Indo-European contacts in the Bronze Age working communities
Summary
The Proto-Balto-Slavic word *talk? ‘a community of workers that was treated with a feast after work’ (cf. Lithuanian talkà, Russian
tolóka, Ukr. toloká ‘construction work’) is known to have been loaned in the Uralic languages as Finnish talkoo ‘id.’, Tver Karelian talkohuš ‘holding a feast for workers’, Votic talko ‘id.’, Livonian talk ‘id.’, etc. (Thomsen 1890: 226). When this loanword item is contextualized in the Uralic=Indo-European language and cultural contacts, the word may start to tell us much information about their
contacts. First, there are some other loanwords between the two language families in the relevant semantic fields, such as Lithuanian vãškas and OCS vosk? ‘wax’ loaned from Uralic *wašk? ‘casting metal’. Also, there are both archaeological and archaeogenetic findings that point to their contacts through metallurgy work in the archaeological remains known as Seima-Turbino transcultural complex. They are trans-cultural archaeological sites dated from ca. 1900 BC. Stretching out in a wide area from the Altai to present-day Finland, they are
characterized with similar metallurgy artifacts and similar metallurgical techniques, e.g., lost-wax casting and hollow-mold casting.
In this project, I will look into the loanwords between the Indo-European and Uralic families in the (metallurgical) labor-related semantic fields from the migrational and contact viewpoints, and aim at the reconstruction of their working life.
Pastoralists and agriculturalists in the Rigveda and beyond
Summary
In the project, I intend to conduct a philological investigation into the early Indo-Iranian vocabulary used to describe the various stages of agricultural production: 1) tillage, 2) fertilization, 3) sowing, 4) reaping, 5) threshing, 6) winnowing, 7) sieving, 8) storage, as well as agricultural products such as various types of cereals. The first aim is to establish which cereals and agricultural processes are actually known in the earliest Indo-Iranian texts, primarily the Rigveda, by filtering out those words for which agricultural semantics cannot be established.
The second aim is to compare the Vedic agricultural vocabulary to that of Iranian. Whenever Vedic and Iranian share a cognate word for an agricultural process or product, it can be reconstructed to Proto-Indo-Iranian. If the word has cognates in other Indo-European branches, it can be projected even further back, whereas an isolated formation points to a unique Indo-Iranian innovation. When a cognate word has agricultural semantics only in one branch of Indo-Iranian, it may point to a post-Proto-Indo-Iranian innovation. In this way, the philological investigation of the Rigveda will feed into a comparative Indo-Iranian study of the agricultural terminology, which in turn will be integrated into an interdisciplinary model of the Indo-Iranian agricultural transition.
The philological investigation and subsequent reconstruction of Indo-Iranian agricultural terminology will result in a paper on the agricultural transition of Indo-Iranian speakers. This will inform not only on the prehistoric dispersal of the Indo-Iranian branch, but on the dispersal of the Indo-European family as a whole, since the dynamics between pastoralism and agriculture is fundamental to the Indo-European homeland question.
More about the Fellowship program
The Fellowship Program offers one Advanced Fellowship, and one Young Scholar Fellowship.
For the Advanced Fellowship, the candidate should, at the time of application, have held a PhD (or equivalent degree) for at least seven years, have a track record of significant and original research achievements, and be active at the international forefront of his/her research field.
Early-career scholars applying for the Young Scholar Fellowship should have a promising track record of independent achievements at the post-doctoral level (at the most seven years from PhD degree), including significant publications, and be active in international fora. (The Young Scholar Fellowship can be compared to a one-year postdoc position.)
As an applicant, you are not required to hold a university position at the time of application.
Scholars may apply for a full academic year (September – June) or one semester.