Recent advances in the field of palaeogenomics have revealed that at the onset of the Late Neolithic, Europe was characterized by a major cultural and genetic transformation triggered by multiple population movements from the Pontic–Caspian steppe. Corded Ware populations show a large-scale introduction of Yamnaya steppe ancestry across the entire archaeological horizon (Allentoft et al. 2015; Haak et al. 2015; Malmström 2019). The emergence of the Bell Beaker burial identity in the early third millennium BCE was similarly accompanied by a dramatic genetic turnover, at least in Northwestern Europe (Olalde et al. 2018). These population changes call for the integration of genetic evidence into existing models for the linguistic Indo-Europeanization of Europe (cf. Kristiansen et al. 2017).

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.

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 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.

We are currently experiencing what could be called the “third science revolution” (Kristiansen 2014). The implications of this revolution are reshaping not only archaeological discourse, but – even more fundamentally – the nature and perception of interdisciplinarity (Stutz 2018). The current reconfiguration offers unique new opportunities for collaboration across the sciences and humanities, as we will show, but can also provoke a strong emotional response. This is apparent from the at times fierce debates about the role of science in archaeological, archaeogenetic, and perhaps especially archaeolinguistic interpretation (Gray, Atkinson, & Greenhill 2011 vs. Pereltsvaig & Lewis 2015; Ion 2017 and 2019; Ribeiro 2019; Sørensen 2016). We also see old debates about the role of historical linguistics in archaeology resurfacing (Hansen 2019).