Archaeology – Sprachen, Karten und Sprachkarten

Spread Zones: Europe and the Neolithic Survivors

I have been away for too long, due to other writing activities that kept me extremely busy. In spite of that long gap, this will not be a new cycle of posts, but the end (at least momentarily) of a series of previous topics. I will, however, touch on a variety of subjects and express my opinion about the most contentious question of European linguistics and archaeology – the timing of the spread of Indo-European languages. My opinion on this problem has been decided (for now) by the evidence provided by Basque and the isolated languages of the Mediterranean.

From the now classic Guns, Germs and Steel to the more recent Prisoners of Geography, the idea that the terrain inhabited by a group largely determines the events of their history has become widespread among the general public. Although reality is much more intricate than that, the same principle is the basis of mosaic x spread zone models: large navigable rivers and extensive flat plains will tend to experience wave over wave of language replacement. In contrast, mountainous areas, islands and other inaccessible terrains tend to be refugia where millennia of uninterrupted development result in a myriad of languages disconnected from large families. Obviously there are exceptions – as in the Andean case that I examined previously.

In any case, it is undeniable (as Russia well knows) that from the Asian steppe to Central Europe there is really no geographical barrier – as long as one keeps south of the Urals. The diffusion of Indo-European languages into Europe did not need to overcome all that distance, moving only from the surroundings of the Caspian Sea to the West (assuming a Yamna origin!). Curiously, the Neolithic diffusion followed a different path altogether, from the Levant, through Anatolia, to the Mediterranean, resembling part of the (much later) silk road. The big question is whether these two events (Neolithic and Indo-European) coincide, as proposed originally by Colin Renfrew. I assumed this theory to be pretty much dead, at least among linguists, but I was mistaken (see Gray and Atkinson’s paper and, more recently, Bouckaert and colleagues’). Fortunately, genetics have been playing a major role in redefining our views about ancient migrations, and I became convinced that genetic evidence does not support a Neolithic age for Indo-European. Nevertheless, given the difficult association between genes and languages, I am sure the matter will continue to be hotly debated for years to come.

pca_basque — Map of the 5th principal component of 94 genes in Europe (from *History and Geography of Human Genes*)

The Pre-Indo-European languages of Europe (and their speakers) offer formidable clues to the problem. I have written about the isolates of Eurasia in a previous post, but let us explore some more facts about the last speakers of a Pre-Indo-European language: the Basques. Even before the modern DNA studies, the Basques were known to be different from their neighbours. For example, using only blood types, it was noticed that Basques were predominantly O and had the highest incidence of Rh- in Europe. With the first DNA analyses of a large number of European populations, it became clear that Basques were indeed genetically distinct. I have previously shown some maps of principal component analyses, and here I reproduce the map of the 5th principal component for Europe, based on the 94 genes analysed by Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues. This principal component peaks at the Basque country, which is at the opposite extreme from most of Northern/Central Europe and the Balkans, although with some similarity to the remainder of the Iberian Peninsula.

Keeping in mind that the first principal component shows a gradient from Greece to the northwest (Neolithic?) and the second principal component radiates from the north of the Black Sea (Bronze Age/Yamna?), I believe there are only two ways Cavalli-Sforza’s data can be interpreted:

The Basques are Paleolithic/Mesolithic “survivors” (ergo Neolithic migrants spread the Indo-European languages);
They are Neolithic “survivors” (ergo Indo-European languages arrived during the Bronze Age).

By the way, I am assuming here that the massive genetic legacy of the Neolithic and Bronze Age expansions (see below) must have had a linguistic correlate. In theory, one can imagine a situation in which large numbers of migrants arriving at a region, becoming culturally dominant and having children with locals do not imply language replacement, but I would like to see real world examples of that. In fact, it seems that one only needs a small number of “conquering” migrants with minimal genetic impact to change the language of whole regions (that is the case in some Latin American countries and, further back in time, was the case of Hungary).

Fortunately, we have advanced much since Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues’ original work. For example, it is clear now that the Neolithic expansion in Europe did involve population movement, and that migrations from Anatolia were indeed the source. In my opinion, the most significant genetic piece of evidence is the discovery that modern Basques are the closest living population to Neolithic skeletons from the same region. Sardinians were also found to be very close and, in fact, Sardinians appear in every study cited here as the closest modern match to Neolithic DNA samples. Their status as a “relic” population in Europe due to isolation was noticed long ago, when Cavalli-Sforza left Sardinians out of the PCA due to their singularity within Europe. The genetic similarity between Sardinians/Basques and Neolithic samples deserves special attention.

haplo

One important aspect that has been taken into consideration recently is the distribution of haplogroups in Europe. Unlike the autosomal data referred to above, which tells us about the admixture in the ancestry of an individual, Y-chromosome and mtDNA haplogroups are specific mutations that are passed down over generations and preserve the histories of migrations of particular male and female lineages. The Y-chromosome haplogroups most closely associated with the Neolithic are E1b1b and G2a. Both of them are rare in modern Europe as a whole, but G2a was the dominant haplogroup among Neolithic farmers of Central Europe, France and Spain. Both E1b and G originate outside of Europe, in the Levant and the Caucasus respectively, and must have been brought to Europe by Neolithic migrants. I will not reproduce the beautiful maps from Eupedia, but in the map above I highlight the areas where E1b and G are nowadays more common. The Mediterranean (including Sardinia) and the Balkans are modern refugia of those two haplogroups, but what happened to Central Europe? In fact, paternal lineages from most of Central and Western Europe were later replaced by haplogroups R1a and R1b, carried by Bronze Age migrants (confirmed by the fact that Yamna samples were recently shown to be R1a). Surprisingly, most modern Basques actually belong to haplogroup R1b (maybe “bottleneck effects” could easily lead to the replacement of Y-chromosome lineages over a few generations in such an isolated population?).

In summary, the Neolithic expansion in Europe involved considerable population movements, the genetic signature of which can still be seen and is most noticeable in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. These areas were somewhat less impacted by the later Bronze Age migrations, which also changed considerably the genetic make-up of Central and Western Europe. The fact is that, since there is no other major language expansion after Indo-European, this event must have occurred during the Bronze Age. Some supporters of the Anatolian hypothesis do not deny that fact, arguing that several waves of Indo-European expansion could have occurred. Using the principle of Occam’s razor, I would immediately discard this explanation as being too complicated. The question then is: would the Neolithic expansion also have involved the diffusion of a single, widespread language family?

neolithic_cultures-01 — Pre-Indo-European languages in relation to the major cultural traditions of the Neolithic.

In the map above, I am showing some of the main Neolithic cultures of Europe in relation to the isolated languages that we know about. The Linearbandkeramik (LBK) has taken advantage of the plains that extend from Ukraine to France – a huge spread zone – and it is difficult not to imagine that it was accompanied by the diffusion of a single language [family] around 7000 years ago. At the same time, the Cardial/Impressed culture spread along the Mediterranean shores. Both ultimately stem from the Greek Neolithic (with clear origins in Anatolia), but seem to be local developments. Whether both involved the expansion of the same language [family], I will not dare to speculate, as there is no clue to what the LBK people spoke (perhaps it is in the substrate of the Germanic languages). But could there be a connection between the other Pre-Indo-European languages recorded in Southern Europe?

That Basque was part of a larger language family in the past is well accepted, but what was its extension? Some have suggested the widespread occurrence of Basque-like elements in the toponymia of Europe: e.g. the connection between Val D’Aran in Spain, Arundel in England and Ahrntal in the Alps would be the Basque word aran “valley”. There have also been some attempts to connect Basque to the extinct Pre-Indo-European language of Sardinia – which we can call “Paleo-Sardinian” but is also known as “Nuraghian”. Beyond genetic isolation, the linguistic isolation of Sardinia is clear even in (relatively) recent times: for example, whereas all Romance languages have turned Classical Latin C into /tʃ/, /ʃ/ or /s/, in Sardinian it is still pronounce as a hard /k/. As for the Paleo-Sardinian language, we have no record of it except for words that entered modern Sardinian or the toponyms in the island. It is based on those that Blasco Ferrer proposes parallels with Basque – e.g. the triad Lur-beltz, Lur-gorri and Lur-zuri meaning “black”, “red” and “white earth” respectively, which appears in the island as Duru-nele, Lúr-kuri and Lu-tzurró.

Among the well-known Pre-Indo-European isolates is the Etruscan language. There is a possibility that it is actually connected to Rhaetic, a language or group of languages preserved on a few inscriptions around the Alps. Given the small corpus, it is unlikely that it will ever be “deciphered”, but formally there are some resemblances with Etruscan – e.g. a common ending -ce or -ke that, in the later, marks the past tense. Another candidate to form a family together with Etruscan is Lemnian, attested in a few inscriptions in the Greek island of Lemnos. If Etruscan, Rhaetic and Lemnian are indeed part of a single family, later fragmented by the spread of Indo-European, then we are potentially dealing with yet another group of Neolithic “relics”. Then, the location of those languages in relation to the Cardial/Impressed culture and to the modern distribution of Y-chromosome haplogroups E1b1b and G2a, as can be seen in the maps above, starts to make sense.

Finally, let us consider the Pre-Indo-European languages (directly or indirectly attested) from the region closest to the origins of the Neolithic. One of the most interesting things about the Greek language is that it absorbed a large amount of non-Indo-European vocabulary. These are wοrds that have no cognates in other Indo-European languages and are also easy to spot based on their distinctive phonology/morphology. Interestingly, they tend to be cultural items – words like σῦκον “fig”, ἔλαιον “olive”, θάλασσα “sea” and βασιλεύς “king” (in Linear B qa-si-re-u). It is not impossible that, like the Linear B syllabary, the substratum in Greek might be related to the language once spoken in Crete and partly preserved in the Linear A script. This language, which we may call Minoan, is probably never going to be fully deciphered given the small size of the corpus and the fact that most of it consists of accounting tablets full of personal names and toponyms. Names of products are written with logograms, so it is impossible to know how they were pronounced. A few transaction words (see below) and inflected forms (like the famous ja-sa-sa-ra-me that I mentioned previously) offer a window into Minoan, but the known vocabulary is so small that the language is destined to remain unclassified.

In summary, it is likely that all these languages are remnants of a once widespread Neolithic family (or families), diffused together with the Cardial/Impressed culture along the Mediterranean. We simply do not have enough material to show how they are related, although a convincing case can be made for Etruscan, Lemnian and Rhaetic. Basque could be related to this phenomenon or be part of a different family spread further west, perhaps in association with the Megalithic traditions of the Atlantic Neolithic. It is almost certain that the LBK expansion brought a single language or language family to their vast territory, but whether it was also related to the Mediterranean variants is impossible to tell.

kikina-01 — Example of a Linear A tablet, now at the museum of Heraklion. Logograms are transcribed with latin words (vir for man, fic for fig). Most of the words spelled with the syllabary are personal and place names. In this tablet, you can see some of the exceptions: ki-ki-na seems to be an adjective describing the figs, or maybe it is the word for fig itself repeated after the logogram. Transaction words usually appear as headers or at the end of the tablet. In this example, a-du and ki-ro could mean something like “balance”. Ku-ro is followed by a number that is the sum of all previous items and must mean “total”.

Spread Zones: South America

As the reader might have guessed by now, one of the theories that I find most attractive in linguistic geography is the opposition between spread and mosaic zones. In the form developed by Nichols, this theory posits that some areas – in general, broad plains with few natural barriers – are prone to the dispersal of single languages or families, whereas other regions (islands, mountain chains) tend to accumulate isolates and small families. Not only specific languages stretch over the spread zones, but also linguistic features. Just look at Eurasia and you will see layer over layer of prehistoric (and more recent) spreads. There is a long East-West axis that served as a corridor for the Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic and Mongolic languages, pretty much along the same steppe that brought Attila and Genghis Khan to the doors of Europe. All the language families in this area also share similar features – as opposed, for example, to the languages of the Caucasus or to the Sino-Tibetan family. The big question is: what are the archaeological correlates of a spread zone? The answer is in the horizon!

Archaeological horizons are geographically extensive phenomena – a ceramic style, a particular form of architecture, or iconography – whose spread happened very fast but whose persistence was often relatively short-lived. If we are trying to identify the periods when some large language families reached their territorial zenith, then we must look for archaeological horizons rather than for very localised cultures. Moreover, it is likely that cultural horizons they corresponded to linguistic spread zones, whereas mosaic zones should be characterised by a myriad of local traditions. Curiously, in South America, the spread zones are very different from the Eurasian case – partly due to the absence of extensive grassy plains with no obstacle to movement (the Argentinian pampas being the obvious exception, although they are not as important a communication route as the Eurasian steppe that connects the continent’s long East-West axis). Instead, the South American spread zones are large river systems (the Amazon and the La Plata Basins) and the Andean cordillera. Yes, mountains are spread zones in South America!

america_spread-01 — To the left, linguistic mosaic zones (green) and spread zones (pink) in South America. To the right, the major archaeological horizons and some localised cultures.

On the Andean side of the debate, the most important question pertains to when the largest language families in the region – Quechua and Aymara – were diffused. Once thought to be closely related in a “Quechumaran” family, the resemblance between the two is now known to be the result of extensive contact. Quechua is much more widespread than Aymara, partly because it was adopted as the language of the Inca empire (although it was already used over a broad territory even before that), but both functioned as linguae francae in different parts of the Central Andes. As correctly pointed out by Paul Heggarty, Quechua and Aymara must have spread during the Early and Middle Horizons of Andean Prehistory (the Late Horizon corresponds to the Inca expansion, but Quechua was already widespread by then). These are periods when shared architecture and/or iconography diffused throughout the coast and the cordillera – presumably, hand in hand with new ideas and, of course, languages. The Andean Horizons are separated by periods of fragmentation, called the intermediate periods, when local cultures flourished.

andes — How can a mountain chain like the Andes have served as a spread zone for languages in the past? One possible explanation is that the population in the whole “spine” of South America has always been connected through river valleys that often link the highlands to the coast. Some of them are extensive, like the Callejón de Huaylas (near Chavín), a major trade route throughout the Andean prehistory.

The Early Horizon, around 900 B.C., is the time of Chavín de Huantar – a labyrinthic pilgrimage ceremonial centre in the highlands once thought to be the “mother culture” of the Andes, but now known to be just one manifestation of a broadly shared tradition. For Heggarty, this is when Aymara started to spread. The reasoning behind that is that there are “islands” of Aymara, as well as place names, in what is now a “sea” of Quechua (including in the region around Chavín), i.e. Aymara must have spread first. I have some doubts about this hypothesis, especially because the family seems a bit shallow (the two other languages, Jaqi and Aru, spoken in central Peru, are not that different from the southern Aymara varieties). However, I admit that it is the most parsimonious explanation. This leaves us with the Middle Horizon as the time when Quechua first expanded. Starting around A.D. 600, the Middle Horizon is the time when two major centres made their influence felt over a wide sphere in the Andes: to the North, Wari, and to the South, Tiwanaku. Although the latter is usually associated with Aymara in most people’s imagination, we know that this language only arrived recently in the region. Could the original one have been Quechua? The linguistic diversity in this area points to other possibilities, including Uru, Chipaya and Puquina. Finally, with the onset of the Late Horizon by A.D. 1450, the Incas continued to propel the expansion of Quechua, as did the Spanish after the conquest. What is important to keep in mind is that there are clear correlates of a linguistic spread zone in the archaeological horizons of the Andes.

shipibo-01 — The famous Shipibo art style looks like a direct descendent of the Amazon Polychrome Tradition. But does that tell us anything about languages in the past?

Let’s move now to the East, to the lowlands of South America. Here, there are two related phenomena whose continental scale grants them the status of archaeological horizons: in the Amazon river, the Polychrome Tradition; in the other large rivers and Atlantic coast, the (distantly) related TupiGuarani Tradition. Starting around 500 B.C., the TupiGuarani Tradition spread from southwestern Amazonia, bringing with it virtually identically decorated ceramics, among other traits. The distribution of the sites and their chronology coincide almost perfectly with the historical extent and depth of the TupiGuarani language family. Thus, unlike in the Andean case, here we know exactly with which languages to associate an archaeological culture. The issue with the Amazon Polychrome Tradition is not so simple. Starting around A.D. 1000 or maybe a few centuries earlier, this tradition rapidly spread over the basin. Some suggest it might also be associated with TupiGuarani languages, based on the fact that the historical Kokama and Omagua, who spoke languages of that family, were still producing similar designs during colonial times. I would really like that to be true, as it would confirm the Spread Zone nature of the main South American waterway. However, there are other groups producing similar pottery until the present, like the Shipibo-Conibo, who are Pano-speakers. Of course, the adoption of the pan-Amazonian polychrome designs does not necessarily imply the diffusion of a single language. However, because the Kokama and Omagua languages apparently result from an ancient TupiGuarani-based lingua franca, I would take that as a serious hypothesis.

quechua_tupi-01

Following on the tradition of showing a little bit of the languages in question, the examples above offer a brief comparison of some widely spaced Quechua and TupiGuarani languages. I have selected sentences with similar structures, though I could hardly find identical ones. The Quechua of Pastaza and Napo, spoken in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and the Quechua of Santiago del Estero, spoken in northwestern Argentina, are separated by over 3,000 km. Kayabi, spoken near the Xingu river, southern Amazon, and Mbyá, spoken in southern Brazil and neighbouring Argentina and Paraguay, are separated by nearly 2,000 km. Yet, the similarities are striking. Moreover, although the two families are completely distinct in terms of morphology (as expected form the west-east divide in South America), they tend to have simpler phoneme inventories and “easier”, more regular structures than many languages that remained in the mosaic zones (see a few examples of isolates and other South American families here). Quechua, in particular, has a regularity reminiscent of an artificial language. I would tentatively suggest that this is a characteristic of languages that succeed in disseminating over the spread zones.

What about the archaeological correlates of linguistic mosaic zones? As I said in a previous post, these tend to be areas rich in localised archaeological cultures. I have highlighted a few of them in the map at the beginning of this post. North- and southwestern Amazon are typical mosaic zones. Recently, the southern fringe of the Amazon has been shown to hide a myriad of archaeological sites with earthworks, ditches, enclosures and roads. Among these are the Geoglyphs of the state of Acre and the “Garden cities” of the Upper Xingu. The Llanos de Mojos, about which I wrote previously, is another example. However, these are very different archaeological cultures, and even within one of these regions there is enormous variety. Therefore, they are perfect correlates of linguistic mosaic zones: there is not a widespread ceramic style or other material trait over these areas, which is matched by their linguistic diversity.

nokugu-01 — Satellite imagery with added plans of a Geoglyph site (left) and one of the “garden cities” of the Upper Xingu (right).

Eurasia-America connections

In the previous post, when I commented about the Amerind hypothesis, I called attention to the fact that most languages in the Americas have similar structures. For example, except for some families clustered on the Pacific side of the continent, they are characterised by: 1) a tendency to use prefixes instead of suffixes; 2) a split ergative alignment for marking the persons in the verbs; and 3) two sets of verbal pronoun prefixes, one of which also functions as possessives. Although language structure seems to be more conservative than vocabulary, providing a good estimate of genetic relationships, these features admittedly could have been diffused over several millennia, or arrived at independently. Or could they? I believe the widespread shared morphology of the American languages is no coincidence, because in Eurasia this pattern is the exception rather than the rule. It can be found in ‘islands’ across the continent, coinciding with many language isolates and small families.

The Islands of Eurasia

untitled — Languages in red share similar structures. Unlike most of the widely dispersed Eurasian families (Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic etc.), the isolates and small families pinpointed in the map share many characteristics found in the American languages. Could this be an ancient pattern in the Old World that was wiped out by later language spreads?

Among the languages that preserve similar structures to the Amerind languages are Basque (but only in vestigial form), the several Caucasian families, Ket, Burushaski, Kusunda, Ainu, and the Chukchi-Kamchatka languages. In the past, Sumerian exhibited similar features. Let us look at some examples in these languages:

eurasia_america-01

As in the Amerind cases, of course, most of these languages also make use of suffixes to varying degrees. It is very suggestive that Chukchi, which is geographically closer to the Americas, shows the same pattern that we saw in the previous post in some Amerind languages: in the transitive verbs, prefixes mark the agent and suffixes mark the patient; suffixes are also used to mark the subject of intransitive verbs, or adjectives in this case (e.g. “you were quick” – remember how adjectives can function as verbs in the Amerind languages?). Curiously, Basque and Burushaski have the inverse situation: prefixes for objects, suffixes for subjects. In all cases, except Chukchi and Basque, the prefix set is also used for marking possessive pronouns.

asasarame-01 — The ‘flexion’ of the word *asasarame* in Linear A.

I have not included Sumerian examples above because this language will be treated separately below – as is appropriate for the oldest language recorded in writing by mankind. Before that, I would like to point out that not all isolates or small families (living or extinct) in Eurasia follow the ‘Amerind’ pattern. There is no evidence, for example, that Etruscan was predominantly prefixing. I did, however, include Minoan (the language spelled in Linear A) – due to the alternation of a/ja in the a-sa-sa-ra-me paradigm. Such paradigms are similar to those noticed in Linear B by Kober and that were so fundamental for the decipherment by Ventris. A-sa-sa-ra-me occurs frequently in libation formulae written in Linear A and, if this is indeed a word that can be ‘infected’, would receive the prefix j- and the suffix -ana. This is weak evidence, of course, especially given that the word is interpreted as the name of a goddess (not a verb, for example). Moreover, it should not be discarded that Minoan was an Afro-Asiatic language (where affixes like j- and -ana would perfectly pass), as the reading of ku-ro as ‘all’ would support, e.g. Akkadian kalû, Arabic kull (but another word of caution here: it does not seem that the word can be reconstructed for Proto-Afro-Asiatic). Although Afro-Asiatic is a geographically vast language family, most of its branches are restricted to North Africa, and quite understandably it does not exhibit the typical Eurasian structures. All in all, I leave Minoan here as a curiosity.

The Nature of Sumerian

Let us briefly examine the grammar of Sumerian with respect to the two main points reviewed above: personal pronoun affixes and verb conjugation. First, unlike all of the previous examples, Sumerian possessive pronouns are suffixed, rather than prefixed to their nouns. The first and second persons sg. are respectively -ĝu and -zu, whereas the first person pl. is marked as -me. These have interesting parallels in Eurasia (m : z could be related to the m : t set, and ĝu, if pronounced /ŋu/, would even have a Sino-Tibetan possessives-01 parallel), but probably are superficial resemblances. The third person is marked -ani if animate and -bi if inanimate.

In the examples, I am using both cuneiform examples and earlier, more linear monumental -style signs, as they were compiled from different sources (this will be covered in the future if in a series of posts about the development of writing).

It is in the field of verb conjugation that Sumerian becomes really interesting – and where it shows some resemblance to languages like Ket or the Na-Dené family. The feature that distinguishes these languages is usually called the ‘verbal chain’, which is nothing more than a sequence of affixes both preceding and following the verb root. In the case of Sumerian, the affixes of the verbal chain convey information not restricted to the agent and patient of the action, but also cross-referencing other components of the sentence in different cases.

Let us take, for example, what is probably the first verbal construction encountered by the student of Sumerian: mu-na-DU₃ ‘he has built’ (Hayes’ manual has a good share of “munadus” in the first chapters!). This appears in a number of dedicatory stelae stating how a temple was built by a king for some deity (E₂-a-ni mu-na-DU₃ ‘his house he has built’, see E₂-a-ni in the previous figure). Such simple word actually conveys a lot of information. verbs-01 First, the prefix mu- is of uncertain meaning, but is one of the mandatory conjugation prefixes, used before case cross-referencing. I.e., there are a number of affixes that reference previous words in different cases: in this case, -na- means that one of the arguments of the sentence is in the dative case (the full sentence would be ‘to him he has built’). Finally, the -n- is marking the 3rd person animate subject (though it is frequently omitted in the cuneiform). In this example and the others included in the figure above, I followed my usual scheme of highlighting the prefixes in red and suffixes in blue.

If the same verb was in the first person, it would be mu-DU₃-en ‘I have built’ – that is because the 1st person is marked as suffix in the verbal chain. This is illustrated by another example above, ma-ra-DU₃-e(n) ‘I shall build’. The elements are the same, except that -mu- changes the vowel due to harmony with the following syllable, -ra-. This, again, cross-references the dative (after all, I shall build your house for you). A last example with the same verb illustrates the nominalisation with -a: i-n-DU₃-a ‘he who has built’. The conjugation prefix in this situation is ĩ-, not mu-, since there is no case cross-referencing. This prefix is also found in the next example, for which I chose an intransitive verb: im-ma-ĝen ‘he went’ (underlying ĩ-ba- affected by nasalisation). The prefix -ba- is in complementary distribution with mu-, referring to inanimate subjects.

The last example in the figure above shows a number of affixes in a relatively complex sentence, nu-mu-e-SUM-mu-un-ze-en /nu-mu-e-sum-enzen/ ‘you have not given it to me’. The first prefix, nu-, is the negation, followed by the now familiar -mu-. Before and after the root SUM ‘to give’, we find -e- and -enzen marking the 2nd person plural, whereas the 1st person is not really referenced.

Conclusion: on long-range comparison

The Sumerian verb chain is not typical of the ‘spread zone’ Eurasian language families – Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic etc. It does, however, have parallels among the ‘residual’ families or isolates: in the figure at the beginning of this post you can see some similarities forms in Ket and Adyghe. Does that mean that those languages are related? Not at all (well, in a way, I believe that all languages are genetically related; the question is whether the relationship is recent enough to be demonstrable). Basque and Sumerian have already been the victims of too many unlikely comparisons. On the other hand, some of the isolates in the map above have indeed been suggested by serious linguists to be related to languages far, far away.

Kusunda, for example, has been hypothesised by Merritt Ruhlen and others to be related to languages of Papua New Guinea, which is not entirely absurd given the genetic ties of southeast Asia with Melanesia. The linguistic evidence is based on pronominal sets and a few vocabulary items. Although the first are indeed suggestive (especially as pronouns tend to be retained longer than vocabulary), the lexical evidence seems to have been assembled in the typical ‘look alike’ fashion that we find, for instance, in the Amerind etymologies. If Kusunda is related to the ‘Indo-Pacific’ languages, this should be an extremely ancient relationship, over 50,000 years old… one wonders how such relationship would still be noticeable today when the languages of Papua New Guinea themselves defy a classification into less than 30 families or so!

The Yeniseian family, of which Ket is the last remnant, has on its turn been proposed to be related to the Na-Dené family of North America. Although the idea is not new (check this 1998 PNAS paper by Ruhlen on the subject), it is in the form proposed by Edward Vajda that it has recently received some acceptance (it was reviewed by Jared Diamond in Nature). The linguistic evidence is mainly based on the resemblance of the ‘verbal chain’ and other shared paradigms in Yeniseian and Na-Dené, but also in a small but significant part of the vocabulary, which shows regular sound correspondences even in items of the basic lexicon. Non-linguistic evidence from genetics is weak and, I must say, archaeologically the hypothesis lacks a clear correlate: the ones that have been presented, such as the interaction with the arctic small tool tradition, fail to convince me (though I am no specialist in the Archaeology of North America, not to say Siberia).

Whether or not we accept those extra-continental relationships, what must be clear is that the common patterns found in the ‘islands’ of Eurasia does not prove genetic relationship between them, but possibly shows a typology that was widespread – maybe through continuous interaction or ‘punctuated equilibrium’ – before the expansions of the major families of the continent. The language(s) of the first (and later?) migrants to the New World shared those features, and that is why they are so common in the Americas, whereas in Eurasia they were wiped out by later language spreads.

An illusion? The dangers of convergence

As usual, in this final note, let me play the Devil’s advocate: it is quite possible that the shared morphology of the languages analysed here simply developed independently over time. This is not just a hypothesis, but a plain fact in the history of some languages: Egyptian, for example, was an agglutinating language with suffixes for the verbs (in most tenses) during its ‘classic’ period, Middle Egyptian. Thus, the verb ‘to hear’ in the perfect was conjugated sdm.n=f (probably pronounced /sadímnaf/) ‘he heard’, where -n- marks the perfect and -f is the 3rd person masculine. However, in the later stages of the language, this form was replaced by the use of an auxiliary verb (as it happened in a number of western European languages – I have heard, ich habe gehört, yo hé escuchado…) from the verb ‘to do’. Thus, we have late Egyptian jr=f sdm ‘he heard’ (literally ‘he did a hearing’). Finally, in Coptic, the latest stage of Egyptian, the auxiliary became bound to the root of the verb, creating a sort of ‘verbal chain’ – ‘he heard’ (a-f-sôtm PST-3sg-hear). If this whole cycle happened over some 4,000 years in the history of the Egyptian language, why would the morphology of Sumerian, Ket, Adyghe etc. have remained intact over dozens of thousands of years?

High and low: some more thoughts on South America

On a previous post I commented about how the major language families of South America appear to form two blocks based on shared vocabulary and morphology. Here I would like to elaborate a bit more on that, recognising that this “lumping” tendency is actually nothing new but pays tribute to the ideas of Greenberg and Ruhlen.

I previously presented some basic vocabulary in different language families of South America, noticing some similarities. Let’s see just one of them, the word for tongue:

‘tongue’ in many tongues

tongue-01

Most of the ‘Andean’ (for lack of better term) languages make use of a root similar to *kal ~ *lak or anything like that (about the feasibility of this, check Latin lac, lactis and Greek γάλα, γάλακτος, both derived from PIE *glákt-). In contrast, the ‘Amazonian’ languages tend to prefer some version of *(n)VnV or similar forms. The words in the two groups above are actually listed under different entries in Greenberg and Ruhlen’s etymological dictionary, but I suppose they might as well be grouped together (I’m not taking this too seriously as an application of historical linguistics, by the way; this is just an exercise to think about the big picture).

I recognise that many of those resemblances could be due to some universal associations between sound and meaning. However, I would still prefer to see the similarities within each continent or region as being due to historical relationships. If there were resemblances between those words in some Amerind languages and, let’s say, a lot of Australian aboriginal ones, then I suppose invoking universals would be appropriate.

Now, as we can see from the table above, there are some exceptions in each group. The languages of the Guaykuru family, mostly spoken in the Paraguayan Chaco, follow the ‘Andean’ pattern, whereas Huarpe, spoken in Patagonia, shares the ‘Amazonian’ cognate.

Another important aspect is the possessive pronouns. They tend to be suffixes in Andean languages like Quechua and Aymara, but prefixes in languages of the lowlands (as I commented in the previous post, this sets Puquina apart from its neighbours and brings it closer to the Arawak family).

I believe the most important trait, however, appears in verb morphology. I have been thinking that South American languages follow two main patterns. Languages of the western part of the continent, mainly those spoken in the Andes (Quechua, Aymara) and adjacent Pacific coast or eastern slopes (Muchik, Mapudungun, Jivaroan) tend to use a lot more (if not exclusively) suffixes to mark agents, patients, tenses and aspects of the verb. In that way, they are similar to most Eurasian languages.

On the other hand, languages spoken east of the Andes, including the Amazonian families (Arawak, Tupi, Karib) as well as those of the Chaco and Cerrado (Macro-Je, Guaykuru) tend to use prefixes to mark the persons in the verbs. There are a number of isolating languages in the continent, but because most American languages tend to be polysynthetic (i.e. adding a lot of affixes to create more complex sentences from a single root), these two patterns are easily identifiable.

twogroups-01

In the example above, I highlighted all the suffixes in blue and all the prefixes to the verbal root in red. The languages of the ‘Andean’ sphere don’t seem to make use of prefixes. Those of the ‘Amazonian’ world do, mostly for marking the persons, but they also rely on suffixes for the tense, aspect, mode of the verbs. The Nambikwaran languages are outliers, being heavily suffixing. Another obvious exception is Arawak. I still think it should be included in the second group, given the fact that agents are prefixed to the verb and possessive pronouns are prefixed to the nouns, but admittedly it does tend to use more suffixes than other Amazonian languages. By the way, if you are interested in this type of analysis, you should check the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures, especially the chapters by Johanna Nichols, where some insightful thoughts about the global distribution of such traits can be found.

Furthermore, in terms of phonology there is also a division between the ‘western’ and the ‘eastern’ blocks. Andean-Patagonian languages tend to have a lot more consonants, including sounds like /l/, /χ/, /q/ and others that are rare in the tropics. In opposition, the Amazonian languages are richer in vowels,with sounds like /i/ and many nasal vowels. Interesting enough, as I was writing this post, I came across a paper suggesting that drier, colder climates favour the development of consonant-rich languages, whereas the humid tropics favour vowel-rich ones (that has to do with the way sound dissipates). This goes along similar lines as the theory about the development of tone in warm humid climates that I mentioned before. Whether we agree with that or not, it’s at least an interesting hypothesis.

The division above is not too different from the original proposal of Joseph Greenberg or, perhaps even better, the revised proposal with Mehrit Ruhlen. The original distinction was between a Macro-Chibchan, an Andean-Equatorial, and a Ge-Pano-Carib group. The Andean-Equatorial group, however, included Arawak and Tupi, families that I see as being typologically very different form the Andean ones. Later on, in the etymological dictionary, he and Ruhlen slightly changed the classification, grouping the South American families into Andean-Chibchan-Paezan, Equatorial-Tucanoan, and Ge-Pano-Carib. I think this last proposal is quite elegant and broadly corresponds to the binary division that I suggested above (see the figure below). Most importantly, as I will explain in the remainder of this post, I believe a division along the lines of Andes-Patagonia vs. Amazonia-Central Brazil has intriguing archaeological correlates.

lithics-01-01 — Lithic industries from the late Pleistocene in South America are very diverse. To the left, projectile points (El Jobo, Paijan and Fishtail). To the right, unifacial tools from Brazil (Itaparica and Pedra Furada).

First, it is possible that the division is rooted in the deep past, dating to the time of initial colonisation of the continent. This is too much of a controversy to be addressed here, but, as I said in the previous post, there is enough evidence for human presence since at least 18 to 14 thousand years ago in South America. Many early sites are found along the Pacific coast and adjacencies, like the Paijan complex of the central coast of Peru, or the Monte Verde site of Chile. Further south, at the tip of the continent, we have the Fishtail horizon of Tierra del Fuego. Genetically, there is evidence that a Pacific coastal route was utilised during the initial human migration into the Americas, with South American peoples living in the western part of the continent still exhibiting a very early founder haplogroup.

Despite the diversity of archaeological cultures in South America during the late Pleistocene, there seems to be a division between projectile points (like those of Taima-Taima, Paijan, Tierra del Fuego) and a different type of stone tool mainly found in Brazil – the unifacial tools. Instead of being worked bifacially, i.e. on both sides like a Clovis arrowhead, these are worked on only one of the faces, resulting in plano-convex artefacts commonly referred to as ‘scrapers’. The best example is the Itaparica culture of the Central Brazilian savannas, dating to around 12 thousand years ago, but this unifacial tradition may be extended further back in time if the dates for northeastern Brazil are confirmed. It is tantalising that there might have been an early migration to the Americas later superseded by the modern Amerind populations, the genetic evidence of which is now found in Amazonia (just to play the Devil’s advocate, this has also been disputed).

In summary, I would suggest that the big Andes-Amazonia linguistic divide seen in vocabulary and morphology is explained by the deep histories of human migration in South America. Ancient population waves took separate paths, one along the Pacific and adjacent Andes, the other penetrating the tropical lowlands.

aymara_pano-01

To conclude, I would like to point out that, at the interface between the two groups, we will find many examples of contact between Highland and Lowland languages. Many Amazonian languages of the eastern slopes of the Andes (like Jivaro) show a typically Andean pattern. Maybe that explains the heavy use of suffixes in Arawak languages, as a western Amazonian origin for that widely diffused family is becoming more accepted. Even more intriguing is the case of the Pano languages (see examples above).

cumancaya-01-01 — Donald Lathrap believed that the designs on the Cumancaya pottery (above) from the Peruvian Ucayali derived from Andean prototypes (below).

I always thought that they somehow ‘sounded’ Andean, at least in their use of suffixes, like the -miski that is so frequent in Cashinahua. The negative suffix -ama- in the same language even has a Quechua counterpart. The relationship between the Pano and the Andean sphere had already been noticed by archaeologist Donald Lathrap in a paper that is quite difficult to find. He advocated that the ceramics of the Cumancaya tradition, appearing in the Ucayali around AD 800, have an iconography inspired by ceramics of Highland Ecuador. He believed they were introduced in the Amazon by a foreign elite during the middle Horizon, when the lowlands traded with the Wari empire. In his classic ‘the Upper Amazon‘, Lathrap brought that interaction further back in time, noticing some iconographic resemblances between the pan-Andean Chavín style (900-200 BC) and the Shakimu ceramics of the Ucayali (650 BC).

Language Isolates Part II (South America)

South America was once the least known continent, as hinted by the title of Jerry Moore’s book – which, as the author says, is a tribute to a previous work by ethnologist Patricia Lyon. If there is something I like about your study area being the “least known” in the field is that you can say pretty much anything and it will take some years until you can be proved wrong. And, if it appears that nothing makes sense, you can always say that research is only beginning and hope that one day the picture will become clearer.

Unfortunately, for South America, the archaeological and linguistic puzzle is still a difficult one. Take, for example, the relatively homogeneous Clovis horizon in North America and compare it with the absolute confusion in South America during the Late Pleistocene / Early Holocene. New dates for new (and old) sites keep springing up, pushing the dates back (definitely before Clovis) and showing that these early cultures were very different from each other (from Chile, through Argentina, to the Brazilian northeast).

The linguistic diversity in the continent goes hand in hand with that. By a quick count, there are more than 90 language families (including isolates) in South America. Europe (over half the area of South America) has only four. In the map below, I highlighted only those that were continentally widespread, covered large areas or had an undeniable historical relevance – and they are still more than ten. It is difficult to make sense of such diversity if we try to approach it with an “Eurasian” mindset – so much so that South America didn’t even figure in case studies of the farming/language dispersal hypothesis (the nice map on the cover notwithstanding!). A single South American example (Arawak) occupies no more than a paragraph in Jared Diamond’s Science paper. Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Neves has been one of the few to scrutinise the South American mosaic of languages and cultures and try to explain why there were no continent-wide expansions as we see in Eurasia.

The choice of the major families and the isolates to be included in the map above were not easy. Those that cover the most extensive territories and have the largest number of members are Arawak, Tupi and Macro-Je. They are also nice case studies because they are clearly associated with widespread archaeological traditions (at least in the case of the first two, and as “clear” as these things can be in Archaeology…) and preferred environments (forested river floodplains in the case of the first two, high altitude savannas for the later). All three expanded between 3,000 and 2,500 years ago given the glottochronological estimates (if we could rewind the figure 3,000 years back in time we would see a very different distribution of colours). Another large family is Karib, though it is pretty much restricted to the Guyana plateau area. Both Arawak and Karib expanded out of South America to the Antilles (these were the first people encountered by Columbus). Other language families, not especially widespread, were included because they are of particular anthropological or historical interest. For example, Pano-Tacana and Tucano groups play an important role in the regional systems of Western Amazonia. Chibcha was the family that connected South and Central America, besides being spoken by the Muisca chiefdoms of Colombia. The Guaykuru were fierce horsemen (after their introduction by the Spanish) and were one of the few non-state societies of the continent to maintain slaves. Needless to say, leaving Quechua and Aymara out would be a sacrilege to millennia of Andean civilisation (I will comment a bit more about those two later on).

Some of the large blank areas that you can see in the map are gaps due to lack of information. This can be seen in the Amazonas floodplain and in Eastern Brazil. The first case is a pity, because we would really like to know the languages spoken by the groups sharing the polychrome pottery style (see below)!

There are many language isolates in South America, and very small language families are also numerous. In the end, the definition of an isolate is debatable: for example, Japanese is not an isolate due to the existence of related languages in the Ryukyu islands, whereas Korean is usually considered an isolate despite being spoken over a pretty large area. Furthermore, as I mentioned before, language isolates are usually the last survivors of ancient language families. In any case, the problem with South America is the lack of documentation for many languages still spoken and the scarcity of historical attestation for many of the extinct ones. For that reason, it is difficult sometimes to decide whether we are talking about isolates or just “unclassified” languages – i.e. for which we don’t have enough materials to link them with one family or another. I decided not to include many languages that would fit that category, so the distribution in this map might look a bit different than what is found in the literature. A reader familiarised with the continent will no doubt miss the languages of the Brazilian northeast, such as Pankararu. As far as I know, the original languages of those groups have been lost, most of them now speak Portuguese, and apparently they spoke a Tupi-Guarani language (which might have been adopted as lingua franca) in the recent past.

The distribution of isolates (and small families) in South America does not present a very clear pattern at first, at least in comparison with Eurasia where they are all “pushed” towards mountainous terrain, islands, peninsulas and the outskirts of the continent. However, on a closer look, it seems that the headwaters in Northwestern and Southwestern Amazonia concentrate most of them (the position of Yagan at the tip of Patagonia, on the other hand, is more typical of an isolate that has been “pushed” or “cut” from later expansions). Of course Greg Urban already noticed this pattern of clustering in headwaters (in fact, we can think of them as friction zones), but I will argue below that some of these areas are also cradles of early cultural developments and high ethnic diversity in the past. First, let’s have a look at some of the isolates and their surrounding language families.

In northern Amazonia, a number of isolates and small families occur in the basin of the Orinoco – the largest river in those parts. It seems to me that, in the Amazon rainforest, some isolates are spoken by hunter-gatherer groups rather than farmers. That is the case with the Joti (3) of the Venezuelan savannas and the Maku (4), neighbours of the well-known Yanomami. The Waorani (5), who live in the forests of Ecuador, are another example. Since it was once thought that hunter-gatherers would be poorly adapted to the jungle, those groups have offered interesting insights on nomadic lifeways in the rainforest (e.g. Gustavo Politis’ book about the Nukak, a Maku people).

Another important isolate in the Amazon is the language of the Tikuna (7), a people known for their colourful art and beautiful polyphonic chants (you can hear them in this recording available through Smithsonian Folways). Tikuna is a tonal language, one of the few in the Amazon, which makes it all the more interesting – by the way, it has been suggested that tone is more likely to develop in tropical environments due to the effects of humidity on vocal cords. Whether that’s true or not, we have another tonal language as an isolate further south: the Guato (15), “Argonauts” of the Pantanal – the single largest wetland in the world. There have been attempts of linking Guato with the Macro-Je family, but it seems that the few cognates they share could also be used to argue for a relationship with other families (there’s a table further below on this post where you can see the similarity in basic vocabulary between many families).

North of the Pantanal, another large expanse of seasonally flooded savannas, known as the Llanos de Moxos, concentrates a myriad of isolated languages – Cayuvava, Itonama, Movima (9) – between the Andes and Amazonia. The region was also a hotspot of cultural diversity in the historical period and home to some very interesting archaeological finds. This region actually is part of a chain of isolates: as we go west, we find Leco (13) at the oriental flank of the Andes, and then we are just one step from the plateau around lake Titicaca where Uru, Chipaya and Puquina (13-14) were spoken.

Where South America ends: Tierra del Fuego was home to the southernmost isolated language of the continent, Yagan

Finally, we cannot forget Tierra del Fuego, where (quite predictably) we find an isolate, Yagan (16). I will now show how isolates can be typologically different from the languages that surround them (a theme that I touched upon in the introductory post) using the example of Puquina, and how they can be found in zones of high cultural diversity taking the Llanos de Moxos as an example.

Seven words in South American languages

salangs-01-01 — Comparison of seven basic words in the major families of South America. The words are part of Swadesh’s list, but I have chosen them among the ones with the highest retention rates. The set I chose for the Basque example is different, as I selected seven words that were all perfect cognates between English, Spanish and Irish. Unlike that example, where I used the standard orthography of each language, I’m using here a very ‘relaxed’ IPA. I used y instead of j as is common in the notation of American languages. I tried to get rid of incorporated prefixes and suffixes that are so common in those languages (and which many times led Greenberg astray). For example, nearly all Piro body parts had a *-tʃi* suffix, and many Kadiweu words incorporated a final *-gi* or *-di*.

I can understand why Joseph Greenberg felt that all American languages (except Na-Dene and Eskimo) belonged in the same stock – they are very similar in the basic vocabulary (see the table above). I assembled the table so as to show a progression from the Amazon, through the Andes, to Patagonia. One does have the feeling that some potential cognates are shared within each area – check, for example, the word for “tongue” in all the right half of the table vs. those to the left. I suppose a lot of the similarities are due to areal features, as the remoteness of the relationship between the families would have obliterated obvious connections, but I still think the similarities are very interesting. They also exist in morphology and syntax. The Amazonian languages tend to be prefixing and show split ergativity; they can have the same series of prefixes for subject (or agent) and the possessive pronouns. Given that objects tend to be prefixed to the verbs, one interesting feature (called portmanteau) is that there is a special marker when the agent is the first person and the patient is the second.

tupi-01

In the example above, Tupinamba is quite typical in having a different 1st person prefix for the agent of a transitive verb (a-) and another for the subject of an intransitive verb (ʃe-). The last also marks the possessive pronoun and the patient of a transitive verb. I did not include any examples above, but this is also the marker of the subject of an adjective clause – i.e. ‘I am cold’ would be something like ‘[it] colds me’ (adjectives behave as verbs in Tupi and many other American languages; some Eurasian languages exhibit the same pattern, as I will comment in a future post). Finally, there is a special prefix (oro-) when the 1st person is the agent and the 2nd is the patient.

I have the impression that there are roughly two typological “blocks”, one Andean-Patagonian and the other Amazonian. Tupi, Macro-Je, Chibcha and Arawak (but not Pano and Tucano) are heavily prefixing in verbal morphology and for marking possessive pronouns, whereas Quechua, Aymara and Mapudungun tend to be on the opposite side, almost completely using suffixes. Other small families in the Andean sphere also tend to be suffixing, such as Mochica and Jivaro, although that probably doesn’t mean anything other than possible areal features.

This should make it easy to recognise outliers, but many isolates seem to borrow features from their neighbours. Let’s have a look at two isolates from Central Brazil, in the southern periphery of the Amazon and the Pantanal – Trumai and Guato – and see how their basic vocabulary compares with the largest families in their surroundings:

guato-01

The reason why Guato has been linked to the Macro-Je family in the past is obvious. Trumai also shares a few possible cognates, but the interesting thing is that resemblances can also be found with nearly every other large South American family (see the table above). In terms of grammar, these two languages seem to be less agglutinative and more isolating than their Tupi and Macro-Je neighbours:

trumai-01

As you can see, Mebengokre (Macro-Je) uses different prefixes according to the function, which is typical of other lowland South American languages (check the Tupi and Karib examples above). In this case, i- marks the 1st person possessive, subject of a nominal predicate, and object of a transitive verb, but ba– is used for the 1st person subject of transitive and intransitive verbs (except in negative sentences). Trumai, on the other hand, uses ha for all those functions. Among the similarities, both languages display ergativity: in Mebengokre, this appears in the negative sentences, where -ye marks the agent. Trumai uses the suffix -k to mark the case, and also has a 3rd person suffix, -e, to mark the agent of an intransitive verb (absolutive).

Puquina and the secret language of the Incas

The next isolate we will look at, Puquina, is actually not too different from the Andean languages around it, Quechua and Aymara. It has a predominance of suffixes in the verbal morphology, and some of these, as well as part of the vocabulary (e.g. the negative ama) appear to be borrowed from the surrounding languages:

puquina-01 — Puquina in comparison with Ashaninka (Arawak) and Quechua. The Quechua variety used in the examples is from Santiago del Estero. Puquina is extinct but has been documented in colonial Catechisms, hence the religious nature of many examples, taken from this analysis.

I might have cheated a little bit by using examples from Quechua, which is more familiar to me, instead of Aymara (the language that actally surrounds Puquina), but both are typologically very similar. Now, the devil lies in the details, and the prefixed possessive pronouns of Puquina are what really separate it from the Andean languages. As you can see, there are resemblances with the pronominal prefixes of the Arawak languages, which led to the hypothesis that they could be related, an interesting insight given that an origin of the Arawak family in western Amazonia is becoming more likely. In the remaining of its morphology, as can be seen in the other examples above, Puquina is actually very close to the Andean sphere, which might be due to centuries if not millennia of coexistence.

That naturally leads to the question of what Puquina really represents in terms of linguistic history of the Andes. Together with Uru and Chipaya, they are all spoken in Bolivian altiplano, surrounding Lake Titicaca, where the Tiwanaku civilisation emerged. But were any of these the languages spoken by those ancient people? The Andean case is one that really brings together linguistics and archaeology. For example, Aymara figures in most people’s imagination as the language of Tiwanaku, in the same way as Quechua is associated with all things Inca and thought to have been spread by them. In reality, Aymara only relatively recently came to the altiplano, and Quechua was already widespread when the Incas chose it as their language (the Inca élites were said to speak their own secret language… given their highland origin, this could be Aymara or even some language related to Uru, Chipaya and Puquina).

chavi — Was Aymara the language spread by the Chavín horizon?

That Quechua and Aymara were once thought to be related in a single family is understandable, taking into account the broad similarities, but we can be sure now that these are due to intensive language contact over the centuries. They were both widely used as linguae francae, but if who spread them, and when? There is still debate on that, but I am inclined to believe that Aymara was widespread before Quechua did (there are “islands” of Aymara in the Central Andes, typical enclaves surviving after later expansions), and that Quechua must have been disseminated by a cultural horizon before the Incas. Following Paul Heggarty, that leaves us (somewhat counter-intuitively) with Quechua as the language of the Wari-Tiwanaku period (around 1,500 years ago) whereas Aymara would have been spread as part of the Chavín sphere of influence ca. 3,000 years before present (in fact, Jaqaru, a branch of the Aymaran languages, is spoken in central Peru, pushing the potential homeland of the family further to the north). The logic of associating the expansion of Quechua and Aymara with the Wari-Tiwanaku and Chavín periods is that widespread language diffusion must have cultural counterparts – in this case, the best match are the geographically extensive horizons of Andean prehistory. If this is correct, Puquina and its isolate neighbours could be the remnants of even older times, perhaps going as far back as the Formative period – around 3,500 years before present – as part of the Chiripa culture. Genetically, modern remnants of the Uru appear to be quite isolate and divergent from other Andean populations, although with gene flow from posterior expansions. In any case, the isolated languages of the altiplano are witnesses to the long cultural history of the region.

Language diversity and cultural “hot spots”

So, perhaps South America does not conform to the typical Eurasian situation, where a few isolates are restricted to inaccessible regions and constitute linguistic “aberrations” in their respective zones, but we can identify some patterns. It seems that a lot of isolates in South America are found in areas of ancient cultural developments and enormous cultural diversity. We have just seen that in the case of Puquina, but let’s now go down the Andes towards the Amazon basin.

moxos-01 — A cultural mosaic: example of a ring ditch (left) and platform ridges (right) in the *Llanos de Moxos.*

Here we find the Llanos de Moxos, a seasonally-flooded savanna that is roughly the size of England. The region concentrates quite a few language isolates, namely Cayuvava, Itonama and Movima (number 9 in the map). Archaeologically, we can divide the area into as many as seven distinct culture areas. For example, in some parts of the Moxos we find a “ring ditch” culture that built fortified villages in forest islands; in others, we find monumental mounds surrounded by other types of earthworks; in others, still, we have series of parallel raised fields used for cultivation. These diversified traditions of the Llanos were well established only some 2,000 years ago, but it seems that the cultural history in the region is a very old one. If you are interested in reading more about the Llanos, you should check Umberto Lombardo’s blog. We must also remember that the Brazilian Pantanal, where the isolate Guato is spoken, has a long history of human occupation. The same is true of southwestern Amazonia, especially the Guapore region in the state of Rondonia, where many isolates are found (e.g. Kanoe, Aikana). This area is home to some of the oldest evidences of agriculture and is thought to be the centre from which the Tupi languages spread, as well as possibly the Macro-Je (given some recent evidence of high diversity within the stock). In fact, the whole southern and southwestern periphery of the Amazon has a ‘belt’ of isolated languages and small families, indicating a high cultural diversity that, coincidentally or not, is paralleled by some of the most surprising findings in the region’s archaeology, such as the massive earthworks known as Geoglyphs in Brazil, and the fortified villages of the Upper Xingu.

polychrome-01 — The polyhcrome tradition spread over more than 2,000 km across the Amazonas floodplain, but was it associated with a single language?

I believe the Llanos, Pantanal, Guapore and other areas where several small families and many language isolates appear (see the map in the beginning of the post) are “cultural hot spots” where potentially such long archaeological sequences and a lot of ethnic diversity will be found. They are predominantly located in headwaters (this idea, of course, goes back to Greg Urban), show early cultural developments as seen through archaeology, and fit within the concept of ‘mosaic zones’. They contrast, for instance, with the huge expanses of Central Brazilian savannas, typical ‘spread zones’ (like the Eurasian steppe!) where an ocean of Macro-Je languages dominate. Another spread zone is the Amazon floodplain, a major waterway where, in prehistory, many material culture traits tended to be shared – for example, the famous Amazon Polychrome Tradition. This tradition arose not long before the year A.D. 1,000 and was adopted for more than 2,000 km along the Amazonas floodplain, but we don’t know if that widespread ceramic style was associated with a single language. In other major river systems of lowland South America, such as the Paraná (and, in fact, all of the Atlantic coast of Brazil), similar ceramics (disseminated a lot earlier) were associated with Tupi speakers, but in the Amazon basin groups of different language families still make similar pottery, such as the Shipibo (Pano) or the Jivaro. On the other hand, some people have been associating the spread of polychrome ceramics with the Tupi languages even within the Amazonas floodplain. That’s a tempting idea, especially because of the historical evidence of the Omaguas and Kokamas, groups that were described in 16th century accounts as artisans of elaborately painted pottery. They spoke a Tupi language, but it seems that it is some sort of creole, using Tupi vocabulary with a different (possibly Arawak) syntax. That, of course, does not contradict the hypothesis that the language contact happened in prehistoric times.