ABSTRACT
As archaeology studies ancient artifacts and attempts to reconstruct a socio-historical context for them, the field I have dubbed ‘linguistic archaeology’ 1 seeks to reconstruct a sociolinguistic context for ancient linguistic forms, that is, to make inferences from the language of ancient texts and/or linguistic reconstructions about the groups who spoke the language in question – including their geographical location, chronology, social and linguistic links with other groups, social stratification, material culture, and ideology. Thus linguistic archaeology can be considered complementary to archaeology itself, in terms of its goals. It also shares with archaeology a commitment to rigorous scholarship, in the sense that conclusions need to be verifiable by methods that are generally agreed upon.
