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

george knysh <gknysh@...> wrote:
<<The LB Pottery culture... has no direct links to
Trypilja-Cucuteni(Tripolye) and to the steppe cultures of southern
and eastern Ukraine.>>

And again:
<<But what is missing is any indication of a direct connection
between LB and TRIP. The stratigraphy of Ukrainian sites consistently
shows that TRIP. arrived in locations previously occupied by LB at
its[TRIP.] B phase only, long after LB had vanished.>>

But we'll read in Zvebebil and Lillie, Transition to Agriculture in
East Europe, in Rowe, Europe's First Framers (Cambridge 2000), p. 75:

[The transition to neolithic] was never completed within the idiom of
Bug-Dneister culture; instead they became a constituent element of
Cucuteni-Tripolye culture that replaced it..., together with
intrusive cultural elements, probably brought by THE MIGRATION OF
LINEARPOTTERY [LBK/LB] AND BOIAN culture groups. (Dergachev, et al.
1991, Zvelebil and Dolukhanov 1991)

So it would appear that not everyone agrees with George Knysh in his
absolute statement that there no "indication of a direct connection
between LB and TRIP." Perhaps he is unaware of this opposing opinion
or gives no credit to it.

One might think that this could happen because the author is only
considering "Ukrainian" Cucuteni-Tripolye sites and not the more
westerly ones where the time line between Tripolye and LBK and its
sucessors would not be quite so abrupt. The commonalities between
LBK and Cucuteni are hard to explain unless one posits that the
latter
reinvented agriculture and all the associated technologies.

But a look at the works cited by Zvelebil offers a better, wider
point. The mass of the material cultures of Tripolye, Dneiper-Donets
and "Sredni Stog" have no antecedents except in LBK and the spread of
neolithic culture from the region of Balkans and the Danube. The
earlier mesolithic cultures leave very little in terms of cultural
artifact. The vast majority of the cultural evidence comes from the
effects of neolithicization.

Unless one posits a native development of ceramics, plant
domestication, animal domestication, certain characteristic flint
technology and metalurgy, the origins are all clear. The evidence of
horse domestication (not horses) only occurs alongside of
domesticated cattle and caprines. Sedentary or pastoral agriculture
comes gradually and only after prolonged exposure to persistent
influence from the west and south.

As to whether a total change in lifestyle or transfer of so much
complex technology can be associated with a language change, it may
be difficult to see how it couldn't. It appears after all, that East
did meet West. In LBK and Tripolye.

Cerrtainly there is far more evidence suggesting the spread of a
pan-European language based on the introduction of food production,
then there is for Yamna in Holland. Steve Long