Words as Archaeological Objects: A Study of Marine Lifeways, Seascapes, and Coastal Environmental Knowledge in the Yagan-English Dictionary

Abstract

Reverend Thomas Bridges’ Yagan-English dictionary (1879) has hitherto been little explored outside of linguistics but is highly valuable as a complementary source to archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic records in Tierra del Fuego (Argentina and Chile). The dictionary contains 22,800 entries and yields rich information concerning the marine lifeways of the Yagan and their and intimate knowledge about Fuegian seascapes. The idea behind this paper is that environments have strong bearings on linguistic vocabularies. Treating words as archaeological objects that map onto landscapes, we identify important landforms for Yagan marine foragers and Norwegian fisher-farmers in a comparative study of word frequencies in Bridges’ dictionary and Ivar Aasen’s Norwegian dictionary (1850). Moreover, we explore in detail how marine lifestyles and Fuegian seascapes emerge in Bridges’ dictionary and discuss the dictionary’s relevance for historical archaeology in Tierra del Fuego.