Glen asked
> It seems that I think that people moved counter-clockwise
> around the Black Sea (that is, from the Euxine event onward)
> and you seem to think that people moved clockwise. Would
> there be any archaeological finds in Turkey showing
> movement either way?
Yes Glen there are. In fact there is evidence of movements from both
directions after the Black Sea event of Ryan and Pitman. At first
though the movements continued for a while to go in a south-north
direction. The EB I and II Yortan culture of Central WestAnatolia
seems to have influenced the building of Troy I and spread from there
into Bulgaria, Macedonia and up the Vardar Moravia Gap. In the east
of Anatolia, influences of the Zagros region are discernable at the
earliest stages of the Maikop cultures in Pontic Transcaucasia.
Then in the EBIII period the cultural influences seem to have
travelled in a reverse direction. From about 2,300 BCE Maikop
cultural influences seem to have determined the flowering of the
chieftain-type culture of Alaca Huyuk, which is the culture which
underlays the Kaskan area during the Hittite period of the Middle
Bronze Age. From the West we have a movement of cultures starting
from Roumania with the Usatova culture, producing a wave of peoples
moving across Anatolia over the next couple of centuries. This wave
of immigrants seems to have been fairly small, but they had big
effects. Troy II, Yortan and Beycultestan were all burned.
Archaeologists have long proposed that this wave was te coming of the
Anatolians, particularly of the Luwians, as it spread from the
Dardanelles to Cilicia - all areas in which Luwian languages were
later recorded.
There is a problem with the development of the other members of the
Anatolian family - Hittite/Neshili and Palaite. The problem is that
neither of these languages are well attested archaeologically.
This has led some archaeologists to suggest that they may have come
with the Maikop-Alaca Huyuk wave around the other end of the Black
Sea, as this is the only archaeological incursion that comes even
remotely near the areas in which Pailaite and Hittite were later
spoken. Another theory is that there was an earlier pre-EBIII slow
dissemination of Anatolian languages over the Bosphorus before the
coming of the Luwians. These people, adopting the Central
Cappadocian early Bronze culture, could have been displaced by the
movement of Luwians and thus carried Hittite and Palaite Anatolian
languages eastwards.
Another explanation is that the movement of the people from the
Bosphorus to Cilicia was not Indo-European at all, but was in fact an
incursion of the Tyrrhenians. They certainly were later found in the
north west of this area, if the associations of Tyrsenoi/Troas/Teresh
found in the LBIII period are anything to go by. Alternatively they
were a sub-stratum of the Luwian wave, just as Hattic was a
substratum of the Hittite/Neshili language.
There is much evidence that this was the case. Leonard Palmer
originally thought he detected a Luwian presence in pre-Greek Greece,
but there is a good alternative explanation for this. The coming of
the Luwian wave seems to have had huge effects, displacing refugee
groups to other locations. The Phylakopi culture of Cyprus, for
instance, shows extremely close associations with the earlier
Anatolian cultures of Cilicia and were probably a wave of refugees
fleeing the "Luwians". Similarly the settlements of Lerna in the
Pelopponesse, and a number of locations in the Cyclades in the
Aegean, show close cultural affinities with the previous cultures of
Western Anatolia, suggesting a movement of refugees fleeing across
the Aegean. This may have resulted in the appearance of Tyrrhenian
cultural imports in this area amongst the people later described by
the Greeks as Pelasgian. If this is so, then, as linguistics seems
to indicate, that much of the difference between the Anatolian
languages can be explained as being due to the fact that they had
different linguistic sub-strata. Luwian seems to have had a
Tyrrhenian sub-strata, Hittite/Neshili a Hattic one, and Palaite a
third - possibly Proto-Hurrian? or even Kaskan?
Glen that is about as much as we can infer from the archaeology. The
linguistics I leave up to you. But hey, are not you the fellow who
keeps saying that linguistics is not a part of culture, and so
cultural movements from the archaeological record have nothing to do
with movements of language?
Warm regards
John