I had referred to this collection of papers before, and now all the PDFs appear to be available free of charge.
This seems fairly interesting:
Language and archeology: some methodological problems.
1. Indo-European and Altaic landscapes
Anna Dybo
The article is the first part of a larger work that represents an attempt to systematize our
ideas on the natural environment and material culture of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. It is
based on a more or less complete selection of reconstructed words from the appropriate semantic areas and on their comparison with a similar selection performed for a protolanguage of similar time depth, whose speakers evidently inhabited a territory that was not
in contact with the Proto-Indo-European one — Proto-Altaic. In this part, only the words that
belong to the semantic field of landscape terms are analyzed. The main conclusion is that thehypothesis of a steppe environment is more applicable for the Proto-Altaic population,whereas for Proto-Indo-Europeans a mountainous region seems more appropriate. As for
the water bodies, for Proto-Indo-Europeans we should suppose the existence of a sea (or of a
very big lake), and for speakers of Proto-Altaic, the existence of very big rivers with season
floods
Mallory's article is also interesting as the latest public take on the PIE origins issue by the prominent champion of the Pontic-Caspian steppe hypothesis. It also alerted me to a study in Russian on the problem of Tocharian origins by Leonid Sverchkov. Sadly, I don't read Russian, but Mallory has a nice review of it in the Journal of Indo-European Studies, from which comes the following excerpt:
The second section of the book investigates CentralIt seems that the PIE urheimat debate is alive and well.
Asia as a cultural historical region. It briefly summarizes the
major Palaeolithic influences, then provides more detail
about the Mesolithic cultures of the region before settling
down to a much more thorough description of the
Neolithic cultures, among which much time is devoted to
the Kelteminar culture that occupied a broad area of
Central Asia and which many earlier authors saw as critical
in explaining the origins of many of the neighboring
cultures, among which would be included the Afanasievo
culture of the Altay and Minusinsk Basin. The author
continues laying out the cultural-historical development of
Central Asia up to the early Middle Ages.
The third part is titled ‘Tokharians and the IndoEuropean problem” and the archaeological evidence seen
earlier is then recast to provide arguments for a Central
Asian homeland for the Indo-Europeans. One of the
perennial problems with searching out the origins of any
particular Indo-European group is that all too often
proponents of a particular theory provide an isolated
‘solution’ divorced from the fact that it is only part of a
larger puzzle and its pieces must make joins with the rest
of the Indo-European world. I have termed this the ‘total
distribution principle’ and it is one of the tests of how
serious we should deal with any partial solution to IndoEuropean expansions. In attempting to meet this
principle, one can hardly criticize the author as his final
section is essentially a very detailed proposal for a ‘new’
Indo-European homeland in Central Asia. Geographically
situated not far from the earlier proposals of Gamkrelidze
and Ivanov, it does provide some legs to their general
positioning of the Indo-European homeland but in a novel
fashion. Sverchkov’s solution also embraces a series of
earlier suggestions or models but is truly his own in terms
of its implementation.
Sverchkov’s solution is fundamentally a rejection of
those who would normally dismiss Central Asia as merely a
transition zone across which migrating populations passed
through. During the transition between the Mesolithic
and Neolithic we find a vast Keltiminar culture occupying
the entire region from the Urals and Caspian east to the
Altay, and north of the Kopetdagh and northern
Afghanistan. This region matches at least in areal extent
the type of homelands anchored in Europe such as those
who have sought the Urheimat in the area of the
Linearbandkeramik. To these Sverchkov also includes the
southern agricultural regions of Jarmo and later Jeitun
which would appear to lie outside the area normally
ascribed to other non-Indo-European languages (Semitic,
Elamite, Dravidian, Altaic, Uralic). This entire region then
functions as a broad Indo-European homeland. He suggests
that the westward movement of the Halaf culture accounts
for the separation of the Anatolian branch. The ProtoTocharians begin within the Jeitun region and moved
eastwards to arrive in Ferghana by the Bronze Age. The
archaeological discussion emphasizes the presence of
painted wares in both the Tarim Basin, especially in the
region where we find Tocharian B, and Ferghana, and
these persistent contacts are seen as indicating the spread
of the Tokharian languages. This pattern of Central Asian
contacts is seen even in the earliest cemeteries of the
region (Xiaohe, Gumagou) which, although lacking
ceramics altogether, possessed abundant evidence for bagshaped baskets which have been compared to the shape
and decorations of Kelteminar vessels. It might be noted
that precisely the same pot-to-basket argument has been
employed by those who support a connection between the
Tarim Basin and the steppelands.
The other Indo-European languages are accounted
for by very early (Neolithic) movements from Central Asia
into the Pontic-Caspian region. The Ayderbol culture of
Kazakhstan, for example, is proposed as underlying the
formation of the Dnieper-Donets culture of the Ukraine
and as seen as the initial wave (roughly in the sense of
Marija Gimbutas) of the Italo-Celtic-Illyrians. The Neolithic
and Eneolithic developments of the Volga-Ural region are
under the Kelteminar aegis and yield the later GermanicBalto-Slavic branches. Out of the steppe cultures (Sredny
Stog and Khvalynsk) and the neighboring Maykop culture
he derives the Yamnaya which in the guise of the
Andronovo culture sets off the Aryanization of southern
Central Asia. Throughout this archaeological discussion the
author relates his theories to a variety of linguistic
proposals, e.g., Henning’s famous argument tying the
names of cultures on the frontiers of Mesopotamia with
those of the Tarim Basin
Two simple questions to all-
ReplyDelete1.From Where the oldest Indo-Europen traditions are found?
2.In Where they are still alive?
The PIE urheimat debate may be very alive, but not exactly "well". On the list is Mallory's article "Twenty-first century clouds over Indo-European homelands", that exhibits a bleak view on the issue: "If there are any lessons to be learned, it is that every model of Indo-European origins can be found to reveal serious deficiencies as we increase our scrutiny."
ReplyDeleteAbove includes his supposed status of "prominent champion of the Pontic-Caspian steppe hypothesis": while "the absence of a fully fleshed out and agreed phylogeny is a serious detriment to evaluating the various homeland models", what is now really affecting the credibility of all Steppe hypotheses is the recognition that agricultural vocabulary was indeed part of PIE, and all what this implies to the supposed IE-identity of Yamnaya ("how can we describe the eastern archaeological cultures of the Don (Repin), Volga (Khvalynsk) or the entire Don-Ural region (Yamnaya) as Indo-European if they lacked arable agriculture?") and the IE-izing of Europe: "it creates a ‘bottle-neck’ for the Northwest (?) Indo-European languages dated to about 1500 BCE where they all should have passed from east to west across the Pontic-Caspian and on into Europe." Previously, Mallory had embraced Corded Ware into the IE family, and rejected (or ignored) Bell Beaker. Still I don't see Mallory giving up on Corded Ware so easily, and all I can think is that probably he was dead-wrong in his rejection of Bell Beaker. If Northwest IE languages are now the common bottleneck for Steppe-like PIE urheimat hypotheses, we might as well think about the reestablishment of the oldest PIE proposal that concerns an origin in NW Europe as a another option. Indeed, here we find the agricultural and "Mesolithic" Swifterbant culture that is considered highly influential to Michelsberg-like Middle Neolithic cultures and probably ancestral to West TRB and the subsequent local Bell Beaker and Corded Ware cultures.
@Nirjhar007:
ReplyDeleteHard to say, because only a few IE traditions can be domonstrated as "universal", and even less of these traditions can be attested in archeology. For instance, how do you attest the old-IE belief that people descend from trees? Still this can be attested in Germanic and Indian mythology. However, at least in European IE societies it was a common practice to make sacrifices in marshes and lakes.
This would make the cow sacrifices in the fens of Drenthe (Netherlands), associated with the Swifterbant culture, fifth millenium BC, probably the oldest finds.
I'm afraid close to none of all IE traditions survived Christianity, thus probably making India the richest hotspot of contemporary IE traditions.
Sverchkov's proposal is strongly reminiscent of Kuz'mina's, both at least reflecting pan-Russian ideology, if not in fact born of it. Both proposals minimize the heterogeneous elements of their chosen archaeological horizons and emphasize a convenient set of similarities.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of Keltiminar, there is no evidence of any contact between it and Jeitun and even claiming that the former was Neolithic is debatable. It is possible that some species represented by the bones found at Ayakagytma were domesticated but last I heard that remains unclear. Also, to the best of my knowledge, there is so far no direct evidence of cereal cultivation at any Keltiminar site prior to the Bronze Age.
The "bagshaped baskets" are in fact the only link between the earliest peoples of the Tarim Basin and Keltiminar, Afanasiev, or some steppe culture. The problem is that such round-bottomed pots are found over a very wide area throughout a very long timespan. Even the Botai had round-bottomed pots.
Nonetheless, I suspect that the precursor of Tocharian did indeed travel east along the prehistoric Silk Route. That peoples, culture, and trade goods, have traveled along this route since the Early Bronze Age is, unlike proposed early movements across the steppe, an established fact.
Nirjhar, those questions are pretty irrelevant to the Urheimat question. It's not unusual for emigrants from a society to be more culturally conservative and maintain old tradtions while those they left behind in the actual homeland innovate. This happens over and over again on the lingusitic side. For instance the Norfolk dialect, or features of it, survives in New England, not in Norfolk.
ReplyDeleteAs far as language is concerned, of course the Anatolian languages were the more conservative because they split off first, but after that it is the Italic and Celtic languages that retained the oldest features (while developing quite a number of new ones too) and no one has ever proposed western or southern Europe as the Uheimat.
Nirjhar007
ReplyDeleteYou only know for sure that a language is IE if you have it in written form from its own time. With that your question comes down to the question: what is the place where the oldest known IE words where written down and still have (at least partial) IE population. The answer for this is probably the Middle East, but this is not so revealing as you might think.
A widespread language family will be first attested in writing where writing comes earlier, not where the language comes earlier.
Just try to answer your questions for the Uralic languages and see how misleading it can be.
Rokus,
ReplyDelete"I'm afraid close to none of all IE traditions survived Christianity,"
The tripartite thing sure survived, if in fact it is valid.
I'm more and more inclined to see the spread of IEs in Europe as associated with the spread of both R1a and R1b. Both appear to be relatively late arrivals, and both ultimately from somewhere in the east. Nowhere in Europe are R1b and the Gedrosia component more common than in the Celtic parts of Britain. Hence it's natural to assume that Italo-Celtic was associated from the beginning with the earliest Gedrosia-/R1b bearing people who entered Europe, and that Proto-Italo-Celtic didn't stem from Steppe-R1a people subjugating a predominantly R1b population of non-IE speakers in the Carpathian basin. According to the linguistic trees, Italo-Celtic split from the mainstream IE relatively early. I guess it was the Baden-Vucedol culture where they first set foot in Europe, stemming presumably from Anatolia. Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian on the other hand appear linguistically (at least according to Ringe) like a late (i.e. bronze age) continuum dominated by R1a. Germanic then would be influenced by both streams. An early (bronze age) R1a-stream accounting for the lexical proximity of Germanic to Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian, followed by an iron age „Hallstatt“ R1b-U106 wave from central Europe, which explains the morphological and phonological relations with Italo-Celtic. Maybe Stanislav Grigoriev's suggestions about middle bronze age influences from Siberia in central Europe are not completely nonsense, unconventional as they may be (or indeed are). In any case the deduction of the Corded Ware from cultures to the east is very problematic, too, and linguistically the split of the above mentioned R1a continuum postdated the split of Proto-Italo-Celtic from the rest, which would make a copper age arrival, at the same time or even earlier than Baden-Vucedol, unlikely.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Balto-Slavic was not impacted by Gedrosia, and R1a is hardly found in the most Celtic places, the exceptions being explainable by late Viking influence. How both groups could be IE may perhaps be due to an early transition and contact zone that is no longer in existence. I could imagine that this was in central Asia.
@Rokus
ReplyDelete''Hard to say, because only a few IE traditions can be domonstrated as "universal", and even less of these traditions can be attested in archeology. For instance, how do you attest the old-IE belief that people descend from trees? Still this can be attested in Germanic and Indian mythology. However, at least in European IE societies it was a common practice to make sacrifices in marshes and lakes.
This would make the cow sacrifices in the fens of Drenthe (Netherlands), associated with the Swifterbant culture, fifth millenium BC, probably the oldest finds.
I'm afraid close to none of all IE traditions survived Christianity, thus probably making India the richest hotspot of contemporary IE traditions.''
There is nothing universal and the PIE is totally hypothetic and i only asked for the oldest surviving traditions......
@slumbery
''You only know for sure that a language is IE if you have it in written form from its own time. With that your question comes down to the question: what is the place where the oldest known IE words where written down and still have (at least partial) IE population. The answer for this is probably the Middle East, but this is not so revealing as you might think. ''
Hittite is a weak and corrupted IE tongue and there is no power which can demonstrate Veda was not in existence before 2000B.C. and vedic traditions are very deep and has roots in IVC which is one of the main reasons the old traditions survived in India.
@Jim and others if you have any questions on the Indo-European question then please go to this scholar-
http://new-indology.blogspot.in/
Good day.
"The tripartite thing sure survived"
ReplyDeleteAt least the IE obsession for having everything in three kinds was alien enough for non-IE culture (oriental christian, muslim) groups to still vehemently reject the Trinity. "If" indeed the IE legacy is recognized as "valid", since this issue may face some religious-political opposition.
BTW, next to the "wishing well", the mythological theme of a tree-origin for humans survives in Dutch expressions that relate character to the "kind of wood" a person is carved out of. The (partly romanized) Franks almost for sure derived their tribal name from the ash tree or the weapons being made of it, the ash being the supposed tribal tree of their istvaeonic origin. Several kinds of trees were worshipped. Strikingly, the oak wood statue Mannetje van Willemstad was found between the fossil roots of an oak tree dated 4500 BC, in the southern reaches of Swifterbant territory. Except for the old age, this cultural expression appears well inside the range of IE cultural expression. I am not aware of older examples having this particular context.
"The main conclusion is that the hypothesis of a steppe environment is more applicable for the Proto-Altaic population, whereas for Proto-Indo-Europeans a mountainous region seems more appropriate."
ReplyDelete"what is now really affecting the credibility of all Steppe hypotheses is the recognition that agricultural vocabulary was indeed part of PIE, and all what this implies to the supposed IE-identity of Yamnaya"
If PIE contains agricultural vocabulary then one possibility is IE were first farmers but a second possibility is they lived in a region *adjacent* to first farmers and traded with them.
However if they were originally foragers living adjacent to the first farmers then why weren't they swamped by first farmer expansion?
One plausible reason would be because they were living on terrain that wasn't well suited to the first farmer package like mountains.
So what mountains are adjacent to the first farmer core regions?
Picking one possibility for the sake of argument let's say it was parts of the Zagros-Taurus mountains that were adjacent to and traded with the first farmers on land that wasn't viable for first farmer expansion.
If you further suppose the PIE mountain foragers picked up the herding part of the neolithic package from the first farmers over time (or the whole package but adapting it to be animal-centric i.e 2/3 animals and 1/3 crops rather than 2/3 crops and 1/3 animals) then that might create the required dynamic.
Assuming a herding centric neolithic package could support a lower population density than the crop-centric package but a larger population density than foragers then after this assumed herding transition the first herders could expand separately from the first farmers into land that wasn't suitable for the first farmers.
Then if the expansion of the first herders arrived on the steppe at some point you'd think there might be a lull as they adapted to the different ecozone thereby creating a secondary heimat.
That's what seems most likely to me, primary heimat in the mountains adjacent to the first farmers, secondary heimat on the steppe (or one of multiple secondary heimats wherever they arrived at the juncture of two ecozones and had to sit and adapt a while).
@Grey
ReplyDelete''If PIE contains agricultural vocabulary then one possibility is IE were first farmers but a second possibility is they lived in a region *adjacent* to first farmers and traded with them.''
I'm going with the farmer origin and my candidate is South-Central Asia or you can say the area around Mehrgarh...
Good Times...
We might question at what height PIE speakers should have dwelled for being acquainted with a presumed "mountain" vocabulary. Is it imperative to imagine them on top of high mountains or a ridge, or would lesser geological structures be sufficient to have the same effect? For instance, accentuated landscapes are common all over Europe between Northern Portugal, the Ardennes and the Peloponeses. I suppose the people inmediately adjacent to these accentuated areas should also be equipped with such a vocabulary without the need to actually inhabit these areas.
ReplyDeleteAnother issue is the general absence of ejectives in IE languages. According to Everett at al. this might indicate a median elevation level of about 340 meter, while languages that feature ejectives would have a median elevatation of just over 600 meter. Such heights hardly pertain to the assumption of PIE speakers dwelling on high mountains or ridges! Only the Armenian language feature ejectives, the Caucasus being an island of ejective languages that might have influenced IE immigrants in the area rather than being close to a PIE heimat - or else more IE languages should have featured ejectives. Dybo's study is interesting, but less conclusive than some might hope for.
@Rokus
ReplyDeleteKindly tell us about your homeland theory....
Good Day.
R1a originated in India and not an intrusive element into India (this isnt the first time this was shown).
ReplyDeleteOne of the links of studies Dienekes posted there in fact is about how R1a and certain forum craze of linage betweeen IE and Y chromosome is wrong.
http://jolr.ru/article.php?id=105
Balanovsky is now well aware that R1a is not native to India. There's academic data to that affect about to be published, and he's seen it. You can e-mail him and ask if you like.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that this paper was written months before that data was available.