29.3766, Confs: Sino-Tibetan; Historical Linguistics/Australia

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-3766. Mon Oct 01 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.3766, Confs: Sino-Tibetan; Historical Linguistics/Australia

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Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2018 15:44:08
From: Gwendolyn Hyslop [gwendolyn.hyslop at sydney.edu.au]
Subject: Bottom-up and Archaeobotanical Approaches to Reconstructable Tibeto-Burman Material Culture

 
Bottom up and Archaeobotanical Approaches to Reconstructable Tibeto-Burman Material Culture 

Date: 01-Jul-2019 - 05-Jul-2019 
Location: Canberra, ACT, Australia 
Contact: Gwendolyn Hyslop 
Contact Email: gwendolyn.hyslop at sydney.edu.au 

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics 

Language Family(ies): Sino-Tibetan 
Meeting Description: 

(Session of International Conference on Historical Linguistics 24)

Methods in Historical Linguistics have proven useful to be useful tools in
making inferences into the past. For example, Mallory (1991) demonstrates that
we can attribute stockbreeding to the proto Indo-European community based in
part on the fact that forms for ‘sheep’, ‘cattle’, ‘goat’ and ‘pig’ can be
reconstructed to the proto language. In the Austronesian world, Blust (1995)
reconstructs words for ‘typhoon’ and ‘snow; ice; frost’ for Proto
Austronesian, suggesting that the people who spoke the proto language lived in
an environment where there were typhoons and snow, ice or frost (fitting the
picture for Taiwan). A considerable amount can also be inferred about Proto
Austronesian speakers’ economy. Blust (1995) shows that this culture was
familiar with rice agriculture, based on reconstructible words for ‘paddy’,
‘harvested rice’ and ‘cooked rice’. In addition, they also exploited several
millet species. Blust (1995) goes on to identify root crops (such as wild
taro),  tree crops, domesticated animals, means by which animals were captured
(hunting and fishing), food preparation, tools and implements, settlements and
housing, clothing, music, social organization, disease and death, and the
spirit world. The aim in this workshops is to apply these methods to the
Tibeto-Burman-speaking world, focusing on the lower subgroups level. 

There has been some work within Tibeto-Burman on reconstructable economy.
Bradley (1997), for example, argues that eight different crops (rice, panicum
millet, foxtail millet, sorghum, buckwheat, barley, wheat, Job’s tears)
reconstruct to Proto Burmic, spoken perhaps four thousand years ago. However,
this appears at odds with archaeobotanical findings which suggest that not all
these crops would have been in use at the same time at that time depth (e.g.
D’Alpoim-Guedes et al. 2014). Recent advances in the fields of archaeobotany
and language documentation now mean that we can take new data from otherwise
under-studied subgroups and look to see what reconstructs at lower, more
confident levels. With these lower groups we can also have more confidence of
time depth and proto homelands, looking to archaebotany for confirmation.

This workshop this aims to advance hypotheses concerning linguistically
reconstructable aspects of early Tibeto-Burman material culture and
environmental economy by focusing closely on the subgroup level. This workshop
welcomes all contributions that are aimed at reconstructing lexicon at the
subgroup level, dealing with flora, fauna, productive economy (agriculture,
hunting, foraging, artefacts and their construction) and any other features
that will contribute to a nuanced characterisation of early Tibeto-Burman
speaking cultures.
 






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