Odp: Danubian Urheimat

If an alternative to the traditional Urheimat is to be considered, the best candidate is, in my opinion, the Danubian theory, locating PIE west rather than north of the Black Sea.

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Piotr has alluded to this before. I've also read elsewhere of this. As I understand it, the PIE homeland is more or less into the western Carpathian curve, essentially modern Hungary and Transylvania. This would perhaps be the predecessors of the Baden culture (apparently the Tiszapolgar (4400-3700) and Bodrogkeresztur (4000-3600) Cultures), and its eastern relatives across the Carpathians via eastern Hungary (Tripolye, Cernvoda I). There does not seem to be any association with the Lengyel Culture (5000-3400) to the west of it, and the maps I see don't allow the LBK (Linear Ware / Linearbandkeramik ) culture to precede it either. The idea seems that the PIEs were not Kurgans, but rather, were kurganized by linguistically unrelated migrants from the east. Am I following the sequences right?

Provided you can maintain PIE unity for something approaching 3,000 years, this is possible; PIE in its earlier stages, then, would have been a small language located in a compact region, and relatively uninfluenced by adjacent languages. Franz-Josef-Land is too big for this. Alternatively, you have to reduce PIE to a single surviving line, with many daughter languages having suffered unrecorded births and deaths.

The problem, of course, is the Sherrat's 'secondary products revolution' and the associated IE words. That, and wheeled-vehicle terminology.

Anyway. Could Piotr elucidate further on his views? And perhaps correct any mistakes I've made in the archaeological/ethnographic sequences?

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I'm at present inclined to look for IE origins in the earliest Linear Pottery (and perhaps Körös) area on the Middle Danube, at a rather earlier date -- early enough for the Linear Pottery expansion in Europe (ca. 5500-4500 BC) to be effected by speakers of non-Anatolian IE. I have no opinion on whether IEs (with extreme speculativeness -- Proto-Anatolians) were involved in creating the Baden culture. It certainly shares many traits with the contemporary cultures of the southern Balkans, Greece and even Asia Minor and testifies at least to the diffusion of ideas and technologies -- perhaps also peoples and languages -- from the south. But along its northern periphery we have a mixture of Baden and post-Funnel Beaker elements, and the Funnel Beaker (TRB) culture of the 4th millennium BC was monolithically IE in my opinion (as were the earlier 'Late Danubian' cultures, e.g. Lengyel and Polgar, and the contemporary Michelsberg culture of western Germany, northern France and Belgium).

 

Under my scenario, the first IEs to reach Ukraine and Moldova were Central European farmers pushing their way along the Vistula, Bug and Dniester valleys and exploiting the loess belt north of the Carpathians. The IE-speaking pastoralists of the Pontic region represent a more recent cultural adaptation to the steppe environment. The linguistic ancestors of the satem speakers of the Balkans and Anatolia (and presumably also of the Greeks) arrived from the north Pontic region; the steppe was also the homeland of the Indo-Iranians, but not of the IEs in general. The people responsible for the Kurgan culture were IE, but not Proto-IE-speaking.

 

I fail to understand how Gimbutas's narratives can be taken seriously. There is no real evidence that the replacement of the Funnel Beaker culture of the European Plain with the Globular Amphora and Corded Ware cultures had anything to do with invations from the steppe, or indeed that the 'newcomers' were classic pastoral nomads. There are plough marks under some Corded Ware mounds and sickle blades as well as vessels containing cereal remains in some of the burials. Herding was just one of the subsistence strategies of those people; they were clearly semi-sedentary and practised only seasonal movement of flocks or herds. Kruk and Milisauskas (1999) list archaeological and palaeoecological arguments in favour of the theory that the shift towards cattle/sheep pastoralism was caused by local ecological factors -- anthropogenic changes (extensive clearing of forests) that had turned previously fertile, easily arable areas into forest-steppe and compelled the farming populations of the Plain to abandon their traditional economy.

 

Of course there were numerous small-scale population shifts, chaotic migrations and outbursts of warfare as sedentary farming gave way to transhumant agriculture-cum-pastoralism, but I can't see anything in the archaeological record that could be interpreted as the 'Kurganisation' of Europe by an advancing wave of steppe intruders. Actually, there is a current tendency among the archaeologists who study the latest phases of the European Neolithic to regard the southwestern coast of the Baltic as the source area of the Globular Amphora culture, and some of the oldest Corded Ware dates come from Germany -- the TRB heartland -- rather than from Eastern Europe.

 

Gimbutas's vision of a peaceful female-centred world of Old European farmers doesn't square very well with the fact that defensive enclosures, ditches and other fortifications are known already from Linear Pottery and Funnel Beaker sites. The collapse of the TRB culture certainly brought about a steep increase in the intensity of intergroup conflict and led to the 'militarisation' of the late Neolithic communities, but this social innovation can also be explained without assuming large-scale migrations of new peoples.

 

Whoever domesticated the horse, the earliest known evidence for wagons and wheels in Europe comes from Funnel Beaker sites (the Flintbeck ruts, the Bronocice wagon, solid oakwood wheels from Denmark) and precedes the crisis of that culture by several hundred years. As for Sherratt's 'secondary products revolution', it's evidently wrong to treat it as a single package of innovations. Cow-milking and even cheese production may have been practised already in the Early Neolithic; there is also evidence that the Linear Pottery people used castrated oxen for tasks such as pulling logs. The ratio of sheep to goats (20:1) and adult (68%) to immature (32%) sheep at typical TRB settlements in Poland are good indirect evidence of wool production.

 

Any details you'd like to discuss?

 

Piotr