04.05.2023

Plant use in ancient Sahul: evidence from linguistics

Colloquium by Prof. Dr. Nick Evans

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Time: Thursday, 4^th May 2023 at 1pm (sharp)

Location: Rümelinstraße 23, Room 602 or via Zoom (the link will shared one day before the talk)

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Nick Evans

Title: Plant use in ancient Sahul: evidence from linguistics

Abstract:

Ancient plant use leaves fewer traces than either bones or stones, yet
knowledge and use of the botanical world was arguably more important
than meat, hunting or stone-tool use, to our deep ancestors. In
addition to food, plants supplied key elements in some of the
less-visible elements of tool-making, such as string, bags, nets,
paint fixatives, medicines and mosquito repellent. In this talk I
bring the tools of historical linguistics, especially etymology, to
bear on two 'hemi-continents' – New Guinea and Australia – of the
once-united continent known as Sahul.

In the New Guinea part of the talk I focus on the origins of gardening
practices in Southern New Guinea, which appear to represent a fairly
recent transition from gathering of wild fruits and roots,
supplemented by casual cultivation of sago, to the construction of
fenced and intensively-worked gardens for growing yams. The linguistic
evidence of semantically-shifted cognates in the domain of words for
swidden gardens, fences, and the plants grown there sheds particular
light on the cultural transition needed to fertilise the earth by
removing large trees, and to keep out animal freeloaders (originally
bandicoots, now pigs) from consuming garden produce.

In the Australian part of the talk, which represents joint work with
Alexandra Marley and Rachel Nordlinger, I examine the question of how
far it is possible to reconstruct a panoply of plant terms, and infer
their uses, among hunter-gatherers, focussing on the non-Pama-Nyungan
languages which occupy most of the Australian tropics, including the
likely entry-point of humans to Australia. Plant use in northern
Australia has been remarkably stable since the first humans arrived c.
65,000 years ago, and it turns out we can reconstruct dozens of plant
names to the earliest common ancestor of Australian languages. For
some of them, such as the screwpalm (Pandanus Spiralis) the existence
of at least four cognate sets, including languages contrasting at
least three of them, points to distinct terms focussing on different
useful parts of the plants involved; for others, such as the tree
orchid (Dendrobium Caniculatum) deep-time cognate sets correlate with
their use as paint fixatives in rock-painting traditions, from the
same region, going back at least 25,000 years and probably longer.

I conclude by emphasising the need to combine extensive in-depth field
recording of Indigenous languages (ideally by teams combining
linguistic and botanical expertise) with approaches to historical
linguistics that maximise what we can infer from comparative data, in
the spirit of Vavilov and Haudricourt.
 

We welcome you all to join us in-person or via Zoom.