How a Dictionary Is Serving to Archeologists Uncover the Yaghan Indigenous Tradition

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Deep within the southern hemisphere, the place frigid waves lap towards the toe of the South American continent, the ocean has no single title. Locals have known as it tāralömbi when the water is completely calm. Čilamaii are the swells that collect alongside the coast, mötālömön is the roughening of the water by western breezes. Döna is the time period when sure winds ruffle the ocean’s floor in such a method that the motion of fish beneath can’t be discerned and canoes should return ashore.

The Indigenous Yaghan individuals who have spoken these phrases are native to Tierra del Fuego—the mosaic of islands, fjords, channels, bays, and coves created by the submerged foot of the Andean mountains in southern Argentina and Chile. The Yaghan and their ancestors are thought to have persevered on this harsh, windy, and chilly seascape for 1000’s of years. There, they’ve constructed canoes, from which they hunted sea lions and seals with harpoons. They’ve caught fish, gathered mussels, made ornaments, and celebrated rites of passage. They’ve roamed far and broad. 

The final actually native speaker of Yaghan, Cristina Calderón, died in 2022. Up to a couple hundred members of the group are nonetheless alive right now—together with Calderón’s granddaughter Cristina Zárraga and others who’re working to revitalize the language; Yaghan is categorised as “dormant” by the Endangered Languages Undertaking. 

Dictionaries, it seems, might be excavated for wealthy info lacking from the archeological report.

Though archaeologists have lengthy been fascinated by the deep historical past of this seafaring, nomadic individuals, most of the bodily stays their ancestors left behind have been misplaced to time. Fortuitously, they’ve additionally left clues within the Yaghan language. 

The Yaghan phrases for the ocean had been exhumed from a Nineteenth-century Yaghan-English dictionary compiled within the late 1800s by an Anglican missionary. In a latest paper within the Worldwide Journal of Historic Archaeology, a staff of Norwegian students argue that learning this historic snapshot of Yaghan may yield essential clues about these individuals’s lives over the centuries. The identical strategy may very well be used for doubtlessly a whole bunch of different languages, useless, alive, or dormant, throughout the globe to raised perceive outdated methods of life, historic ecologies, and people’ connection to the panorama.

Dictionaries, such because the one created for the Yaghan language, it seems, might be excavated for wealthy and nuanced info lacking from the bodily archeological report. 

“You may take into consideration language in the same method as we take into consideration the archaeological websites in a panorama,” says the lead writer of the brand new analysis, archaeologist Jo Sindre Eidshaug of the Norwegian College of Science and Know-how’s Marine Ventures undertaking, a world archaeological analysis effort. Eidshaug views language as one thing that “settles” a panorama similar to bodily artifacts, as individuals develop information and vocabulary in locations the place they spent most of their time.   

“This type of analysis offers us a brand new instrument to grasp some (questions on) the life of those individuals previously,” provides Angélica Tivoli, an archaeologist on the Austral Heart for Scientific Analysis of the Nationwide Scientific and Technical Analysis Council in Ushuaia, Argentina, who wasn’t concerned within the new work.  

Today, whereas language revitalization efforts of Zárraga and others are underway, little Yaghan is at present spoken in Tierra del Fuego. The Yaghan tradition and language underwent a devastating decline after Europeans arrived. Within the Eighties, about 90 p.c of the Yaghan individuals died from infectious ailments Europeans introduced. The decline continued into the twentieth century, when many Yaghans continued to die prematurely and confronted discrimination for talking the language. Immediately’s Yaghan individuals nonetheless style conventional harpoon factors of whale bone and weave baskets, these days principally to promote to vacationers, however they will now not canoe or boat freely as a consequence of restrictions by the Chilean Navy. 

Thomas Bridges, who constructed the dictionary, first met the Yaghans as a teen in 1856 and later lived with them for 30 years. Fastidiously documenting their language and tradition helped Bridges to translate the Gospel of Luke into Yaghan, as a part of Anglican missionary custom to make the Bible accessible in native languages. However whereas an entire Yaghan Bible could by no means have come to fruition, Bridges’ dictionary contains about 32,000 phrases. “That stage of element he was documenting—it’s so stunning,” says Oxford College ornithologist Andrew Gosler, analysis director of the Ethno-Ornithology World Atlas which collects Indigenous information on birds. “To have the ability to doc that form of element,” he says, demonstrates a closeness with the native audio system.  

As a result of Bridges was merely striving to report the Yaghan vocabulary as comprehensively as potential, his dictionary could also be much less coloured by prejudices and private agendas than ethnographic studies of the Yaghan by different missionaries and vacationers, Eidshaug says. However nonetheless, the dictionary is proscribed within the sorts of questions in regards to the previous it might reply. Languages change over time, so it’s unlikely, for instance, to make clear deep archeological questions, such because the origins of the primary marine hunter-gatherers in Tierra del Fuego some 7,000 years in the past. Or to essentially give a full image of the richness and breadth of Yaghan life. 

Elsewhere, like Australia, male linguists have been traditionally extra more likely to ask males than girls about their practices, documenting little on actions historically carried out by girls, notes linguist Luisa Miceli of the College of Western Australia. Bridges additionally principally labored with just one Yaghan couple—Okokko and Camilenna—to grasp the language, probably limiting his view of the communities’ actions as an entire, Gosler says. And, many ideas in Yaghan are so particular to tradition and place that they’re laborious, if not unimaginable, to totally encapsulate in different languages, provides Zárraga, who discovered the language as an grownup from her grandmother.  

However the dictionary might need encoded detailed information in regards to the sorts of assets, practices, and deep environmental understanding that had been assembled over a whole bunch or 1000’s of years in Tierra del Fuego, a lot of which hasn’t been preserved within the archeological report. “The form of environmental information that’s picked up on this language has an antiquity to it,” Eidshaug says. 

Most bodily traces of Yaghan tradition, like every remnants of foraged feasts, had been misplaced to time. 

Wherever they went, Yaghans collected information and vocabulary about their surroundings—the local weather, the ocean and its inhabitants, the shoreline, the seashore, and the forested hinterlands of Tierra del Fuego. Archaeological research have principally centered on shell middens alongside the coast—ring-shaped piles of shells that had been discarded round dwellings—the place animal bones and bone instruments had been preserved due to the alkaline chemistry of the shells. 

The dictionary catalogs generally hunted and foraged meals that don’t protect—fast-degrading issues like crab shells, berries, and fungi—in step with some ethnographic studies. Eidshaug counted 48 Yaghan phrases for native fungi, many who describe their ripening in wealthy element. For instance, auačix, the spherical yellow summer time fungus that grows on the šöšči tree: čikidönara describes immature fungi; pöša the second stage simply earlier than the fungus opens in holes and will get puffy; and dönara is when they’re totally ripe, shortly after falling from the timber.

Most bodily traces of the central car of Yaghan tradition, the bark canoe, like every remnants of auačix feasts, had been additionally misplaced to time. But the dictionary describes intimately the assets and techniques concerned in canoe-making. Bark is lower from the šöšči tree, and wooden fiber known as uri is used for stitching. Hūšun—seed stalks of untamed celery—are sewn as pads into the seams to make them waterproof. Tstāgi soil is used to cement the seams. Tatega—items of younger easy bark—are connected to the canoe’s higher edges to guard paddlers from blisters. By phrases like these, “we get a broader image of the fabric tradition,” Eidshaug says.

The dictionary additionally affords a window into a few of the intangibles of Yaghan tradition and worldview. Some entries pertain to rituals, comparable to kīna, an initiation ceremony for boys aged 12 to 17. The Yaghan phrase “to go” is commonly mixed with prefixes to point path; some denote the cardinal instructions like north and south, however others point out “towards land” or “away from shore,” illustrating how individuals mentally divided their panorama. Different entries clarify how Yaghans stored time in response to the seasonal adjustments in nature round them. Čgaiaŋgūta is the season for ripe auačix fungus. Čīyāgörana is the season when šöšči tree bark loosens, hākūa for making spring canoes. Iūan is the time when older crabs carry the youthful ones, čīiūaiella the time after they’ve separated. 

Data buried within the dictionary may additionally assist interpret the bodily archeological report. Within the dictionary, as an example, Uštānim is described as a porpoise jaw used as a comb. Isöska is the decrease jaw bone of a whale used as spear bones. Dictionary entries of this sort may assist archaeologists make sense of a hodgepodge of bones discovered beneath shell middens, and maybe present essential context to sure instruments, Tivoli says. “Perhaps it’s a method of calling our consideration to look deeper into the archaeological report,” she says.

Many nouns describe native animals, which characterize a 3rd of the dictionary. The wealth of various phrases for sure animals—comparable to for shellfish—could replicate a latest improve of their significance as a useful resource relative to different creatures.  

This new, linguistic strategy to uncovering extra a couple of long-lived tradition as described in Eidshaug’s paper is sort of helpful, says archaeologist Flavia Morello of Chile’s Institute of Patagonia and the Cape Horn Worldwide Heart, each a part of the College of Magallanes. It exhibits how dictionaries can act as gateways to distinctive cultures and in doing so assist foster a deeper societal appreciation for cultural range and the sorts of relationships people can domesticate with landscapes. “It’s very inspiring as a paper,” she says. 

Archaeologists elsewhere are more and more considering leveraging language in related methods. Miceli and her colleagues just lately revealed a pilot examine to discover what sort of info they might glean—from dictionaries of 10 Aboriginal languages in Australia—about home fireplace use, and whether or not this may very well be helpful in guiding archaeologists in excavating websites, Miceli says. Previous collaborations between archaeologists and linguists have usually centered on answering questions in regards to the probably homeland of ancestral languages, and the way and why they unfold, relatively than utilizing vocabulary to assist with archaeological excavations. “That, I feel, is sort of new,” Miceli says. 

Eidshaug and his colleagues additionally utilized this similar proof of idea to a dictionary of Norwegian because it was spoken amongst coastal fisher-farmers and different individuals within the space within the 1840s. And there are lots of extra outdated dictionaries of languages ready to be excavated from archive cabinets.  

Within the case of the Yaghan, the hope is that such investigations not solely reply archaeological curiosities but additionally assist the dwelling communities interact extra deeply with their previous. “We’ve linked a number of instances with archaeologists who examine artifacts and middens, and it has all the time been an attention-grabbing subject for us Yaghans,” says Zárraga, who spoke with me by means of an interpreter from her native Spanish language. 

Zárraga spent a decade dwelling together with her grandmother, studying Yaghan practices, values, and language—and about her grandmother’s expertise because the tradition round her eroded. “It was … very pure cultural information that my grandmother had, by means of the language,” Zárraga remembers. She is working to hold this ancestral information ahead in time. She’s already written two academic books on the Yaghan language and has plans for a Yaghan-Spanish dictionary. Eidshaug, in the meantime, has digitized Bridges’ dictionary to make it extra simply accessible.   

Although media studies usually described her grandmother because the final Yaghan speaker, Zárraga hopes her efforts will be certain that the language and its embedded info is not going to molder in archives, and that the distinctive tradition it described gained’t go the identical method.  “That’s why it’s very, essential, all of this stuff that my grandma gave me,” she says. “So we’re not the final ones.”

Lead picture: pics721 / Shutterstock

• Katarina Zimmer

  Posted on July 31, 2024

  Katarina Zimmer is a contract science and surroundings journalist.

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