Uralic archaeolinguistics

Abstract This chapter considers the Uralic language family in connection with the genetic and cultural history of Northwest Eurasia. In the north and east, foraging economies have persisted among Uralic-speaking groups into modern times, partly combined with reindeer husbandry. Meanwhile, farming was only gradually introduced into the area from the west and south from the fourth/third millennia BC onwards, likely connected to Indo-European expansions. Today, the Uralic speaker populations and their neighbours form a genetic cline across the North Eurasian taiga and tundra. The time depth of this genetic landscape is unknown, whereas the Uralic language family likely emerged during the last five millennia. The current distribution of Uralic languages in the north is, instead, a consequence of secondary dispersals in the Iron Age and Medieval Era. We review the hypotheses of temporal and structural disintegration of the Uralic family as well as the hypotheses of its homeland and provide independent introductions to the formation of cultural and genetic landscapes of the area contemporaneous to Uralic family emergence and evolution. Our interdisciplinary qualitative inference supports the hypothesis that the family could have spread westwards as lingua franca within the Seima-Turbino Bronze Age network at the turn of third and second millennia BC. We further develop this scenario by identifying a distinct transregional communication space (‘flowerpot complex’) in Southern Siberia and promote the Uralic languages’ origin in the region of the Sayan mountains, wherefrom the languages would have spread west to their secondary and tertiary homelands in Western Siberia and Volga-Kama region.