I am posting your article at “Our Cultural World” as part of the “Four Stone Hearth Carnival Blog” which I am hosting this week. You will be able to find the post here: http://culturalworld.wordpress.com/

I should have it out in the next couple of hours! :) Great article.

As for the new school of linguistics, I’m a little wary of yet another divergent discipline and would rather see you buck the trend and keep publishing the sort of research that you think ought to get published. There’s nothing wrong with having multiple approaches within the same journal. It keeps things interesting.

Grammatical systems are frequently embedded in complex and interesting conceptual schemes, but I don’t think that these schemes are, in general, on the order of the kinds of ‘world view’-type insights that certain versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seem to promise. To take an example, Iquito, an Amazonian language that I have worked on, exhibits a combined lexico-grammatical system for expressing location, orientation, and direction in space, based in large part on a system of orientation relative to rivers (e.g. upriver, downriver, away from the river, towards the river, etc) and isomorphisms between the river-based system and interior-exterior and horizontal-vertical systems of orientation. The system is fascinatingly complex, as it has grammaticalized spatial relationships that take into acount the simultaneous positions and orientations of the referent, speaker, and hearer relative to the river. Based on this, one can work out all the spatial relationships a speaker of Iquito needs to consider in order to use the lexico-grammatical spatial system correctly, and I suppose it would be reasonable to consider the conceptual schemas involved to form part of how Iquitos think about the world around them. But at the end of the day, what does one have? In my view, simply the observation that Iquito speakers attend to positions and orientations relative to rivers, and that they divide up space in certain ways based on those relative positions and orientations.

So, while I find the study of conceptual schemes underlying lexico-grammatical systems like the one I just described to be interesting for its own sake, and for its ability to answer questions about how people lexicalize and grammaticalize their conceptualizations of space, I’m not sure that this kind of work goes very far in the direction of providing the kind of ‘emic’ approach you would see as being helpful to archeologists. But maybe archeologists would find these kinds of results useful. What do you think?

I want to add that I can think of at least two other ways, apart from traditional comparative linguistics, to which you allude, that the study of language could be helpful to archeologists. First, the study of language contact has really begun to take off in the last decade, and it looks like the study of areal linguistic phenomenon, coupled to traditional historical linguistics, could be a powerful tool to uncover prior contact between groups speaking different languages, and even deduce certain aspects of the nature of that contact.

The second area is the systematic use of linguistic reconstruction to reconstruct the lexicons of protolanguages, which can give us significant insight into cultures of the speakers of those protolanguages, and even, in some cases, the locations of those peoples. Emile Benveniste’s Indo-European Language and Society is an example of some of the things that can be done in this area.

Unfortunately, neither of the two approaches that I mentioned are of any significance in current linguistic anthropology. I do think that they are prime candidates for important areas in a newly-reconstituted anthropological linguistics, however.

Still, that question has bothered me for the couple of years since and I’ve given some consideration as to how linguistic anthro could benefit archaeology. I’m pretty weak at understanding the difference between plain ol’ linguistics and anthropological linguistics, but I remember discussing (all those many years ago) color terms and other methods of classification that are reflected linguistically. That may help to show how those peoples perceived (or at least categorized) their surroundings (Do people still talk about the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis?). Such an emic approach would be a boon to archaeologists, I would think.