Re: Deep Dates.

From: Mark Odegard
Message: 504
Date: 1999-12-09

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.