Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

----- Original Message -----

From: Marc Verhaegen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Friday, August 11, 2000 1:00 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Gimbutas.

Renfrew may be right that Anatolian farmers colonised Europe agriculturally (LP), but that doesn't mean they spoke IE.

You think IEs in the Balkan took over agriculture from people in Anatolia & then colonised Europe?

 

Renfrew thinks they did speak PIE already in Anatolia, and that the first Neolithic arrivals in Greece were IE. I agree with what John says and what most archaeologists seem to believe about Linear Pottery: "They developed in situ from a process of neolithicisation of pre-existing mesolithic cultures." There is enough cultural discontinuity between Starchevo and LP despite all the similarities to make this hypothesis acceptable. I suppose the LP-makers were originally riverside dwellers who were expert at exploiting woodlands and the resources of river valleys, and had the good fortune to live in areas in which the southern farmers had little direct interest.

 

Even if contacts with the Anatolian-derived farmers changed those people's way of life and had an impact on their genetic constitution, their language survived.

Not impossible of course, but the close relationship with Uralic suggests IE came from the N or E rather than SE (but the Black Sea then was still a much smaller water).

"Close relationship" is an overstatement. The IE/Uralic relationship is a mere possibility and I wonder how anybody could assess its depth on linguistic evidence (I know I'm risking a remonstration from Glen if he's tuned in). But I'm open to suggestions as regards the genealogy of the Danubian Mesolithic populations. Maybe they had arrived from the steppe a couple of millennia before they became Neolithicised -- I just don't know.

 

That [the BBs] came from Spain is what used to be believed, but Sherrat (though he's apparently wrong in his domesticated horses at Dereivka) says (I've read later confirmations of this) that CW came from Ukraine 3000 BC to the Low Countries = Rhine delta 2800 BC, where it changed in BB (schematically - details are very complicated), then split north to Brittain and south to the Rhone valley & delta ca.2500 BC, where it split into an Iberian branch & an Italian branch. That's the main reason why I think CW = Germanic & Balto-Slavic perhaps, and BB = Celto-Italic. It would imply Italic came from what is now France, not from the East.

 

The origin of the BBs (I mean the people, not the beakers as such -- oh, this clumsy terminology!) remains a mystery. They certainly interacted and mixed with the CW culture, but whether they represent a local transformation that began in the Low Countries (as indeed suggested by some datings) is just a matter of speculation at present. New findings will probably clarify things -- fortunately, as I said, there's a lot of interest at present in European archaeology. The geographical spread (almost all over Central and Western Europe) of the BB phenomenon makes its association with a single linguistic group difficult to defend. If I find any useful refs concerning the BB debate I'll post them.

 

Piotr