Iberian Urnfield?
From: Rick McCallister
Message: 58971
Date: 2008-06-02
I found this interesting and fodder for a nice
friendly polemical discussion and free-for-all.
"Iberian Language" Wikipedia
European hypothesis: a recent theory, links the
arrival of Basques/Aquitani and Iberians to the
Pyrenees and the Iberian peninsula with the arrival of
the urnfield culture.
All I know about Urnfield is that it's a mode of
burial from Central Europe till about 700 BCE and some
see it as a precursor to the Celts
On the Wikipedia map, I did notice a spur into Iberia
that does correspond to Iberan territory
My questions
1. Any chance Urnfeld is a pre-Celtic culture that got
wiped out with the expansion of the Celts? And that
only the "tail" of it survived in Iberia?
2. If so, could it be responsible for Vennemann's
"Vasconic" subtrate in Germanic? --which then raises
the question of whether or not there is shared lexicon
between Basque and Iberian and how much
3. Conversely, could Urnfeld in Iberian have been the
precursor of IE? i.e. the Western advance edge of IE
that Douglas Kilday has speculated about? If so, could
that be responsible for some of the IE-looking
vocabulary in Basque?