Center for the Human Past
Seminars
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Mini-Seminar: Plant gatherers, plant managers or agriculturalists? Investigating people-plant relationships in early prehistory.
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: Plant gatherers, plant managers or agriculturalists? Investigating people-plant relationships in early prehistory.Abstract What plant foods did hunter-gatherers in N-W Europe eat? Was the way hunter-gatherers and farmers used and interacted with plants fundamentally different? How did prehistoric farmers grow their crops? The scale and nature of human-plant interactions and plant subsistence strategies in early prehistory have been rigorously debated. Although past understandings of prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies…
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Mini-Seminar: Politicised prehistories: How Archaeologists Can Counter the Far-Right Appropriation of Prehistory
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: Politicised prehistories: How Archaeologists Can Counter the Far-Right Appropriation of PrehistoryAbstract Over the last few decades, increasing numbers of researchers who study the past have noticed their research being appropriated by bad-faith far-right actors. Selective archaeological motifs and data/interpretations from our papers are being spread across far-right online spaces to justify racist, misogynistic and homophobic views. This has become so prevalent that it is even…
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Mini-Seminar: Methods to infer past and future species distribution based on environmental data, with Marco Gargano
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: Methods to infer past and future species distribution based on environmental data, with Marco GarganoThis mini-seminar aims to stimulate discussion on methods that bridge the interests of population geneticists and archaeologists. The seminar host: Francesco Giannelli Invited guest researcher: Marco Gargano (a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary biology, Marche Polytechnic University, Italy
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Mini-Seminar: An agenda for palaeosociolinguistics. Using ethnographic models to interpret patterns in historical linguistics, with Roger Blench
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: An agenda for palaeosociolinguistics. Using ethnographic models to interpret patterns in historical linguistics, with Roger BlenchAbstract One major problem for dating the origin and dispersal of language phyla, or indeed their individual branches, is that they do not diversify at a standard rate. Once the great hope for dating language families, and regularly invented with ‘new’ mathematical methods and improved algorithms, glottochronology continues to fail to convince all but small…
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SCAS Seminar: Echoes of Preliterate Voices on the Shores of the Baltic Sea, with Anthony Jakob
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Read more →: SCAS Seminar: Echoes of Preliterate Voices on the Shores of the Baltic Sea, with Anthony JakobAbstract When people think of their ancestry, they are often just as concerned with the origins of their linguistic and cultural identity as they are with their genetic history. And while modern advances in ancient DNA have dramatically improved our understanding of prehistoric population movements, genes do not themselves carry language. The fields of population…
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Mini-Seminar: Biomolecular perspectives on Corded Ware subsistence: integrating isotopic, proteomic and lipid evidence in the context of steppe-derived economies, with Łukasz Pospieszny
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: Biomolecular perspectives on Corded Ware subsistence: integrating isotopic, proteomic and lipid evidence in the context of steppe-derived economies, with Łukasz PospiesznyAbstract Recent advances in biomolecular archaeology have transformed our understanding of prehistoric subsistence strategies, yet their implications for broader questions of mobility, environment and language dispersal remain insufficiently integrated. This presentation explores dietary practices among Corded Ware populations through a combination of stable isotope analysis, palaeoproteomics and organic residue analysis of ceramics. Stable isotope data…
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Talks of the Past Open Seminar: Archaeology, Genetics and Language, with examples from Germanic and Celtic
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Read more →: Talks of the Past Open Seminar: Archaeology, Genetics and Language, with examples from Germanic and CelticInvited seminar speaker: Kristian Kristiansen – an interdisciplinary researcher, professor of archaeology at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, and an affiliate professor at Globe Institute, Lundbeck Centre for Geogenetics, Copenhagen University.
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Talks of the Past Open Seminar: Hunter-gatherer ancestry in Zambian BaTwa populations – Genetics, archaeology and discussion of results with study participants
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Read more →: Talks of the Past Open Seminar: Hunter-gatherer ancestry in Zambian BaTwa populations – Genetics, archaeology and discussion of results with study participantsAbstract Sub-equatorial Africa is today inhabited predominantly by Bantu-speaking groups of Western African descent, whose ancestors, in many cases, replaced, displaced, or assimilated local hunter-gatherer groups. In eastern Zambia, there is evidence of Bantu-speaking agriculturalists from circa 2000 years ago. Little is known about the genetic affinities of the hunter-gatherers who inhabited the area before…
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Talks of the Past open seminar: From Phonology to Phylogeny: Inferring Language Trees from Cognate Word Forms
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Read more →: Talks of the Past open seminar: From Phonology to Phylogeny: Inferring Language Trees from Cognate Word FormsAbstract Linguistic phylogenies are commonly inferred from abstract cognate classifications that encode relationships among lexemes. Although widespread, this practice has well-recognised limitations: it discards phylogenetic signal contained in segmental word forms, restricts the range of evolutionary questions that can be addressed, and treats cognacy judgments, which are hypotheses in their own right, as observed data.…
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Higher Seminar in Baltic Studies, Stockholm University, with Anthony Jakob
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Read more →: Higher Seminar in Baltic Studies, Stockholm University, with Anthony JakobThe Higher Seminar in Baltic Languages with Signe Rirdance (SU) and Anthony Jakob (SCAS). The seminar is split into two sessions (with a coffee break in between): 14:00-15:30 – Signe Rirdance (SU): “Deciphering Getzel’s hand in early Latvian: AI and I” 16:00-17:30 – Anthony Jakob (SCAS): “Linguistic ghosts and zombies in modern Standard Lithuanian” Language:…
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Mini-Seminar: Models, data, and their limits: What can we know about the deep history of language families? with Philipp Rönchen
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: Models, data, and their limits: What can we know about the deep history of language families? with Philipp RönchenAbstract Computational methods are increasingly used to reconstruct the deep history of language families, yet different models often produce strikingly different answers. This reflects a general challenge in the historical sciences: we must draw conclusions from fragmentary data shaped by complex processes that cannot be directly observed or experimentally repeated. In this talk, I summarise…
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Mini-Seminar: Using the dog to date Torricelli languages with linguistic paleontology, with Erik Elgh
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: Using the dog to date Torricelli languages with linguistic paleontology, with Erik ElghAbstract The earliest archaeological dog remains in Melanesia found to date are from Babase Island, New Ireland, and are associated with the Early Lapita layers on the site, thus dating from ca. 3300-3000 BP (Summerhayes et al. 2019, see Manne et al. 2020 for an overview of dog remains in the area). The formation of…