Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins
 | von Colin Renfrew
ISBN: 0521386756 |
A Little More Balance, Please!
For those who prefer their IE ancestors waving bloody battle-axes as they horse across Eurasia, instead of pushing plows and herding cows, this book is not congenial reading. Renfrew identifies the "wave of advance" of agriculture into Central Europe from Asia Minor as the foundational event in the spread of IE languages. This puts the time of origin back beyond 4000 bce, possibly even to 7000 bce. The battle-ax gang was a later development, an offshoot, dating to around 2600 bce. As Renfew points out, pastoral nomadism requires the pre-existance of more settled agriculture.Some of what Renfrew has to say is a reaction against those who imagine prehistory as a sort of Conan the Barbarian playground, full of tribal migrations and thrusts. It is possible to support Renfrew's ideas in the main, without denying that various warlike surges took place. The question is, do we attribute the root of the languages we speak to the transient nomads, or to the people who hung on, before and after? There is more to this book than this one issue, but this seems to be the hot one as far as some other reviewers are concerned.
Immobilist Ideology
A recent edition of "British Archaeology" noted that the ideological prejudice against the idea of population movements among British archaeologists had gotten to the point where some postgraduate student would soon come up with a paper 'proving' that the first humans in Britain weren't immigrants at all, but purely indigenous, symbolically transformed reindeer. Renfew is already well along that road; in this volume he tortures (and/or massively ignores) two centuries of linguistic research in an attempt to argue that as soon as no literate observers are present the basic mechanisms of historical change are completely different. This fairy-tale of peaceful farmers who, once there, never move, and of languages which remain perfectly static for 3000 years, is a stain on the reputation of a notable scholar. He should reconcile himself to the notion that people have feet -- and note that you can walk from Denmark to Greece in a summer.
Interesting but very speculative
Renfrew suggests that the ancient history of Europe may have been much more peaceful than previously supposed, with the Indo-European languages spreading from Anatolia along with the invention of agriculture, rather than being imposed by waves of martial nomadic horsemen from the steppes. But the book made me realize how little we know for sure about these ancient populations -- Renfrew's theories (like those of his colleagues) seem to be largely speculation on the basis of the few physical and linguistic remnants that survive.
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