Linguistic Reconstruction and Historical Ecology in the North Pacific Rim

Linguistic Reconstruction and Historical Ecology in the North Pacific Rim explores human-environmental interactions in the Northern Pacific Rim over the last 10,000 years. It introduces students and researchers to linguistic methods for reconstructing how humans have managed and modified landscapes over millennia. The chapters cover a variety of temporal and geographical ranges, including the coastal areas on both sides of the Pacific from Neolithic to medieval times.

This book engages a multitude of Indigenous languages, such as Sinitic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Turkic, Koreanic, Japonic, Ainuic, Amuric, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Yukaghiric, Eskaleut, Na-Dené and Salishan languages. As such, archaeolinguistics is showcased as a truly new frontier in Historical Ecology, bridging the natural and social sciences. The volume adds linguistics to a wide array of windows into the ecological past.

This volume is ideal for advanced students and researchers in archaeology, anthropology, genetics, ecology, and geography.

Prof. Dr. habil Martine Robbeets is the head of the Language and the Anthropocene Research Group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena and Honorary Professor 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 wrote several monographs and edited various volumes, among which Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Linguistics on “the Transeurasian Languages”, “The Oxford Guide to Transeurasian Languages” and “The Oxford Handbook of Archaeology and Language”.

Martijn Knapen is a doctoral researcher in the Language and the Anthropocene research group at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena. He holds an MA in Linguistic Diversity and Digital Humanities from the University of Helsinki. He is a linguist specializing in three Indigenous linguistic lineages of Northeast Asia: Nivkh (or Amuric), Tungusic and Ainu. His ongoing research focuses on the interactions of their speakers among themselves and their interrelations with their local landscapes and seascapes.