Summary: Ecotones and Persistent Ethnolinguistic Frontiers
Language frontiers did not universally coincide with ecological frontiers or natural geographic barriers, even in the tribal world, because migration and all the other forms of language expansion prevented that. But the heterogeneity of languages—the number of languages per 1,000 km2— certainly was affected by ecology. Where an ecological frontier separated a predictable and productive environment from one that was unpredictable and unproductive, societies could not be organized the same way on both sides. Localized languages and small language territories were found among settled farmers in ecologically productive territories. More variable languages, fuzzier dialect boundaries, and larger language territories appeared among mobile hunter-gatherers and pastoralists occupying territories where farming was difficult or impossible. In the Eurasian steppes the ecological frontier between the steppe (unproductive, unpredictable, occupied principally by hunters or herders) and the neighboring agricultural lands (extremely productive and reliable, occupied by rich farmers) was a linguistic frontier through recorded history. Its persistence was one of the guiding factors in the history of China at one end of the steppes and of eastern Europe at the other.26
SMALL-SCALE MIGRATIONS, ELITE RECRUITMENT, AND LANGUAGE SHIFT
Persistent ecological and migration-related frontiers surrounded the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppes. But the spread of the Indo-European languages beyond that homeland probably did not happen principally through chain-type folk migrations. A folk movement is not required to establish a new language in a strange land. Language change flows in the direction of accents that are admired and emulated by large numbers of people. Ritual and political elites often introduce and popularize new ways of speaking. Small elite groups can encourage widespread language shift toward their language, even in tribal contexts, in places where they succeed at introducing a new religion or political ideology or both while taking control of key territories and trade commodities. An ethnohistorical study of such a case in Africa among the Acholi illustrates how the introduction of a new ideology and control over trade can result in language spread even where the initial migrants were few in number.27
The Acholi are an ethnolinguistic group in northern Uganda and southern Sudan. They speak Luo, a Western Nilotic language. In about 1675, when Luo-speaking chiefs first migrated into northern Uganda from the south, the overwhelming majority of people living in the area spoke Central Sudanic or Eastern Nilotic languages—Luo was very much a minority language. But the Luo chiefs imported symbols and regalia of royalty (drums, stools) that they had adopted from Bantu kingdoms to the south. They also imported a new ideology of chiefly religious power, accompanied by demands for tribute service. Between about 1675 and 1725 thirteen new chiefdoms were formed, none larger than five villages. In these islands of chiefly authority the Luo-speaking chiefs recruited clients from among the lineage elders of the egalitarian local populations, offering them positions of prestige in the new hierarchy. Their numbers grew through marriage alliances with the locals, displays of wealth and generosity, assistance for local families in difficulty, threats of violence, and, most important, control over the inter-regional trade in iron prestige objects used to pay bride-prices. The Luo language spread slowly through recruitment.28 Then an external stress, a severe drought beginning in 1790–1800, affected the region. One ecologically favored Lou chiefdom—an old one, founded by one of the first Luo charter groups—rose to paramount status as its wealth was maintained through the crisis. The Luo language then spread rapidly. When European traders arrived from Egypt in the 1850s they designated the local people by the name of this widely spoken language, which they called Shooli, which became Achooli. The paramount chiefs acquired so much wealth through trade with the Europeans that they quickly became an aristocracy. By 1872 the British recorded a single Luo-speaking tribe called the Acholi, an inter-regional ethnic identity that had not existed two hundred years earlier.
Indo-European languages probably spread in a similar way among the tribal societies of prehistoric Europe. Out-migrating Indo-European chiefs probably carried with them an ideology of political clientage like that of the Acholi chiefs, becoming patrons of their new clients among the local population; and they introduced a new ritual system in which they, in imitation of the gods, provided the animals for public sacrifices and feasts, and were in turn rewarded with the recitation of praise poetry—all solidly reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European culture, and all effective public recruiting activities. Later Proto-Indo-European migrations also introduced a new, mobile kind of pastoral economy made possible by the combination of ox-drawn wagons and horseback riding. Expansion beyond a few islands of authority might have waited until the new chiefdoms successfully responded to external stresses, climatic or political. Then the original chiefly core became the foundation for the development of a new regional ethnic identity. Renfrew has called this mode of language shift elite dominance but elite recruitment is probably a better term. The Normans conquered England and the Celtic Galatians conquered central Anatolia, but both failed to establish their languages among the local populations they dominated. Immigrant elite languages are adopted only where an elite status system is not only dominant but is also open to recruitment and alliance. For people to change to a new language, the shift must provide a key to integration within the new system, and those who join the system must see an opportunity to rise within it.29
A good example of how an open social system can encourage recruitment and language shift, cited long ago by Mallory, was described by Frederik Barth in eastern Afghanistan. Among the Pathans (today usually called Pashtun) on the Kandahar plateau, status depended on agricultural surpluses that came from circumscribed river-bottom fields. Pathan landowners competed for power in local councils (jirga) where no man admitted to being subservient and all appeals were phrased as requests among equals. The Baluch, a neighboring ethnic group, lived in the arid mountains and were, of necessity, pastoral herders. Although poor, the Baluch had an openly hierarchical political system, unlike the Pathan. The Pathan had more weapons than the Baluch, more people, more wealth, and generally more power and status. Yet, at the Baluch-Pathan frontier, many dispossessed Pathans crossed over to a new life as clients of Baluchi chiefs. Because Pathan status was tied to land ownership, Pathans who had lost their land in feuds were doomed to menial and peripheral lives. But Baluchi status was linked to herds, which could grow rapidly if the herder was lucky; and to political alliances, not to land. All Baluchi chiefs were the clients of more powerful chiefs, up to the office of sardar, the highest Baluchi authority, who himself owed allegiance to the khan of Kalat. Among the Baluch there was no shame in being the client of a powerful chief, and the possibilities for rapid economic and political improvement were great. So, in a situation of chronic low-level warfare at the Pathan-Baluch frontier, former agricultural refugees tended to flow toward the pastoral Baluch, and the Baluchi language thus gained new speakers. Chronic tribal warfare might generally favor pastoral over sedentary economies as herds can be defended by moving them, whereas agricultural fields are an immobile target.
Migration and the Indo-European Languages
Folk migrations by pioneer farmers brought the first herding-and-farming economies to the edge of the Pontic-Caspian steppes about 5800 BCE. In the forest-steppe ecological zone northwest of the Black Sea the incoming pioneer farmers established a cultural frontier between themselves and the native foragers. This frontier was robust, defined by bundles of cultural and economic differences, and it persisted for about twenty-five hundred years. If I am right about persistent frontiers and language, it was a linguistic frontier; if the other arguments in the preceding chapters are correct, the incoming pioneers spoke a non—Indo-European language, and the foragers spoke a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language. Selected aspects of the new farming economy (a little cattle herding, a little grain cultivation) were adopted by the foragers who liv
ed on the frontier, but away from the frontier the local foragers kept hunting and fishing for many centuries. At the frontier both societies could reach back to very different sources of tradition in the lower Danube valley or in the steppes, providing a continuously renewed source of contrast and opposition.
Eventually, around 5200–5000 BCE, the new herding economy was adopted by a few key forager groups on the Dnieper River, and it then diffused very rapidly across most of the Pontic-Caspian steppes as far east as the Volga and Ural rivers. This was a revolutionary event that transformed not just the economy but also the rituals and politics of steppe societies. A new set of dialects and languages probably spread across the Pontic-Caspian steppes with the new economic and ritual-political system. These dialects were the ancestors of Proto-Indo-European.
With a clearer idea of how language and material culture are connected, and with specific models indicating how migrations work and how they might be connected with language shifts, we can now begin to examine the archaeology of Indo-European origins.
PART TWO
The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes
CHAPTER SEVEN
How to Reconstruct a Dead Culture
The archaeology of Indo-European origins usually is described in terms that seem arcane to most people, and that even archaeologists define differently. So I offer a short explanation of how I approach the archaeological evidence. To begin at the beginning, surprisingly enough, we must start out in Denmark.
In 1807 the kingdom of Denmark was unsure of its prospects for survival. Defeated by Britain, threatened by Sweden, and soon to be abandoned by Norway, it looked to its glorious past to reassure its citizens of their greatness. Plans for a National Museum of Antiquities, the first of its type in Europe, were developed and promoted. The Royal Cabinet of Antiquities quickly acquired vast collections of artifacts that had been plowed or dug from the ground under a newly expanded agricultural policy. Amateur collectors among the country gentry, and quarrymen or ditch diggers among the common folk, brought in glimmering hoards of bronze and boxes of flint tools and bones.
In 1816, with dusty specimens piling up in the back room of the Royal Library, the Royal Commission for the Preservation of Danish Antiquities selected Christian J. Thomsen, a twenty-seven-year-old without a university degree but known for his practicality and industry, to decide how to arrange this overwhelming trove of strange and unknown objects in some kind of order for its first display. After a year of cataloguing and thinking, Thomsen elected to put the artifacts in three great halls. One would be for the stone artifacts, which seemed to come from graves or sediments belonging to a Stone Age, lacking any metals at all; one for the bronze axes, trumpets, and spears of the Bronze Age, which seemed to come from sites that lacked iron; and the last for the iron tools and weapons, made during an Iron Age that continued into the era of the earliest written references to Scandinavian history. The exhibit opened in 1819 and was a triumphant success. It inspired an animated discussion among European intellectuals about whether these three ages truly existed in this chronological order, how old they were, and whether a science of archaeology, like the new science of historical linguistics, was possible. Jens Worsaae, originally an assistant to Thomsen, proved, through careful excavation, that the Three Ages indeed existed as distinct prehistoric eras, with some qualifications. But to do this he had to dig much more carefully than the ditch diggers, borrowing stratigraphic methods from geology. Thus professional field archaeology was born to solve a problem, not to acquire things.1
It was no longer possible, after Thomsen’s exhibit, for an educated person to regard the prehistoric past as a single undifferentiated era into which mammoth bones and iron swords could be thrown together. Forever after time was to be divided, a peculiarly satisfying task for mortals, who now had a way to triumph over their most implacable foe. Once chronology was discovered, tinkering with it quickly became addictive. Even today chronological arguments dominate archaeological discussions in Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, a chief problem preventing Western archaeologists from really understanding steppe archaeology is that Thomsen’s Three Ages are defined differently in the steppes than in western Europe. The Bronze Age seems like a simple concept, but if it began at different times in places very close to each other, it can be complicated to apply.
The Bronze Age can be said to begin when bronze tools and ornaments began to appear regularly in excavated graves and settlements. But what is bronze? It is an alloy, and the oldest bronze was an alloy of copper and arsenic. Arsenic, recognized by most of us simply as a poison, is in fact a naturally occurring whitish mineral typically in the form of arsenopyrite, which is frequently associated with copper ores in quartzitic copper deposits, and is probably how the alloy was discovered. In nature, arsenic rarely comprises more than about 1% of a copper ore, and usually much less than that. Ancient metalsmiths discovered that, if the arsenic content was boosted to about 2–8% of the mixture, the finished metal was lighter in color than pure copper, harder when cool, and, when molton, less viscous and easier to cast. A bronze alloy even lighter in color, harder, and more workable was copper and about 2–8% tin, but tin was rare in the ancient Old World, so tin-bronzes only appeared later, after tin deposits were discovered. The Bronze Age, therefore, marks that moment when metalsmiths regularly began to mix molten minerals to make alloys that were superior to naturally occurring copper. From that perspective, it immediately becomes clear that the Bronze Age would have started in different places at different times.
THE THREE AGES IN THE PONTIC-CASPIAN STEPPES
The oldest Bronze Age in Europe began about 3700–3500 BCE, when smiths started to make arsenical bronze in the North Caucasus Mountains, the natural frontier between the Near East and the Pontic-Caspian steppes. Arsenical bronzes, and the Bronze Age they signaled, appeared centuries later in the steppes and eastern Europe including the lower Danube valley, beginning about 3300–3200 BCE; and the beginning of the Bronze Age in central and western Europe was delayed a thousand years after that, starting only about 2400–2200 BCE. Yet, an archaeologist trained in western Europe may commonly ask why a Caucasian culture dated 3700 BCE is called a Bronze Age culture, when this would be the Stone Age (or Neolithic) in Britain or France. The answer is that bronze metallurgy appeared first in eastern Europe and then spread to the west, where it was adopted only after a surprisingly long delay. The Bronze Age began in the Pontic-Caspian steppes, the probable Indo-European homeland, much earlier than in Denmark.
The age preceding the Bronze Age in the steppes is called the Eneolithic; Christian Thomsen did not recognize that period in Denmark. The Eneolithic was a Copper Age, when metal tools and ornaments were used widely but were made of unalloyed copper. This was the first age of metal, and it lasted a long time in southeastern Europe, where European copper metallurgy was invented. The Eneolithic did not appear in northern or western Europe, which skipped directly from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Experts in southeastern Europe disagree on how to divide the Eneolithic internally; the chronological boundaries of the Early, Middle, and Late Eneolithic are set at different times by different archaeologists in different regions. I have tried to follow what I see as an emerging inter-regional consensus among Russian and Ukrainian archaeologists, and between them and the archaeologists of eastern Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and the former Yugoslavia.2
Before the Eneolithic was the Neolithic, the later end of Thomsen’s Stone Age. Eventually the Stone Age was divided into the Old, Middle, and New Stone Ages, or the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic. In Soviet archaeology and in current Slavic or post-Soviet terminology the word Neolithic is applied to prehistoric societies that made pottery but had not yet discovered how to make metal. The invention of ceramics defined the beginning of the Neolithic. Pottery, of course, was an important discovery. Fire-resistant clay pots made it possible to cook stews and soups all day over a low fire, breaking down complex starches and proteins so that they were easier to di
gest for people with delicate stomachs—babies and elders. Soups that simmered in clay pots helped infants survive and kept old people alive longer. Pottery also is a convenient “type fossil” for archaeologists, easily recognized in archaeological sites. But Western archaeologists defined the Neolithic differently. In Western archaeology, societies can only be called Neolithic if they had economies based on food production—herding or farming or both. Hunters and gatherers who had pottery are called Mesolithic. It is oddly ironic that capitalist archaeologists made the mode of production central to their definition of the Neolithic, and Marxist archaeologists ignored it. I’m not sure what this might say about archaeologists and their politics, but here I must use the Eastern European definition of the Neolithic—which includes both foragers and early farmers who made pottery but used no metal tools or ornaments—because this is what Neolithic means in Russian and Ukrainian archaeology.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 15
