Re: [tied] Will East and West ever meet?

On Sat, 20 Oct 2001 10:03:51 -0700 (PDT), george knysh
<gknysh@...> wrote:

>--- Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv@...> wrote:
>> Yes, but Mallory is talking about the *genesis* of
>> the
>> Cucuteni-Tripolye culture itself, which shows
>> connections with Balkan
>> cultures such as Boian, *but also with Linear Ware*.
>
>*****GK: Which proves nothing about language of
>course.

Of course. No archaeological evidence _proves_ anything about
language.

>Just as the spread of agriculture (and
>cultural forms associated with it) from Anatolia
>cannot be equated with the expansion of IE speech.

Sure it can.

>> Another thing is that in the B-period,
>> Tripolye/Trypillja advances
>> into areas of modern Moldavia and Ukraine which were
>> indeed previously
>> occupied by LBK-folk. This puts LBK squarely in the
>> area that was
>> later to become the home of cultures like Serednyj
>> Stih.
>
>*****GK: The area of Ukraine and Moldavia into which
>TRIP spread had been empty of LBK for centuries.

Who were there then in the meantime?

>*****GK: Whatever the situation in the proto-Baltic
>and proto-Ugrofinnic areas of Eastern Europe, it
>remains that if any language had what it takes to
>become a "prestige language" in the area later
>associated with IE groups such as the proto-Greeks,
>proto-Armenians and proto-Indo-Aryans/Iranians/
>Nuristanis it would have been not LBK but that of the
>Trypilians (preceded by the Bog/Dnister culture which
>was also of "Danubian"

Danubian = LBK. Surely you mean Balkanic.

>>MCV: Telegin previously held that D-D originated in
>> the northern forest
>> area, as you claimed yourself one or two messages
>> ago ("Serednyj Stih
>> for its part develops to a large degree from the
>> Dnipro-Donetz culture
>> whose own antecedents are in the mesolithic cultures
>> of Eastern Europe
>> (and partly of the area close to the Baltic coast")
>
>*****GK: I got this last point ("and partly from
>etc..") not from Telegin but from a post on this
>forum. When Telegin talked about "the mesolithic
>cultures of Eastern Europe" he even then had in mind
>primarily those which occupied more southern areas.

I haven't read Telegin, but Mallory (In Search of.. p. 256) states:
"Here we can return to Dmitry Telegin's proposal that the
Dniepr-Donets culture can be included among a broad group of
Vistula-Dniepr sub-Neolithic cultures. These would include the Narva,
Valdai and Comp-pricked Ware cultures of Poland". P. 191: "The
physical type, the extended supine burial positioon, the continuity
with the preceding macro-microlithic industry, and similarities in
ceramic decoration with the Sub-Neolithic cultures of the northern
Forest Zone have all suggested a northerly origin within the Ukraine,
and the formeost authority on the culture, the Ukrainian archaeologist
Dmitry Telegin, assigns them to a broad cultural region that spanned
the Vistula in Poland southeast to the Dniepr".

>*****GK: In the first place there is no evidence that
>LBK contacted directly with ancestors of Surs'ka and
>Dnipro-Donetz. That would have been done by
>Bog-Dnister and then Trypilia. And in the second, and
>probably more important, place, just as the spread of
>agriculture from Anatolia into Europe did not mean
>that the local populations which adopted the new
>technology also adopted the language of its carriers
>(after all is that not the main point of the LBK
>hypothesis? That Danubian pre-agriculturals turned to
>agriculture but became PIE and not whatever the
>earlier farmers from the south were?)

The main point of the "LBK hypothesis" is that PIE was spoken in the
Balkans by the early agriculturalists there, and that the LBK
expansion from Hungary represents the split between non-Anatolian and
Anatolian Indo-European. This means that at least a part of the
Balkan complex (and this includes Tripolje and Bug-Dniestr) spoke PIE.
Whether there was a linguistic break between Anatolia and the Balkans
is a different matter. Personally, based on the close linguistic ties
between PIE and Etruscan, I'd say there was no break. But I strongly
disagree with Renfrew in calling the language of these Anatolian
farmers that crossed over to Europe "Proto-Indo-European". It's way
too early for that. A better term for now would be
"Proto-Indo-Tyrrhenian".

>== And note the
>corollary that in the case of Eastern Europe it's not
>even a case of turning to agriculture but just
>borrowing some elements of an agricultural way of life
>(ceramics for instance). So the incentive would be
>even less present. AS a matter of fact I am more
>inclined to think that if any LBK's or similar
>individuals entered the world of the northeast it is
>they who assimilated and not the reverse.The IE of the
>East cannot be demonstrated to derive from LBK. There
>is not even a probable argument for this.

I disagree. The argument is there, and it's credible. I would not
consider it proven (and perhaps it never will be), but it requires a
lot less assumptions than the argument that derives the IE of the West
from Serednyj Stih and other steppe cultures.