Cross-CRP Workshop (Veranstaltung: 15-16 Oktober 2011, Berlin)

This workshop brought together researchers from the Kalahari Basin Area (KBA; http://www2.hu-berlin.de/kba/) and Alor-Pantar (AP; http://www.uaf.edu/alor/) EuroBABEL projects, as well as outside experts in the fields of linguistics, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and genetics. The program pushed disciplinary boundaries in two important ways. First, by bringing together KBA and AP participants, the workshop was able to examine commonalities in these two distinct research areas. Both the problem of “Khoisan” in the Kalahari Basin area and the problem of “Papuan” in the Alor-Pantar area share a complex and often misunderstood research history. The Khoisan languages have traditionally been assumed to form a genealogical grouping, based on little more than superficial similarities between the languages. Similarly, the Alor-Pantar languages have traditionally been assumed to belong to the Trans-New Guinea family, based on rather superficial pronominal evidence. In both cases academic tradition has triumphed where data were lacking. Both the KBA and AP projects have applied new data to the problem of language classification, shattering established assumptions. However, each project has applied these data in a different way. In particular, the KBA project has relied much more on interdisciplinary approaches incorporating archaeology and genetics, reflecting the strong tradition in both of these fields in southern Africa. In contrast, such traditions are lacking in southern Indonesia.