The Indo-Europeans: Archeological Problems

Abstract

appeared in Paris in 1961 a book by P. Bosch-Gimpera entitled Les IndoEuropeens, problames archeologiques, which was a French translation by R. Lantier from the Spanish, published in Mexico several years earlier. The book has 283 pages and ten maps. It covers not merely the origin problem, but pursues the Indo-European story up to the Roman times. It is a survey of much that had been said by linguists and archeologists in the course of about 60 years on the Indo-European mother tongue, language relationships, homelands, development and migrations of separate Indo-European groupsa survey of remarkable fluency. The book is not a precise account of archeological developments, but rather a summing up of many hypotheses. It certainly will stir archeologists and linguists and will give a new stimulus to reexamine the aging Indo-European homeland problem. In this lies its value. Bosch-Gimpera's general conclusions on the birth, homelands and early development of the Indo-European cultures are as follows: (1) The embryo of the Indo-Europeans lies in Mesolithic Europe; languages in the Mesolithic period must have formed a general substratum giving birth to the Indo-European, the Finno-Ugrian, the Rhaetian and Basque linguistic families. (2) The formation of several Indo-European groups occurred in the early Neolithic, reaching back to the 5th millennium. These are manifested by the birth of the linear culture and by another culture located between Poland and the Black Sea. (The author probably has in mind the North Pontic neolithic culture and assumes its westward spread over Poland, which is not established in archeology.) (3) In the third millennium the process of crystallization of the culture reached a stage of maturity. The author sees Danubian infiltration in the Balkans and in the Apennine Peninsula. With the or other movements are to be connected the appearance of early Greeks in Greece, and of Luvians and Hittites in Anatolia. (4) The Funnel-necked Beaker culture of the third millennium in northern Europe between Denmark and Poland must also have been Indo-European. (5) The Ponto-Caucasian group of the third and second millennia formed an early Indo-Iranian bloc, part of which spread to the Near East. Its northern branch, the people of the Pontic steppes, spread westward,