The Roots of Europe centre has received a grant from the VELUX Foundation for a new research project:

The Indo-European Dark Ages Illuminated

PI: Thomas Olander

Project period: 1 Januar 2025 – 31 December 2028

Apart from the PI, the project will include two postdocs as well as a PhD student.

Official announcement: veluxfonden.dk/en/node/15935 (in Danish)

Note the seemingly clever, yet unintended (or subconscious?) pun in the project title with the funding body: the VELUX company produces roof windows.

Project summary

The millennia following 4000 BCE changed the linguistic, cultural and genetic make-up of Europe and W Asia forever. A decisive factor in this turbulent period was a herding people in the Ukrainian and S Russian steppes that spread W into Europe and E towards India and China.

The most visible mark they left was linguistic: they spoke a language, Proto-Indo-European, which is not attested in writing, but is the ancestor of a number of languages spoken in large parts of the world today, including Danish, English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi.

Analysing the culture-specific words in the Indo-European languages, the project examines how far back the words can be reconstructed in the shared prehistory of the languages – some can be traced back all the way to Proto-Indo-European, others to later stages.

The vocabulary is thus used to throw light on the archaeological cultures in which the various prehistoric language stages may have been spoken.

The project is linguistic in its core, but together with archaeology and prehistoric genetics it contributes to the cross-disciplinary endeavour of understanding this formative period in the prehistory of Europe and Asia.