In the literature (e.g., Anthony 2007: 35–37), it is often stated that we can reconstruct five words of wheel and wagon terminology for Proto-Indo-European (PIE), viz. the words for ‘wheel’ (2×), ‘axle’, ‘thill’, and the verb ‘to convey in a vehicle’

It does not often happen that linguistic and archaeological sources allow the creation of a coherent narrative: they are usually separated from each other in time and space and do not meet the necessary prerequisites for a comparative analysis. The archaeological facts must form a clear pattern and demonstrate the existence of a cultural stereotype; the linguistic attribution of the population to which the analyzed archaeological sites belong must be uncontroversial; and, finally, the linguistic sources must provide sufficient information about that cultural stereotype.

Between 3000 and 2500 BCE, populations derived genetically from individuals assigned to the Yamnaya archaeological culture migrated out of their steppe homeland eastward to the Altai Mountains and westward into the Hungarian Plain and southeastern Europe, an east–west range of 5,000 km across the heart of the Eurasian continent (Allentoft et al. 2015; Narasimhan et al. 2019). In Europe, their descendants created the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker horizons (Haak et al. 2015; Frînculeasa et al. 2015; Olalde et al. 2018), establishing a large part of the genetic ancestry in modern Europeans and probably their linguistic ancestry in the Indo-European language family as well (Anthony 2007; Reich 2018). The Yamnaya archaeological culture (or “cultural-historical community,” in Soviet archaeological jargon) has consequently become a focus of wide interest. One debated subject that is perhaps most relevant for understanding the outbreak of long-distance migrations is the nature of the Yamnaya pastoral economy – were they nomads? This essay addresses Yamnaya nomadism as an innovation that opened the Eurasian steppes to productive human exploitation. It does not consider nomadic pastoralism in other parts of the world. Because the Yamnaya culture is little known or understood by Western archaeologists, I begin with an overview of Yamnaya chronology and variability.

In the past couple of years, we have witnessed how new techniques for the study of ancient biomolecules have disrupted the study of the human past and reshaped the research arena (Cappellini et al. 2018). Traditionally, only two lines of evidence have been available for human prehistory: that of prehistoric archaeology and that of historical linguistics. Now we are so fortunate as to witness these being supplemented with a third, entirely independent line of evidence, viz. palaeogenetics. The consequences of this addition can safely be called spectacular.

Recent chemical and isotopic sourcing of copper alloys, mostly from Scandinavia but some also from Britain (Ling et al. 2013; 2014; Melheim et al. 2018; Radivojević et al. 2018), point to a production–distribution–consumption system that connected the South with the North along the Atlantic façade during the period 1400/1300 to 700 BC. Up to now, Scandinavia has not been directly related to the Atlantic Bronze Age of this time. Parallel to these discoveries, aDNA evidence has revealed a bidirectional north–south genetic flow at nearly the same time, 1300 to 800 BC, as early European farmer (EEF) ancestry rose in southern Britain and fell in the Iberian Peninsula, accompanied there by a converse rise in steppe ancestry (Patterson et al. 2021). It appears, therefore, that people as well as metals were on the move during a period of intensified contacts across Europe’s westernmost lands in the Middle and Late Bronze Age. Thus, there arose a network comparable to that established earlier in connection with the Beaker phenomenon, one coinciding with a comparably significant transformation of the region’s populations (Olalde et al. 2018; Koch & Fernández 2019).

As I have already discussed the field of Indo-European textile vocabulary on various occasions,1 I will here concentrate on the etymological status and time horizon of the word for ‘wool’. By way of introduction, it will suffice just to recapitulate a few main points.

How do virtually identical burial rituals and worldviews emerge among widely dispersed communities? Five thousand years ago, preliterate Corded Ware communities throughout Europe achieved this remarkable feat. For half a millennium, these communities performed near-identical burial rituals in an area that extends from the Volga to the Rhine. What processes shaped such durable uniformity?

Corded Ware is one of the main archaeological phenomena of the third millennium before the common era (BCE), with a wide geographic spread across much of central and northeastern Europe, from Denmark, the Rhineland, and Switzerland in the west to the Baltic and Western Russia in the east, and broadly restricted to the temperate, continental zones north of the Alps, the Carpathians, and the steppe/forest steppe border to the east (Glob 1944; Strahm and Buchvaldek 1991; Furholt 2014).

The aim of this chapter is to establish the semantic field of maritime vocabulary of the Celtic languages, especially that part of the maritime vocabulary that can be reconstructed for Proto-Celtic, the common ancestor of all Celtic languages, and for the prehistoric stages of the Insular Celtic languages. The approach taken in this study is to analyse the relevant lexemes etymologically, and to assess the findings from the point of view of linguistic archaeology. Linguistic archaeology seeks to extract as much information as possible from the synchronic and diachronically reconstructable semantics and morphology of words in order to make inferences about the environment and living conditions of the language’s speakers from a prehistoric and early historic perspective. Maritime vocabulary, which is the focus of this study, includes all elements of the lexicon that refer to the topographical, biological, and economic environment of the sea and the shore, and to human interaction with them.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore one area in which comparative linguistic data can play a role in interpreting late Neolithic and early Bronze Age genetic and archaeological data from western Eurasia. The sharp rise in available samples of ancient DNA enables the establishment of kinship relations between individuals in prehistoric graveyards. It also makes it possible to establish where their ancestors came from. The analysis of strontium, oxygen, carbon, and lead isotopes in the tooth enamel of these same individuals provides information about movements during their lives. When these techniques are combined, we obtain a much better idea about who moved where and when in prehistory. Being able to establish the diet of prehistoric individuals and which diseases they may have suffered from allows archaeologists to set up hypotheses as to why some of the population movements that can be observed in the archaeological data might have taken place. Linguistics can offer a valuable contribution to the discussion of why people moved by shedding light on factors other than diet or disease; it may, for example, help to explain cases in which males appear to have migrated differently from females. In order to understand how, this chapter will take a closer look at the linguistic evidence for kinship relations and the role of gender and age in Indo-European society. At the end of the chapter, hypotheses about mobility, kinship, and marriage in early Indo-European society as based on the linguistic data will be compared to the findings of recent research into ancient DNA and isotope analysis.

The first use of metals in the production of objects among human societies was undoubtedly a defining event with a profound, irreversible impact on craftsmanship, agriculture, trade, warfare, and other cultural and political phenomena. The continuous refinement of metallurgical practice, including the introduction of new metals, has left behind some of the most conspicuous and important archaeological remains. Furthermore, the linguistic and archaeological evidence provided by metals can be combined to cast light on the relative placement of reconstructed languages in time and space through the use of linguistic palaeontology (cf. already Schrader 1883). For the study of the expansion of the Indo-European (IE) languages, examining the inventory of metallurgical vocabulary is thus highly relevant – not only for dating and locating the dissolution of each language, but also for determining the branching and spread of the successive daughter languages, and how they were influenced by foreign languages.