Acknowledgements
This work came about as part of my PhD project titled “The prehistoric origin and spread of the Indo-Iranian languages: A linguistic test of hypotheses rooted in genetics and archaeology” and represents a revised version of my doctoral dissertation. As such, I would like to begin by extending a warm thank you to Guus Kroonen and Sasha Lubotsky, without whose supervision and guidance during my time in Leiden this work would not have been possible. Their feedback on my work has been invaluable. Furthermore, I would like to thank the members of the defense committee for scrutinizing my work, which helped me greatly in improving the quality of this book. An especially warm thank you goes out to Agnes Korn, Martin Kümmel, Tijmen Pronk, and Rick Derksen for pointing out mistakes and suggesting improvements on the manuscript. I would also like to thank an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on the manuscript.
I am very grateful to have had so many great colleagues at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Thanks especially to Michaël Peyrot, Alwin Kloekhorst, Andrew Wigman, Anthony Jakob, Cid Swanenvleugel, Paulus van Sluis, Rasmus Thorsø, Abel Warries, Louise Friis, Niels Schoubben, Stefan Norbruis, Xander Vertegaal, Federico Dragoni, Carmen Spiers, and Tobias Søborg. I am furthermore grateful to Jenny Larsson and the other colleagues at the Center for the Human Past, as well as Christina Garsten and the staff and fellows at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study for welcoming me to Uppsala, where I finished the work on this book. Additionally, I wish to thank Volker Heyd and Asko Parpola for taking an interest in my work and introducing me to Bronze Age archaeology during a research stay at the University of Helsinki. Likewise, I wish to thank David Reich, Nick Patterson, Iosif Lazaridis, and all their wonderful lab colleagues, with whom I had many fruitful discussions during a research stay at Harvard University.
Being the fruit of years of work at Leiden University, I am thankful to all the staff of LUCL for creating such an inspiring and friendly work environment, where outstanding, innovative, in most cases externally funded research in a wide variety of linguistic subfields flourishes next to excellent teaching and work camaraderie. The department is deservedly recognized as one of the foremost research and teaching institutions in the field. This is something for all the Netherlands to take pride in. Its value is not easily quantified according to the economic practices of our day, but I am convinced that it provides wealth of a different kind, without which Dutch society would feel poorer. It is my sincere hope that LUCL and the rest of Leiden University will be allowed to continue to flourish for many decades to come.