Origins of the Western Desert language: convergence in linguistic and archaeological space and time models

Abstract

Recently linguists have adopted historical approaches to provide chronologies for the expansion of languages in Australia. McConvell (1996) has defined an approach he refers to as linguistic prehistory, in which the methods of comparative linguistics are used to estimate the point of origin and timing of the spread of the Western Desert language. McConvell and others have aimed to calibrate these reconstructions against available archaeological evidence from the Western Desert. In this paper I consider recent archaeological syntheses from the Western Desert and discuss how inferred changes in archaeological site patterning, occupational intensity, technology, symbolic schema and exchange systems may correlate with linguistic phases of expansion. It is an assumption of this paper that the spread of a language occurs through the migration of those language speakers.