Wheels, Wagons and Words

The source and directionality of wheeled wagon technology represent persistent difficult issues in the prehistoric sciences. Archaeological evidence appears almost simultaneously across Western Eurasia, while word complexes from independent language families like Indo-European or Semitic only provide formal relative chronologies. By recontextualizing established and suggested loanwords between known language families, historical linguistics may nonetheless provide a hitherto unemployed perspective on the problem: loanword trajectories betray exchange and communication networks in the increasingly well-understood prehistoric human landscape illuminated by ongoing triangulation of ancient DNA, archaeology and historical linguistics. The project employs state-of-the-art contact linguistic analyses based on the established traditions within language families from across Eurasia to arrive at the simplest explanation for the Bronze Age spread of wagon technology.