Inferring language from non-linguistic artifacts
In this week’s lecture and associated readings we have been looking at human evolution, with the aim of understanding the ecology that shaped the evolution of our species, but also in the hope that we might be able to glean some clues about when language evolved. Unfortunately, writing is a very recent invention, and spoken languages don’t leave direct traces in the archaeological record. However, it might be possible to make inferences about when language evolved, or whether some hominid population had language, if we can infer the presence of language from something that does show up in the archaeological record – tools, beads, ochre etc.
The question for this week’s tutorial, which we’ll run as a debate, is therefore: can we infer the presence (or absence) of language from the presence (or absence) of certain types of material culture in the archeological record? You’ll split into teams and (initially) argue for opposite positions. Team 1 will read/argue for a paper by Henshilwood & Dubreuil arguing that these kind of inferences can be made, team 2 will read/argue for a very skeptical response paper by Botha. The Blombos cave in South Africa features quite prominently in both papers, so you might want to check out the wikipedia page on that. Make sure you have read at least one of the papers - if you have read both that’ll give us a bit more flexibility in organising groups, plus you’ll know both sides of the argument.
It’s entirely up to your tutors (and you!) how to use the time available in the tutorial, but I’d suggest something like: a short period of discussion within the two teams, identifying the main points to be made; reconvening as a group and each team taking turns to summarise their contents of their paper for the other team; a short period arguing for strengths of the paper they read and weaknesses of the other paper (this can be as interactive or sequenced as you like); a more general conciliatory discussion of the issues raised, the collective consensus on the issues discussed, interesting points raised, and any questions to bring to the following lecture.
The references for the two readings are below.
Team 1: Henshilwood, C.S. & Dubreuil, B. (2009). Reading the artefacts: Gleaning language skills from the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa. In R. Botha & C. Knight (Eds.), The Cradle of Language (pp. 41-60). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online from the University network - you can access the whole book from one of those links and scroll down the table of contents to find this chapter.
Team 2: Botha, R. (2010). On the soundness of inferring modern language from symbolic behaviour. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 20, 345-356. Available online from the University network - just click “read article” near the top.
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