Indo-European

We begin with Indo-European (IE - Figure 10.1), since this is by far the most studied language family in the world, and also the one that has driven much of the debate over how one determines deep language history. No discussion of Indo-European can begin without a reference to Sir William Jones, who in 1786 commented on similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, and Persian, and added the famous phrase that they must have been "sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists" (Pachori 1993:175; Johann Reinhold Forster anticipated Jones by about a decade with his comments on Austronesian!). In 1890, von Bradtke divided the IE languages into two groups in terms of a sound change in the word for "one hundred," thus defining Greek, Italic, Germanic, and Celtic (and later, Tocharian and Anatolian) as a centum group, and Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian as a satem group. At first sight, the geography of all this looks rather odd, but explanations are offered below.

Indo-European from the Pontic steppes?

The first, and long dominant, "world view" of IE origins developed through the middle and later years of the 20th century, with contributions from both archaeologists and linguists. This is the Pontic steppes theory, with a homeland located in Ukraine and southern Russia, north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and a dispersal associated with conquests by late Neolithic and Chalcolithic / Early Bronze Age pastoralists who had knowledge of horse-riding and use of the wheel for transport. No proposed family trees for IE actually demand a Pontic homeland, and we return to subgrouping matters below. The Pontic steppes theory has basically been driven by a congregation of assumptions, unrelated to linguistic subgrouping per se, that can be listed as follows:

1.Linguistic reconstructions of terms for wheeled vehicles to a relatively early stage of IE support a homeland in the Pontic steppes, where carts are known to date back to about 3000 BC in the archaeological record (Anthony 1995; Bakker et al. 1999).

2.Certain aspects of reconstructed Proto-IE society could be taken to imply patrilineality and pastoralism, the latter again pointing to the rather dry Pontic steppe region, albeit not in any specific way.

3.Some linguists have an intuition, backed by glottochronology, that the IE languages cannot be more than 5,000 or 6,000 years old, and thus late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, but not early Neolithic or Mesolithic, in archaeological terms.

4.The Anatolian languages (discussed further below) are stated by many historians and linguists to be non-native to Anatolia, and thus of no relevance for IE homeland questions.

Within the archaeological literature, for this is where it has been most strongly propounded, the Pontic steppes hypothesis was clearly stated by Gordon Childe in 1926, and then taken up in many publications by Marija Gimbutas (e.g., 1985, 1991). In Gimbutas' formulations, the early IE populations spread by migration of patriarchal horse-riding pastoralists from the Pontic steppes between 4500 and 2500 BC, in up to four successive waves. These people constructed burial mounds (kurgans), and formed an elite who imposed their IE languages upon a matriarchal (and non-IE) Neolithic population with goddesscentered rather than patrilineal ideologies. As Gimbutas (1985:185) once stated of Neolithic Anatolia: "the great neolithic civilization of this region is the antithesis of all the characteristics understood as Proto-IndoEuropean."

The Pontic steppes origin has been supported (with variations on some of the Gimbutas details) by scholars too numerous to discuss individually. Currently, one of its strongest proponents is archaeologist David Anthony (1991, 1995; Anthony and Brown 2000), who has examined both the archaeological and the linguistic records for evidence of early horse riding and wheeled vehicles on the Eurasian steppes. In Anthony's most recent formulations, horse riding could

have been practiced north of the Black Sea as early as 3500 BC, and the Proto- Indo-Europeans might thus have spread together with horses, wheeled vehicles, and a full agropastoral economy from the steppes, entering Europe by about 3000 BC.

All these reconstructions, of course, require processes of "elite dominance" for the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) populations to impose their languages on the much larger Neolithic populations already spread across Europe, processes in my view based more in guesswork than sociolinguistic reality. Indeed, all four assumptions listed above as being at the base of the hypothesis are now under attack from many sides.

For instance, Jim Mallory (1997), one of the staunchest supporters of a Pontic homeland, is clearly no longer convinced that domesticated horses and wheeled vehicles must be reconstructed to PIE (although wild horses could be another matter). Neither are linguists James Clackson (2000), Robert Coleman (1988:450), Calvert Watkins (1985), and historian Igor Diakonov (1985). The reconstructed PIE vocabulary' was not exclusively pastoralist, and neither is the archaeological record entirely pastoralist from the relevant period on the steppes (Mallory 1997; Anthony and Brown 2000). Recent research on horse domestication by archaeologist Marsha Levine (et al. 1999) suggests much later dates for horse riding, only late second millennium Be and thus irrelevant for PIE dispersal. Many linguists are now willing to entertain suggestions that PIE could be older than 5,000 years (see below), and the idea that the Anatolian languages were not native to Anatolia (and thus not relevant for IE homeland questions) has no strong factual basis. But the fundamental nail in the coffin of the Pontic steppes hypothesis was hammered by Colin Renfrew (1987), when he asked how a kurgan-based expansion of late Neolithic and Bronze Age conquering pastoralists across most of Europe could have left absolutely no corresponding continent-wide horizon in the archaeological record.