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Post by Admin on Jul 21, 2018 18:40:45 GMT
The Yamnaya horizon was the first more or less unified ritual, economic, and material culture to spread across the entire Pontic-Caspian steppe region, but it was never completely homogeneous even materially. At the beginning it already contained two major variants, on the lower Don and lower Volga, and, as it expanded, it developed other regional variants, Eastern Indo-European branches the spirit of the domestic hearth was female (Hestia, the Vestal Virgins), and in Indo-Iranian it was male (Agni). Western Indo-European mythologies included strong female deities such as Q,Ieen Magb and the Valkyries, whereas in Indo-Iranian the furies of which is why most archaeologists are reluctant to call it the Yamnaya. A higher percentage (80%) of males than any other Yamnaya region. But many broadly similar customs were shared. In addition to kurgan graves, wagons, and an increased emphasis on pastoralism, ar-chaeological traits that defined the early Yamnaya horizon included shelltempered, egg-shaped pots with everted rims, decorated with comb stamps and cord impressions; tanged bronze daggers; cast flat axes; bone pins of various types; the supine-with-raised-knees burial posture; ochre staining on grave floors near the feet, hips, and head; northeastern to eastern body orientation (usually); and the sacrifice at funerals of wagons, carts, sheep, cattle, and horses. The funeral ritual probably was connected with a cult of ancestors requiring specific rituals and prayers, a connection between language and cult that introduced late Proto-Indo-European to new speakers. The most obvious material division within the early Yamnaya horizon was between east and west. The eastern (Volga-Ural-North Caucasian steppe) Yamnaya pastoral economy was more mobile than the western one (South Bug-lower Don). This contrast corresponds in an intriguing way to economic and cultural differences between eastern and western Indo- European language branches. For example, impressions of cultivated grain have been found in western Yamnaya pottery, in both settlements and graves, and Proto-Indo-European cognates related to cereal agriculture were well preserved in western Indo-European vocabularies. But grain imprints are absent in eastern Yamnaya pots, just as many of the cognates related to agriculture are missing from the eastern Indo-European lan-guages.' Western Indo-European vocabularies contained a few roots that were borrowed from Afro-Asiatic languages, such as the word for the war were male Maruts. Eastern Yamnaya graves on the Volga contained a ration of the feminine gender as a newly marked grammatical category in the dialects of the Volga-Ural region, one of the innovations that defined Proto-Indo-European grammar.
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Post by Admin on Jul 23, 2018 18:32:48 GMT
Did the Yamnaya horizon spread into neighboring regions in a way that matches the known relationships and sequencing between the IndoEuropean branches? This also is a difficult subject to follow archaeologically, but the movements of the Yamnaya people match what we would expect surprisingly well. First, just before the Yamnaya horizon appeared, the Repin culture of the Volga-Ural region threw off a subgroup that migrated across the Kazakh steppes about 3700-3500 BCE and established itself in the western Altai, where it became the Afanasievo culture. The separation of the Afanasievo culture from Repin probably represented the separation of Pre-Tocharian from classic Proto-Indo-European. Second, some three to five centuries later, about 3300 BCE, the rapid diffusion of the early Yamnaya horizon across the Pontic-Caspian steppes scattered the speakers oflate Proto-Indo-European dialects and sowed the seeds of regional differentiation. After a pause of only a century or two, about 3100-3000 BCE, a large migration stream erupted from within the western Yamnaya region and flowed up the Danube valley and into the Carpathian Basin during the Early Bronze Age. Literally thousands of kurgans can be assigned to this event, which could reasonably have incubated the ancestral dialects for several western Indo-European language branches, including Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic. After this movement slowed or stopped, about 2800-2600 BCE, late Yamnaya people came face to face Figure 13.2 Culture areas in the steppes between the Volga and the Altai at the time of the Afanasievo migration, 3700-3300 BCE. conflict that prompted some groups to move across the Ural River eastward into the Kazakh steppes (figure 13.2). I say a conflict because of the extraordinary distance the migrants eventually put between themselves and their relatives at home, implying a strongly negative push. On the other hand, connections with the Volga-Ural Repin-Yamnaya world were maintained by a continuing round of migrations moving in both directions, so some aspect of the destination must also have exerted a positive pull. It is remarkable that the intervening north Kazakh steppe was not settled, or at least that almost no kurgan cemeteries were constructed there. Instead, the indigenous horse-riding Botai-Tersek culture emerged in the north Kazakh steppe at just the time when the Repin-Afanasievo migration began. The specific ecological target in this series of movements might have been the islands of pine forest that occur sporadically in the northern Kazakh steppes from the Tobol River in the west to the Altai Mountains in the east. I am not sure why these pine islands would have been targeted other than for the fuel and shelter they offered, but they do seem to correspond with the few site locations linked to Afanasievo in the steppes, and the same peculiar steppe-pine-forest islands occur also in the high mountain valleys of the western Altai where early Afanasievo sites appeared. s In the western Altai Mountains broad meadows and mountain steppes dip both westward toward the Irtysh River of western Siberia (probably the route of the first approach) and northward toward the Ob and Yenisei rivers (the later spread). The Afanaslevo culture appeared 111 this beautiful setting, ideal for upland pastoralism, probably around 37003400 BCE, during the Repin-late Khvalynsk period.9 It flourished there until about 2400 BCE, through the Yamnaya period in the Pontic-Caspian steppes. . . The Altai Mountains were about 2000 km east of the Ural RIver frontier that defined the eastern edge of the early Proto-Indo-European world. Only three kurgan cemeteries old enough to be connected with the Afanasievo migrations have been found in the intervening 2000 km of steppes. All three are classified as Yamnaya kurgan cemeteries, although the pottery in some of the graves has Repin traits. Two were on the Tobol, not far east of the Ural River, at Ubagan I and Verkhnaya Alabuga, possIbly an initial stopping place. The other, the Karagash kurgan cemetery, was found 1000 km east of the Tobol, southeast of Karaganda in central Kazakhstan. Karagash was on the elevated green slopes of an isolated mountain spur that rose prominently above the horizon, a very visible landmark near Karkaralinsk. The earthen mound of kurgan 2 at Karagash was 27 m in diameter. It covered a stone cromlech circle 23 m in diameter, made of oblong stones 1 m in length, projecting about 60-70 cm above the ground. Some stones had traces of paint on them. A pot was broken inside the southwestern edge of the cromlech on the original ground surface, before the mound was built. The kurgan contained three graves in stone-lined cists; the central grave and another under the southeastern part of the kurgan were later robbed. The lone intact grave was found under the northeastern part of the kurgan. In it were sherds from a shell-tempered pot, a fragment of a wooden bowl with a copper-covered lip, a tanged copper dagger, a copper four-sided awl, and a stone pestle. The skeleton was of a male forty to fifty years old laid on his back with his knees raIsed, onented southwest, with pieces of black charcoal and red ochre on the grave floor. The metal artifacts were typical for the Yamnaya horizon; the stone crom-lech, stone-lined cist, and pot were similar to Afansievo types. Directly east of Karagash and 900 km away, up the Bukhtarta River valley east of the Irtysh, were the peaks of the western Altai and the Ukok plateau, where the first Afanasievo graves appeared. The Karagash kurgan IS unlikely to be a grave of the first migrants-it looks like a Yamnaya-Afanasievo kurgan built by later people still participating in a cross-Kazakhstan mculation of movements-but it probably does mark the Imt"l route, smce routes in long-distance migrations tend to be targeted and re-used.
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Post by Admin on Jul 19, 2019 20:40:05 GMT
At the Moscow conference Paul Haggerty from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig pre-sented a defense of Bouckaert et al. and its Anatolian homeland hypothesis. He welcomed the paper as a definitive science-based rejection of the steppe theory of Indo-European origins. Haggerty argued that Bouckaert et al. presented “the data” in a quantified and objective man-ner, that their chronological and geographic conclusions were strongly supported under the thousands of different iterations that generated them, and that, in spite of small flaws in their phylogeny, it would be irresponsible to reject such a strongly supported quantitative argu-ment drawn from linguistic data across the Indo-European languages, in favor of an impres-sionistic steppe-origin theory that he admitted he had never liked.I argued that the Anatolian geographic root in Bouckaert et al., the new element that mer-ited publication in Science, was made inevitable by three constraints in their model: first,Anatolian was the first and oldest branch to split in their phylogeny; second, the Anatolian languages were assigned a priori to Anatolia by their mapping constraints, which did not per-mit any language to be mapped outside its known range (also limiting Celtic to the British Isles); and third, the mechanism of spread was a series of short-distance random walks con-strained only to avoid sea crossings, and assuming that the world was otherwise a flat plane with no geographic barriers. On this plane, the modern geographic distribution and number of Indo-Iranian languages pulls the optimal origin point to the south, under an assumption of in-cremental random movements as the mechanism of spread; and the greater difficulty assigned to sea crossings makes a center north of the Black Sea less likely than Anatolia, south of the Black Sea; and again, Anatolian a priori was assigned to Anatolia. I thought that the Anatolian root was the product of their methods.Our minor debate in Moscow was simultaneously and subsequently upstaged by a much more widely disseminated series of online essays that began to appear on September 4, 2012, one week before the Moscow conference began, at the website Geocurrents (http://geocurrents.info),created by Stanford University’s Martin Lewis, a geographer, and Asya Pereltsvaig, a linguist.This series of web posts, as of this writing in November 2012, contains 30 referenced articles, each with a different criticism of Bouckaert et al., presenting a new flaw or error every 2–3 days for two months. Rarely has a Science paper been exposed to such a withering and wide-ranging barrage of point-by-point criticisms from a professional source. A few titles convey the tone of the series: “The malformed language tree of Bouckaert and colleagues”, “Atkin-son’s nonsensical maps of Indo-European expansion”, “103 errors in mapping Indo-European languages” [five separate posts], “The misleading and inconsistent language selection in Bouckaert et al.”, “The hazards of formal geographic modeling”, “Absolute dating and theRomance problems on the Bouckaert/Atkinson model”, “Shared innovations are more impor-tant than shared retentions”, “Linguistic phylogenies are not the same as biological phyloge-nies”, “Do languages spread solely by diffusion (no)?”, “The consistently incorrect mapping of language differentiation in Bouckaert et al.”, “Mismodeling Indo-European origin and expan-sion: Bouckaert, Atkinson, Wade, and the assault on historical linguistics”, and, following the same chronological argument I articulated, “Wheel vocabulary puts a spoke in Bouckaert etal’s wheel”. Even if you do not agree with every point, it is difficult to retain any faith in the Bouckaert et al. model after reading these 30 detailed, incisive essays, many of which present important and persuasive insights. In the end, it is the reconstructed PIE vocabulary that is the entire reason for an anthro-pologically-oriented archaeologist such as I am to pursue Indo-European origins. If an archae-ologist found a 1000word vocabulary inscribed on a tablet from a time and place so remote that no written language was known there, his/her discovery would be regarded as an exciting window into a society previously known only through the labored interpretation of its burial mounds and pottery. That is more or less how I regard the possibilities contained in the recon-structed PIE vocabulary, with the added interest that this was a language that generated daughters that were adopted from China to Scotland during the Copper and Bronze Ages, pe-riods we know very well archaeologically. We are already studying the social and economic changes that accompanied the Indo-European expansion; we just haven’t looked at the ar-chaeological data from that perspective. This is because we don’t know where to look, and we have rarely tried to look for regional waves of cultural shift towards new symbols of power and prestige that align with the political and cultural institutions referenced in the PIE vo-cabulary. The possibility of a fruitful conjunction between archaeological and linguistic evi-dence therefore is compelling in this case, but it will require archaeologists to accept recon-structed linguistic data into analyses of Bronze Age cultural and political dynamics. Their re-luctance to do so reflects real concerns: the political misuses of the past that such an accep-tance might encourage, as well as their uncertainty about the reality of reconstructed roots.But all sources of evidence about human history are partial, fragmentary, and difficult to interpret. Artifacts are not particularly eloquent about many important aspects of human be-havior, and ancient texts are partial, class-biased, gender-biased, sometimes retain anachro-nistic characters and expressions, and are interpreted differently by different trained readers.The reconstructed PIE vocabulary shares many of the same problems, but that does not dis-qualify it as a source of information about the past. If we can narrow the chronological focus for PIE to about 4500–2500 bc and the geographic focus to the Pontic-Caspian steppes, then the reconstructed vocabulary can be useful as a guide to behaviors that might not be expressed, ormight be expressed in a puzzling way archaeologically. To give just one example on the cul-tural side, Clackson’s 2007 textbook contained a long and fascinating discussion of the vo-cabulary for family relations in PIE, which he reviewed in the manner of an ethnographer and concluded that “they” were patrilineal in inheritance rules and patrilocal in residence rules for married couples, a long-known feature of PIE life. Archaeologically, most Yamnaya burial mounds in the Volga-Dnieper steppes were built over the graves of adult males. Clackson also discussed the implications of the fact that PIE-speakers placed people in the same grammatical category as domesticated animals, while wild animals were discussed in a different category.Archaeologically, wild animal bones are very rare in Yamnaya grave sacrifices or settlements.On the political side, mortuary feasts and celebrations associated with the burial under kur-gans of exceptional individuals are documented in Yamnaya and earlier Pontic-Caspian steppe archaeology, and these might align with the reconstructed PIE vocabulary for feasting,gifts, songs of praise, guest-host relationships, and patron-client relationships. The recon-structed PIE vocabulary is the prize, and we should not be distracted from it by pessimism about the limitations of linguistic evidence. We can assign more than 1000 roots to PIE, and we have only begun to use them to understand the people who spoke them.
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Post by Admin on Jul 20, 2019 18:45:56 GMT
The Ringe et al. phylogeny and migrations out of the Pontic-Caspian steppes I accept the Pontic-Caspian steppe homeland for Proto-Indo-European, and a date for PIE(post-Anatolian) in the late fourth and early third millennia bc, see Fig. 1. The strongest geo-graphic indicator is the fact that PIE and Proto-Uralic were geographic neighbors; they shared core-vocabulary roots (name, water) and even pronoun paradigms. Proto-Uralic was a lan-guage of forest-zone foragers, unfamiliar with domesticated animals except dogs. The sharing between PIE and Proto-Uralic, which is well documented by both Uralic and Indo-European linguistic specialists (Koivulheto 2001; Janhunen 2001, 2000; Kallio 2001; Ringe 1997; Salminen 2001), suggests a PIE homeland bordering the forest zone. PIE also exhibits borrowings with Caucasian language families, particularly with a language ancestral to Kartvelian, suggesting a location adjoining the Caucasus (Gamkrelidze and Ivanov 1995). The Pontic-Caspian steppes lie directly between the Caucasus and the Uralic forest zone, a plausible and even probable lo-cation for PIE given these internal clues from shared loans and/or inheritances with neighbors.The additional constraints that PIE speakers were familiar with herding, agriculture, andwagons (shown in PIE vocabulary) and with honeybees and horses (Carpelan and Parpola2001) and that the daughter branches must have differentiated many centuries before 2000 bc(shown by Anatolian, Greek, and Indic inscriptions in the 2nd millennium bc) limits PIE to a window of time (maximally 4500–2500 bc) and geographic location (in the Pontic-Caspian steppes between the forest zone and the Caucasus west of the Urals). Does the archaeology of this region show evidence for migrations outward? Fig. 1. The Proto-Indo-European homeland and the first three migrations,paralleling the phylogeny of Ringe et al. 2002 Here I point to archaeological evidence for three migrations, or more accurately periods of out-migration, from the Pontic-Caspian steppes that can be seen as corresponding with the first three branching events in the phylogeny of Ringe et al. (2002). The Ringe et al. phylogeny was based on the application of quantitative methods derived from cladistics, like Bouckaertet al., but included phonological and morphological traits, in addition to shared cognates, and was overseen by an Indo-European historical linguist. The parallel between predicted (byRinge et al.) and observed directions and sequence of movement provides archaeological sup-port for the Pontic-Caspian steppe homeland hypothesis, in addition to the advantages that it is in the right place (between Proto-Uralic and Proto-Kartvelian, with honeybees and horses)at the right time (after wheeled vehicles were invented), with actual wagon burials as part of its material culture.To be explicit, the first three splits in the Ringe et al. phylogeny are 1. Anatolian, 2. To-charian, and 3. a complicated root that engendered Italic and Celtic, and possibly Germanic,the root of which remained unresolved in the Ringe et al. phylogeny. Germanic showed some archaic traits that suggested a phylogenetic root at about the same time as Italic and Celtic, but also exhibited other traits that suggested a later rooting, at about the same time as Balto-Slavic.Archaeologically, an earlier root would seem to match the archaeological evidence better. If the PIE homeland was in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, root 1 should be reflected in a migration that began in the Pontic-Caspian steppes and moved into or toward Anatolia. Root 2 should detach in a migration to the east, toward the Tarim Basin, where Tocharian was later spoken.Root 3 should be a complex series of movements to the west, from the steppes into Europe,toward regions that could plausibly have been connected later with Celtic, Italic, and Ger-manic origins. Pre-Italic, Pre-Celtic, and pre-Germanic should not be conceived as languages but rather were regional phases in language evolution, possibly millennia of language evolu-tion for Pre-Germanic, preceding the later formation of Proto-Italic, Proto-Celtic, and Proto-Germanic. Archaeological migrations matching these requirements are identified below.I should note that after the third split in the Ringe et al. phylogeny, Proto-Indo-European can no longer be said to exist. Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic might have shared some areal linguistic similarities prior to the formation of Proto-Italic and Proto-Celtic, but the phylogeny suggests that regional and geographic isolation between these branches began soon after the migrations that separated them from late PIE. After these movements occurred, PIE differentiated into daughter languages in Anatolia, SE Europe, the Pontic-Caspian steppes, and central Europe that were largely isolated from each other through geographic separation and were quickly altered by interaction with regionally distinct substrate languages outside the steppes. It is impossible to connect all of the branching events in the Ringe et al. phylogeny with archaeo-logical migrations out of the PIE homeland because after the third branching event the PIElanguage community no longer existed, and the homeland was a distant memory — perhaps aplace referenced in songs and folklore, but essentially forgotten.
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Post by Admin on Jul 22, 2019 18:15:30 GMT
1. The first split in the Ringe et al. phylogeny is Anatolian. To arrive in Anatolia from the Pontic-Caspian steppes, the direction of movement should have been south, through either southeastern Europe or the Caucasus. The oldest archaeological evidence for a post-Neolithic migration from the Pontic-Caspian steppes into neighboring regions is a movement into southeastern Europe about 4400–4200 bc, linked chronologically and geographically with the sudden abandonment and burning of hundreds of tell settlements in the lower Danube valley and eastern Bulgaria about 4400–4200 bc, with associated rapid changes in pottery, metal-lurgy, mortuary customs, ritual figurines, and other behaviors (Fig. 2). During the same period Balkan copper bracelets, beads, and rings were obtained by small-scale steppe elites in the lower-Dnieper and middle Volga steppes, seen in graves at Skelya, Novodanilovka, Petro-Svistunovo, and Khvalynsk, among others; and a chain of similar copper-rich graves, equipped with similar shell beads and flint blades and bifacial lanceolate points, extended through the Dniester steppes (Koshary, Kainari) to Suvorovo in the lower Danube steppes and onward to eastern Bulgaria (Devnya), with a separate path of movement extending into Transylvania(Decea Muresului) and eastern Hungary (Csongrad) (Telegin et al. 2001; Rassamakin 2002). One of the richest of the intrusive cemeteries, a cluster of five well-outfitted burials, was discovered at Giurgiuleşti, at the southern tip of Moldova, north of the Danube delta (Bicbaev 2009). Fig. 2. The first migration, 4200–4000 bc, of the Suvorovo-type immigrants into the Danube valley, Transylvania, and the Dobruja A horse was sacrificed above the grave of an adult male armed with gold-trimmed javelins at Giurgi-uleşti. A human bone gave a date of 4490–4330 bc (Ki-7037, 5560 ±80 BP).While it is difficult to identify the role of the Suvorovo-type steppe migrants in the col-lapse of agricultural tell settlements in Balkan Thrace and the lower Danube valley (primary cause? after the fact?), it is clear that steppe people of the Suvorovo type moved into the lower Danube valley and eastern Bulgaria at about the same time as the collapse, probably bringing horses with them. The total number of intrusive cemeteries is not large, but the subsequent pe-riod saw the adoption of a more mobile, less settled economy particularly in the Balkan up-lands, where no settlements of any kind can be identified for 500 years after the collapse of the tell societies. The new pastoral economy, probably using horse-mounted herders who could manage two times larger herds than pedestrian herders, was familiar and well-suited to the immigrants from the steppes. At this moment of wrenching change for the local people, the immigrants’ familiarity with social mechanisms for managing social relations at a distance,such as patron-client and guest-host relationships, and their promotion of these relationship sat public feasting events featuring praise poetry for the sponsor of the feast (all indicated in PIE roots), gave them the ability to absorb local people into a system suitable for a more mo-bile, pastoral economy. Pastoral institutions for maintaining social relations at a distance, cele-brated at boastful public feasts, could have been a vector for language shift. The Cernavoda 1 culture that followed the abandonment of the tells in the lower Danube valley, together with the archaeologically undocumented shepherds who grazed their sheep on the abandoned tells in the Balkan uplands between 4200–3500 bc, could have been the dis-tant antecedents of the Anatolian branch, the first split in the Ringe et al. 2002 phylogeny. They would have spoken a language detached from an early chronological stage (a millennium ear-lier than the next split) and a western geographic dialect in the evolution of PIE, consistent with the multiple archaisms retained uniquely in the Anatolian branch. Note that this migration is dated before wheeled vehicles were invented, perhaps the reason why Anatolian uniquely lacked the shared wheel vocabulary of later PIE. Troy I had a material culture closely linked to Balkan cultures such as Ezero, and the Anatolian branch could have become isolated in Anatolia,initiating the shift from Pre-Anatolian to Proto-Anatolian, with the movement of some Balkan people to the Troad during the Troy I era, 3000–2600 bc. Fig. 3. The second migration, 3300–2800 bc or later, of the Afanasievo-type immigrants into the western Altai Mountains. 2. The second split in the Ringe et al. phylogeny is Tocharian, requiring the second movement to depart from the Pontic-Caspian steppes toward the east. Tocharian retained PIE roots in its wheeled-vehicle vocabulary, and in other ways shared the innovations that definedall post-Anatolian IE languages, so the migration that separated Pre-Tocharian speakers from regular contact with the main body of PIE speakers must have occurred after wheeled vehicles were invented, probably after 3500 bc. The second archaeological migration from the Pontic-Caspian steppes meets these criteria, Fig. 3. A much-argued but widely accepted migration did occur, going from the Caspian-Ural steppes eastward across Kazakhstan to the western Altai Mountains about 3300–3000 bc (disregarding some earlier dates, now regarded as anomalous), creating the intrusive Afanasievo culture in the western Altai. The Afanasievo migrants seem to have introduced a pastoral economy, wheeled vehicles, horses, and an ac-companying new social order into mountain meadows formerly occupied by ceramic-making mountain foragers, some (many?) of whom probably were absorbed into the Afanasievo cul-ture. Afanasievo material culture exhibits typological, ritual, and economic parallels with Yamnaya, including Yamnaya kurgan grave types, a typical Yamnaya burial pose, Yamnaya-Repin ceramic types and decoration, and sleeved axes and daggers of specific Yamnaya types(Kubarev 1988; Chernykh, Kuz’minykh and Orlovskata 2004: Fig. 1.4). The Ural-Altai connec-tion seems to have been maintained at least sporadically after 2800 bc, because typological in-novations in the western steppes including later sleeved axe types and MBA Catacomb-style ceramic censers appeared in late Afanasievo graves in the western Altai. could have represented the antecedent population for the Tocharian languages later spoken in the Tarim Basin, an argument articulated by Mallory and Mair (Mallory and Mair 2000).
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