Despite consensus on the movement of peoples from mainland Asia to Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific over the past five thousand years, the mode of dispersal and biocultural change remains highly contested. While some hypotheses posit agriculturalists and Austronesian language speakers rapidly dispersing via Taiwan, other scenarios postulate, for example, additional dispersal routes, the gradual adoption of agricultural practice, and dynamic language borrowing.
During the fellowship, Reyes Centeno will assess current debates by critically synthesizing models developed from linguistic, archaeological, and genetic lines of evidence and by harnessing original archaeological data collected from the Philippine archipelago.

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.

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.

One of the most dramatic cultural transformations – involving major linguistic, religious and demographic shifts – occurred in Anatolia in the 2nd millennium, and yet, compared to other mass migration and cultural transformation events in West Eurasia, from the Yamnaya expansion or the Fall of Rome to the Crusades, it has received much less historical attention, arguably due to cultural biases.

The mixing of incoming Turkic tribes with local Greek- and Armenian-speaking populations and the pull and push factors behind the religious and linguistic conversion of the latter are still little understood. I argue that a well-thought-out research programme involving ancient genomes, burial context and historical text will provide a breakthrough in our understanding of the process.

My proposed work involves data analysis of published and unpublished modern-day and ancient genomes from Anatolia, an extensive survey of the historical
literature and its synthesis with genomic data, and the design of a long-term research programme to help resolve the most central and still open questions about the 2nd-millennium transformation of Anatolia.