Center for the Human Past
Seminars
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Mini-Seminar: Treating language contact as normal: coalescent-theoretic modeling of the prehistory of the Bantu language family
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: Treating language contact as normal: coalescent-theoretic modeling of the prehistory of the Bantu language familyAbstract The Bantu language family of sub-Saharan Africa is among the world’s largest in terms of the number of languages, geographical extent, and number of speakers. The expansion of the Bantu languages is a major example of large-scale language-family expansion in human history. To learn the early prehistory of the Bantu language family, one needs…
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Talks of the Past Open Seminar with Anne-Maria Fehn and Jorge Rocha (TBA)
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Read more →: Talks of the Past Open Seminar with Anne-Maria Fehn and Jorge Rocha (TBA)Title & Abstract – TBA Anne-Maria Fehn is a researcher at the University of Porto, a linguist with a special interest in the history of southern Africa. Her main field of expertise is documentary and historical linguistics, but she is also interested in multidisciplinary approaches to population history research, including methods from human genetics…
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Mini-Seminar: Diet and subsistence strategies from the Early Mesolithic to the Bronze Age in Eastern Europe (working title)
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: Diet and subsistence strategies from the Early Mesolithic to the Bronze Age in Eastern Europe (working title)Abstract (TBA) Kerkko S. Nordqvist, an archaeologist at the University of Helsinki
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Mini-Seminar: A culinary riddle of chalcolithic Iraq revisited: Interweaving ancient textual and archaeological evidence with ethno-culinary insights to understand bevel-rim bowls
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Read more →: Mini-Seminar: A culinary riddle of chalcolithic Iraq revisited: Interweaving ancient textual and archaeological evidence with ethno-culinary insights to understand bevel-rim bowlsAbstract A distinctive crude clay bowl is today taken as an important marker of the so-called “Uruk” cultural phenomenon which spread across Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey in the Late Chalcolithic period (c. 4500–2900 BC). This so-called bevel-rim bowl was also depicted in an iconic glyph in the earliest cuneiform writing, where it was clearly…
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Talks of the Past Open Seminar: The evolution of linguistic diversity: the case of South America
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Read more →: Talks of the Past Open Seminar: The evolution of linguistic diversity: the case of South AmericaAbstract It has been observed many times that linguistic diversity is unevenly distributed over the globe. This is true for language diversity (e.g. Derungs et al. 2018; Hua et al. 2019), genealogical diversity (e.g. Gavin et al. 2013; Norder and Van Gijn 2026), and structural diversity (e.g. Dahl 2008; Skirgård et al. 2023). These non-randomly…
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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.