Alexander Stolbov
writes:
Mark, thank you for the detailed explanation of your position. Now I see your statements
clear. Still I don't understand well why is it so
important for you to make PIE balancing on the border of forest and steppe? What
does your conception win (or not lose) due to this?
To tell you the truth, Alexander, I
don't entirely see the importance myself. Mostly, I'm following the standard
model, and attempting to see why one group would become the masters of the
steppe, while another would take over the Northern European Forest. To have them
succeed so well in both environments, it seems you have to have them in both
places at once at some point during unity.
The facile explanation is they were
exploiting the resources of both forest and steppe simultaneously at time when
neither alone was sufficient to provide the standard of living they enjoyed when
using both. I'm not equipped to cite those specific things such
an inter-habitat lifestyle would involve.
One thought that has been
percolating for the last few weeks is that the steppe-culture was to a certain
extent a 'perversion'. I'm thinking of the 'wolves' you read about here and
there, where adolescent males (14-21 or so) essentially lived among themselves
in "wolf-packs", following a very wild (and romantic) lifestyle free of the
burdens of wives and children and community responsibility. Sending out your
teenage boys to the rough-tough life on the open range, and having them pass by
home only now and again is a time-tested way to maintain fine, fat herds of
livestock. By their economic importance, they are allowed their own rules --
when among themselves, and even when home among the womenfolk and little ones.
My thinking here is very
incomplete, and my tentative conclusions are based on a dangerously
inadequate command of the literature, but I'm saying I think the PIEs
simultaneously maintained themselves in and based their material culture
on the exploitation of two separate ecologies. Transhumance, to use the
fancy word, was a function of the wolf-packs, the teenage boys.
Anyway. Were someone to come up
with a model as compelling and thoroughly documented as the one
Gimbutas provided with her kurgan-model, one that allowed the Baden
Culture to be the PIE homeland -- and also successfully addresses the objections
raised to a deeper date by the Sherrats, I'd probably leap on board. Such a
model would still encompass Kiev, but as the eastern outlier (fully sharing
the innovations of the steppe, including the domestication of the
horse).
Mark.