Page 160 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

indo-european migration 979

to support a homeland in either India or on the shores migrations (that is, one that starts from current locations
of the Baltic Sea (because of the conservative nature of and tries to wind the clock backwards) throws up too
Lithuanian). many dead ends; in the current state of play most prefer
to start with a proposed homeland and trace putative
Models out-migrations.There are two popular models for Indo-
No matter where one places the homeland, there is an European origins that differ with respect to location,
expectation that its location should at least be congruent time, and means of expansion.
with the evidence of the archaeological record; that is,
there should be some form of concrete evidence of the The Neolithic Model
expansion of a language. A homeland at the North Pole Some associate the expansion of the Indo-Europeans
obviously fails the test because there was no one there to with the spread of agriculture, a mechanism of language
speak any language. Other solutions have localized the spread that has also been argued for the dispersal of
Proto-Indo-Europeans in regions where there is simply other major language families, including Austronesian,
no archaeological evidence that might suggest a move- Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, and the Bantu languages.
ment consistent with the historical distribution of the Farming entered Europe from Anatolia about 7000 BCE
Indo-Europeans, such as Scandinavia and the Baltic and passed through Greece and the Balkans both to the
region, Britain and Ireland, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, north and west across Europe, arriving at the Atlantic
Iran, India, and Xinjiang. All of these areas are not only and Baltic by about 4000 BCE.This model supports the
peripheral to the overall distribution of Indo-European notion of demic diffusion, that is, the massive although
groups, they also lack any evidence whatsoever for a gradual movement of people with a more productive
major out-migration that might be equated with Indo- economy into areas earlier occupied by people with a
European expansions. less productive economy (namely, hunter-gatherers),
It is all the more ironic, then, that although the arrival whom the newcomers absorb culturally and linguisti-
of each Indo-European group in its historical seat (the cally. Some argue that enormous language families can
Celts in Ireland, Latin speakers in Italy, Indo-Aryans in only be explained by such massive cultural change. The
India) might appear to be a good starting place for back- process is seen to have taken many generations and the
tracking to the Indo-European homeland, no dates for emphasis, at least for southeastern and central Europe,
any of those arrivals have yet been determined. Instead, has been on population replacement, generally by peace-
archaeologists are confronted with a series of windows ful farmers. The attraction of this model is that it intro-
of possible intrusions that may span up to four thousand duces a very powerful mechanism to explain how a
years, as every new horizon of ceramic type, tools, or bur- language family could spread over such a vast area and
ial is (generally unconvincingly) associated with a poten- extinguish all previous languages.
tial invasion of Indo-European speakers.There is simply But the model also has its critics. Many do not be-
no region where there is an archaeological smoking gun lieve population movement is responsible for the arrival
—evidence for an invasion so massive that it must be of agriculture in northern and western Europe; they pos-
associated with the arrival of the Indo-Europeans. The tulate a process of acculturation, the local hunter-gatherers
appearance of the Celts in Ireland has been set at any- adopting agriculture from their neighbors, and so the
time between 4000 and 250 BCE, while the evidence for mechanism for language dispersal is not so compelling
the arrival of the Indo-Aryans in India is so ambiguous for the periphery of Europe. And when it comes to ex-
that many Indian scholars have argued that the Indo- plaining the Indo-Europeans of Asia (who occupied an
Europeans have always been there (though these schol- area at least equal to that of Europe), the earlier pres-
ars do not explain how they could have spread elsewhere ence of agriculture there, which appears to be unasso-
from India). A retrospective approach to Indo-European ciated with the origins of agriculture in Anatolia, forces