Linguoarchaeology: goals, advances and limits

Abstract

Russia is famous for its long tradition of ethnogenetic studies-i.e. investigations of the origins of particular peoples: how, when, under what conditions different peoples came into being.1 This tradition is deeply rooted in the Age of Nationalism when various European peoples occupied themselves with the search for their ancestors and past cultures. A peculiar feature of the Russian approach was the idea that there were no pure peoples or cultures. This idea, already forged by the mid-nineteenth century (Khomiakov 1871), stressed that different components with their own histories and cultures played an important role in each particular ethnogenesis. One had to reveal these components and to study their particular histories. Since the processes in question took place in the very remote past, when written sources were scarce or non-existent, the researcher had to rely on the indirect evidence of material and skeletal remains or linguistic data.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.