Ancient Korea Lecture Series
From Foraging to Farming in Prehistoric Korea: A View from Linguistics
The prehistoric origins of the Korean language are among the most disputed issues of historical linguistics. This talk examines the earliest dynamics of the ancestral Proto-Koreanic language in the light of the Farming-Language Dispersal Hypothesis. Archaeolinguistic evidence associates the arrival and spread of Proto-Koreanic on the peninsula with the dispersal of millet cultivation in the Middle Neolithic. Whereas millet farming will appear as a major addition to the food spectrum that caused socio-linguistic shifts, the adoption of rice, barley and wheat agriculture in the Bronze age left a milder linguistic signal involving ancient borrowings from neighboring languages. Taking linguistics as a vantage point, the transition of farming to foraging in prehistoric Korea will be addressed from different perspectives, including palaeogenetics, archaeology and palaeoclimatology. By combining evidence from these disciplines, the talk suggests that the primary spreads of the Korean language were driven by agriculture.
About the Speaker
Martine Robbeets is the head of the Language and Anthropocene Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena and Honorary Professor at the Department of General and Comparative linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. She holds a PhD in Comparative Linguistics from the University of Leiden and a Habilitation in Linguistic Typology from the University of Mainz. She recently finalized an interdisciplinary project on the prehistoric dispersal of Koreanic and other Transeurasian languages, funded by an ERC Consolidator’s Grant. She wrote several monographs and edited various volumes, among which Routledges Critical Concepts in Linguistics on “the Transeurasian Languages”, “The Oxford Guide to Transeurasian Languages” and “The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language”.
Cultural Heritage and Traditional Ecological Knowledge of Neolithic Islanders on Jeju, Korea
On Jeju Island cultural heritage has developed distinctly from mainland Korea. Its geological and environmental history rendered the particular cultural trajectories throughout the Holocene, and archaeological materials reflect its long origin as far as back to 10,000 years ago. Up against the changing climate and tourism development, a number of specialists organized the Jeju Archaeology Project to protect endangered sites and to appreciate the long tradition of island cultures. The project aims to understand the traditional ecological knowledge that helped Jeju islanders adapting to the changing climates throughout the Neolithic period (10,000–3,000 years Before the Present). This talk will summarize what the team has learned about the pattern of settlements, mobility, and migration, and its link to clay sourcing for pottery making and to the particular foodways.
About the Speaker
As an archaeologist, Gyoung-Ah Lee investigates the foodways, traditional ecological knowledge, and human-environmental dynamics in East Asia. Her research spans the globe, and she has conducted archaeological work in Australia, Canada, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Korea. More recently, she has been developing the archaeological project on Jeju Island in Korea, and her team pursues a deep understanding of Jeju cultural heritage in a long time scale. Since 2007 she has been based at the University of Oregon, as a member of the faculty of Anthropology.
- Humanity