Re: [tied] Will East and West ever meet?

On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 07:33:04 -0700 (PDT), george knysh
<gknysh@...> wrote:

>--- Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv@...> wrote:
>>[GK]:
>> The LB Pottery culture which
>> >PG posits as a starting point only reached the
>> >westernmost areas of contemporary Ukraine, and
>> petered
>> >out with no discovered archaeological continuations
>> >there (if one believes Ukrainian archaeologists and
>> >why not?). It has no direct links to
>> >Trypilja-Cucuteni(Tripolye)
>>
>> This is debatable. Links between Trypilja and LBK
>> are often mentioned (e.g. by Mallory in EIEC: "In origin,
>> the [Tripolye] culture is seen as a projection of southeast
>> European agriculturalists to the east and
>> its closest genetic connections, seen particularly
>> in ceramics, are with Neolithic cultures of the Balkans (Boian,
>> Hamangia) and the Linear Ware culture").
>
>*****GK: The Balkan connection is
>indubitable.TRIP.(Trypilja/Tripolye)spread north and
>east therefrom. But what is missing is any indication
>of a direct connection between LB and TRIP. The
>stratigraphy of Ukrainian sites consistently shows
>that TRIP. arrived in locations previously occupied by
>LB at its[TRIP.] B phase only, long after LB had
>vanished.*****

Yes, but Mallory is talking about the *genesis* of the
Cucuteni-Tripolye culture itself, which shows connections with Balkan
cultures such as Boian, *but also with Linear Ware*.

Another thing is that in the B-period, Tripolye/Trypillja advances
into areas of modern Moldavia and Ukraine which were indeed previously
occupied by LBK-folk. This puts LBK squarely in the area that was
later to become the home of cultures like Serednyj Stih.

> While they are not to be equated with
>> the Linear Ware
>> (LBK) culture to which they neighboured in the west,
>> they adopted
>> certain techniques (such as pottery) from their
>> western neighbours.
>> In fact, it is impossible to tell how far the
>> interactions between the
>> Neolithic "LBK'ers" and their Mesolithic or
>> Sub-Neolithic neighbours
>> went: certainly, in the course of having their wave
>> of advance peter
>> out, some LBK farmers must have moved into these
>> areas, without
>> succeeding in becoming technologically predominant
>> (perhaps because of
>> the different terrain and climatological conditions,
>> which prevented
>> an LBK-style economy to be effective there). A
>> certain demographic
>> influx from the more densely populated LBK area must
>> have continued to
>> occur even after the borderline between Neolithic
>> and Sub-Neolithic
>> had become firmly established. So in terms of genes
>> and pottery, the
>> LBK area can be seen as the "donor", while the
>> eastern Sub-Neolithic
>> area is the "recipient".
>
>******GK: The point however is that this is not
>reflected in the archaeology. There is nothing in the
>pottery styles,

Not only the pottery styles, which were adopted from the LBK area, but
the mere presence of pottery itself is without a shadow of a doubt
archaeological evidence for influence from the LBK area.

>microlithic industry, or burial practices of the Dnipro-Donetz

I was talking about the Comb-pricked Ware and other cultures of
Poland, the Baltic lands, Byelorus and Russia, not the D-D.

>population which
>indicates "donor" lines of influence from the LBK
>area, nor even from the Bug-Dnister culture which was
>closer to them territorially.******
>
> We have no proof that this
>> was also the case
>> in terms of language, but it cannot be excluded
>> either.
>
>******GK: In that case nothing can be excluded, but
>then we leave the realm of scientific inquiry
>altogether.****

The point is that archaeology, unfortunately, tells us nothing about
language, which makes these archaeological discussions only marginally
relevant. I assign much greater weight to linguistic factors: e.g.
it's nice to have archaeological confirmation that the
Proto-Austronesians originated in Taiwan, but the fact that it so
happened is proven already by linguistic arguments alone. In the case
of PIE, we are not so lucky.

Since in the case of the Eastern European/Baltic forest area cultures
we are talking about poorly known cultures, and at most a couple of
hundred people, it's hard to prove how big the influence of LBK was,
and easy to imagine how little it would have taken for LBK'ese (i.e.
PIE) to become the prestige language in the area.

> When the
>> Dnepr-Donets culture emerged from this eastern
>> Sub-Neolithic area
>> southwards to the "steppe" zone, the language they
>> brought with them
>> may well have been an eastern peripheral dialect of
>> LinearBandKeramikese ("proto-Satem-IE").
>
>******GK: The most recent research (published by
>Telegin in "Arkheologia"(1999) indicates that the
>Dnipro-Donetz culture emerged overwhelmingly from
>previous local "mesolithic" (to use his terminology)
>groups. I.e. from groups already "in place".

Telegin previously held that D-D originated in the northern forest
area, as you claimed yourself one or two messages ago ("Serednyj Stih
for its part develops to a large degree from the Dnipro-Donetz culture
whose own antecedents are in the mesolithic cultures of Eastern Europe
(and partly of the area close to the Baltic coast"). If D-D
originated locally instead, that does not make a big difference. The
same acculturation that I assume took place between LBK and
Mesolithic/Sub-Neolithic populations along the Polish frontier, will
also have taken place along LBK's Moldavian-Ukrainian borders.