Re: [tied] The IE homeland

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

From: george knysh

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 7:16 AM

Subject: [tied] The IE homeland

> ... At least Renfrew was more logical than the proponents of a Balkan or Danubian
Urheimat. He did not assume a language shift with the arrival of agriculture into the Balkans from Anatolia.

 

For a discussion of a possible discontinuity due to the "mixed" origin of the Alföld and LBK cultures, see:

 

http://www.comp-archaeology.org/Bandkeramik.htm

 

> As to the Balkanists. I see at least two problems here. One is that of explaining the diversity of IE languages in a situation where the farming communities spreading north, northwest and northeast are all issuing from the same center, and are maintaining
territorial contact with each other. This may perhaps be eased by an assumption similar to that of the Gimbutas/Mallory view, viz., the interaction of colonists with a variety of mesolithic substrate elements. What works for Mallory would certainly work for the Danubians/Balkanists.

 

Don't forget the effect of time (the dispersal of even the non-Anatolian subfamily starts ca. 5000 BC under this scenario) and space (the later LBK was distributed from eastern France to western Ukraine, with the degree of territorial contact perhaps sufficient to permit the spread of some innovations and cultural loans within a dialectal continuum but certainly insufficient to prevent increasing differentiation).

 

> The other (and in my view insuperable) problem is that neither LBK nor Trypilia can explain the rise of the Indo-Iranian (and perhaps of other) IE speeches in the vast areas east of the Dnipro r. The assumptions required for this are simply not convincing.

 

I, for one, don't date the "Indo-Europeanisation" of the steppes to the LBK times but to the period just before and after 3000 BC. I do not insist that the earlier local cultures east of the Dnieper were IE-speaking.

 

Piotr