Why Would IE Wait?

"jdcroft" <jdcroft@...> wrote:
<<Regarding speculations regarding origins of agriculture and the
Indo-Europeans, I would suggest that we are confusing two separate events in
history. Firstly we have the origins of grain agriculture in the Middle East.
This movement of agriculture *was not* associated with PIE movements.>>

Absolutely right. In fact, early agriculture obviously spread with other
language groups in other places. E.g., the Near East and South East Asia.

<<By 6,200-5,800 BCE, a serious climatic reversal in the area of
aceramic agriculture... saw a number of inter-related trends...

This led to Andrew Sherratt's "Secondary Products Revolution", which,
although a development upon the first system of Primary Agriculture saw some
remarkable new techniques. Firstly these were ceramic cultures, the invention
of pottery allowing a variety of cooking and baking methods not present
before. These were cultures which saw the development of both yeast breads
and beer manufacture. Animal products other than meat were used,...[etc.]>>

So far, so good. BTW, ceramics were probably as important in surplus storage
and transport in trade.

<<Given the presence in PIE of such terms for plough and wheel, shows that
the spread of Indo-European cultures... occurred not
with the primary spread of agriculture (as proposed by Renfrew and
others), but after the Secondary Products revolution of 4,500-5,500 BCE
(depending in which parts of the world we are speaking).>>

NOT so logical on the dating of the language.

The Secondary Products revolution was ALREADY well on its way with the
dramatic spread of LBK (about 5700BC - 4500BC). In fact, Sherratt in his
"recantations" changed his mind about the LBK vats, theorizing that they did
not hold milk but beer malt. Nothing says that IE had to wait for the
secondary products revolution to end.

In LBK, you already have surpluses, population concentrations, animal
domestication technology, sophisticated ceramics, mesolithic acculturation
and a spread across Europe of technology and culture that outdoes anything in
European pre-history. In slightly later neolithic cultures on the Danube and
in the Ukraine you have strong evidence of core centers that spread
metallurgy, textiles, and new plant and animal domestication far eastward,
precisely in the direction we would expect IE to spread.

So, there's really no justification for your waiting till AFTER the Secondary
Products revolution for IE to spread. Why would it not spread ALONG WITH the
Secondary Products revolution - which had quite a unitary and dramatic spread?

The existence in *PIE (note the asterisk) of terms for the wheel and plow
bring up matters of the original semantics, the nature of early borrowing and
the fact that such linguistic dating is totally dependent on archaeology. If
these two words fell out of the sky on the exact C-14 date that the actual,
verified first and unprecedented wheel and plow, born full-bore out of
someone's neolithic brain, then there may be a case. Otherewise there is a
bit of speculation to this particular piece of paleolinguistics. (I don't
know how Piotr feels about this.)

In any case, the spread of IE takes all kinds of complex machinations after
the spread of agriculture - dependent on all kinds of transfer theories that
often just don't match the evidence.

And by "agriculture" I mean it in the big sense - food domestication and
production, dirt farming and husbandry, preservation and storage, markets and
trade. As opposed to some other places, in most of Europe, the Secondary
Products revolution spread at the same time as actual food production
technology.

Why would this dramatic mass conversion, depending so much on community and
language go on, and then have IE only start to spread afterwards? The answer
may be because 75 years ago we didn't know when agriculture arrived or how it
spread. And some of us may still be adhering to that old lack of knowledge
today.

Steve Long