Rock art, Atlantic Europe, Words & Warriors (RAW)

Rock Art, Atlantic Europe, Words & Warriors: a four year cross-disciplinary project (RAW 2019–23)
Hällristningar, språk och maritim interaktion i Atlantiska Europa

The RAW project investigated a Bronze Age episode of contact between Scandinavia and the Atlantic West. The project was funded by the Swedish Research Council [Vetenskapsrådet], and based at the University of Gothenburg. It was led by Professor of Archaeology Johan Ling, with Professor John Koch of CAWCS as co-leader. Work in the project’s first year included 3D scans of Bronze Age ‘warrior’ stelae from the regional museums of Badajoz and Cáceres in southwest Spain. Some of these stones were also inscribed with texts in the Tartessian script and language. Together with a new Spanish interface, these stelae were added to the database of the Swedish Rock Art Research Archives (Svenskt Hällristnings Forsknings Arkiv; SHFA) and compared with the thousands of Scandinavian rock art panels documented and made accessible there.

Celto-Germanic is a study of the inherited vocabulary shared uniquely by Celtic, Germanic, and the other Indo-European languages of North and West Europe. The focus is on contact and common developments in the prehistoric period. Words showing the earmarks of loanwords datable to Roman times or the Middle Ages are excluded. Most of the remaining collection predates Grimm’s Law. This and further linguistic criteria are consistent with contexts before ~500 BC. The Celto-Germanic vocabulary – like the motifs shared by Iberian stelae and Scandinavian rock art – illuminates long-distance interaction in later prehistory, opening a window onto the Bronze Age in North-west Europe. Much of the word stock can be analyzed as shared across still mutually intelligible dialects rather than borrowed between separate languages. In this respect, what is revealed resembles more the last gasp of Proto-Indo-European than a forerunner of the Celtic–Germanic confrontations of the post-Roman Migration Period and Viking Age.

This 2020 edition puts into the public domain some findings of the cross-disciplinary ‘Rock Art, Atlantic Europe, Words and Warriors’ project, funded by the Swedish Research Council from 2019–23.