Sergei Vsevolodovich Kullanda (23.08.1954 - 30.11.2020)
The paper examines the major milestones of Sergei V. Kullanda's scientific activity and summarizes his heritage. During the first half of his career, Sergei Kullanda focused on Austronesian studies: the history of ancient Java and pre-Austronesian societies as well as Austronesian linguistics. Later Kullanda turned to Indo-European and Iranian studies: reconstruction of the Indo-European system of age and gender groups based on kinship terms, the problem of male unions in the Indo-European society, Scythian linguistics, and Proto-East-Caucasian loanwords in Proto-Indo-Iranian. The development of deep semantic reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European kinship terms was the central topic for Sergei Kullanda. In his Austronesian and Indo-European studies he combined data of language, history and ethnography. Kullanda's minor works covered such topics as the origin of Indian varṇas, reconstruction of the original character of the Vedic god Indra, and etymologies for Austronesian, Indo-Iranian and Caucasian languages.