"Dean_Anderson" wrote:
<<Now, now. No need to mention Atlantis, etc. Especially when it seems
you haven't read beyond this newgroup and found the arguments within
the discipline.>>
Pleeze. The reason it seems to you that I "haven't read beyond this newgroup
and found the arguments within the discipline" is because I am saying things
you are probably unfamiliar with. If the discussion is "India as IE
homeland" and such, there is quite a bit more to that "discipline" than I
think you realize.
<<Actually horses figure prominently in the debate by people like Witzel,
Meadows... well, actually the list is rather long and consists of many of the
mainstream scholars. It's a central point.>>
That's because Witzel et al (Lord knows what zooarchaeologist Richard H.
Meadows really has to say about it) are dealing with the consequences of
trying to force an essentially 19th Century theory into the facts presented
by 21st Century archaeology. AND that's the only reason it's an issue at
all. (And BTW when you say "horse" you should know what you mean is the
domesticated horse.)
The connection between the domesticated horse and a "proto-IE language" is
not an archaeological concept. The connection was made by linguists a while
ago and then followed by certain schools of archaeologists (sometimes, as in
the cases of Kossina and Gimbutas, with a vengeance). But the archaeology
that once easily supported the horse idea has changed and not just in India.
The validity of that linguistic connection can be questioned on numerous
grounds, only one of which is that "horses" and things like horses existed
for hundreds of thousands of years before horse domestication, IE or India.
Which might essentially mean that horse words would not be particularly
helpful in dating *PIE or locating it. And make the debate about horses in
India meaningless.
Now the reason that you think that horses are important is because the
Mallory-Gimbutas-Witzel school of paleolinguistics seems to be carrying the
media torch in this Great Vedic Debate. If that side of the debate was being
handled by classic Anglo-American school processual archaeologists (like
Collis, Whittier or Sherratt) there would be no debate. Because there would
be NO "archaeological" acceptance of the location of *PIE unless there was
actual written evidence of PIE. Such a position of course gets no headlines
on the BBC home wire.
An equally untantalizing to the media position is that IE languages spread by
way of one of the most singular events in Eurasian history and that is the
spread of "agriculture" - plant and animal domestication - AND the
substantial cultural and economic transformation that can be PROVEN to have
accompanied it.
The diffusion of this know-how, and the social and cultural transformation
that accompanied it, seems very much like a powerful unitary event of
sufficient geographic scope to support the spread of a language family like
IE (or other language families, for that matter) across an extensive area of
diverse populations and environments. It would also seem to create the need
for a common language as a medium by which that technology could spread.
(E.g., English and computers.)
Note that "agriculture" here does not refer to farming or even the
domestication of a particular species. It seems no coincidence that multiple
plant and animal domestication first occurred in the same places around the
same time. Domestication is essentially the genetic alteration of wild
species by selective breeding. In the manner of V. Gordon Childe, we can
accurately describe the spread of domestication as the spread of a technology
(and today we call it bio-technology.)
And of course, all of these "civilizations" and "urban centers" were made
possible by the spread of this technology. Not by any specific seeds or cows
or horses, but by the know-how itself, adapted as needed. Few other events
in human history have had the effect of plant and animal domestication.
Now when we corrolate this event (also called the neolithic revolution) to
the spread of IE languages (along with other language groups elsewhere), the
domestication of the horse becomes a mere drop in the bucket along side of
all the other species that were domesticated, cultivated and adapted from
place to place as the local environment and population required. (E.g,
aurochs in northern Europe, goats in the south, horses on the steppes, water
buffalo in south Asia.)
So, going back to "the discipline" you referred to, my own reaction is that
the horse proves nothing about the original location of the reconstructed
language, *PIE, even if they find a whole corral of Harrapan horses. Horses,
wheat, alcoholic beverages, etc., are just part of a bigger picture, and
domesticated horses actually arrive too late to have much say about it.
As a matter of fact, I'm actually hoping that they find lots of very early
Indic horses, if the Mallory school has been relying on that kernel, because
it just shows the fundamental weakness in the whole horse = IE machination.
(Although I did note that Piotr matter-of-factly dodged that bullet by simply
suggesting horses could have been imported from Central Asia before the
coming of I-A.)
<<The best place to begin is with Witzel's article called "Authochthonous
Aryans" online at EJVS.>>
To understand the bigger issues here, it pays to read Renfrew's Archaeology
and Language (with a caution that Renfrew has never really done linguistics
the service of understanding what it was saying, which has sent him more
recently flying off to Nostratic and the idea that everything is
"authochthonous").
For a linguistically sound and neolithically based view of IE's origins, I
believe Miguel Carrasquer Vidal's pages are still up on the web. Reading
Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans will give you good idea of why the
Indigenous Indus is causing such problems for this point of view. Pay
particular attention to how Mallory handles the fact that archaeological
dating of the wheel, horse, etc., might change. He didn't even anticipate
potential location changes. Note also that though Mallory calls his datings
and locatings linguistic, they are actually often totally contingent on
archaeology, and therefore extremely vulnerable to any such changes in
datings and locations. That's the trouble they're running into in India.
I'll try to adddress some of the other things you bring up at another time.
Steve Long