Kurgan hypothesis
Part of a series on |
Indo-European topics |
---|
The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory, Kurgan model, or steppe theory) is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the
The steppe theory was first formulated by
Gimbutas defined the Kurgan culture as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the
Recent genetics studies have demonstrated that populations bearing specific Y-DNA haplogroups and a distinct genetic signature expanded into Europe and South Asia from the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the third and second millennia BC. These migrations provide a plausible explanation for the spread of at least some of the Indo-European languages, and suggest that the alternative Anatolian hypothesis, which places the Proto-Indo-European homeland in Neolithic Anatolia, is less likely to be correct.[6][7][8][9][10]
History
Predecessors
Arguments for the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as steppe nomads from the Pontic–Caspian region had already been made in the 19th century by the German scholars,
The view of a Pontic origin was still strongly supported, including by the archaeologists V. Gordon Childe[15] and Ernst Wahle.[16] One of Wahle's students was Jonas Puzinas, who became one of Marija Gimbutas's teachers. Gimbutas, who acknowledged Schrader as a precursor,[17] painstakingly marshalled a wealth of archaeological evidence from the territory of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc that was not readily available to Western scholars,[18] revealing a fuller picture of prehistoric Europe.
Overview
When it was first proposed in 1956, in The Prehistory of Eastern Europe, Part 1, Gimbutas's contribution to the search for Indo-European origins was an
The mobility of the Kurgan culture facilitated its expansion over the entire region and is attributed to the
Kurgan culture
Cultural horizon
Gimbutas defined and introduced the term "Kurgan culture" in 1956 with the intention of introducing a "broader term" that would combine
Cultures that Gimbutas considered as part of the "Kurgan culture":
- Bug–Dniester (6th millennium)
- Samara (5th millennium)
- Khvalynsk (5th millennium)
- Dnieper–Donets (5th to 4th millennia)
- Sredny Stog(mid-5th to mid-4th millennia)
- Maikop–Deriivka(mid-4th to mid-3rd millennia)
- Yamnaya (Pit Grave): This is itself a varied cultural horizon, spanning the entire Pontic–Caspian steppe from the mid-4th to the 3rd millennium.
- Usatovo culture(late 4th millennium)
Stages of culture and expansion
Gimbutas's original suggestion identifies four successive stages of the Kurgan culture:
- Kurgan I, Seroglazovocultures.
- Kurgan II–III, latter half of the 4th millennium BC. anthropomorphic stone stelae of deities. Includes the Sredny Stog culture and the Maykop culture of the northern Caucasus.
- Kurgan IV or Ural to Romania.
In other publications[21] she proposes three successive "waves" of expansion:
- Wave 1, predating Kurgan I, expansion from the lower Volga to the Dnieper, leading to coexistence of Kurgan I and the .
- Wave 2, mid 4th millennium BC, originating in the Maykop culture and resulting in advances of "kurganized" hybrid cultures into northern Europe around 3000 BC (Globular Amphora culture, Baden culture, and ultimately Corded Ware culture). According to Gimbutas this corresponds to the first intrusion of Indo-European languages into western and northern Europe.
- Wave 3, 3000–2800 BC, expansion of the Pit Grave culture beyond the steppes, with the appearance of the characteristic pit graves as far as modern Romania, Bulgaria, eastern Hungary and Georgia, coincident with the end of the Trialeti culturein Georgia (c. 2750 BC).
Timeline
- 4500–4000: Early PIE. Sredny Stog, Dnieper–Donets and Samara cultures, domestication of the horse (Wave 1).
- 4000–3500: The Pit Grave culture (a.k.a. Yamnaya culture), the prototypical kurgan builders, emerges in the steppe, and the Maykop culture in the northern Caucasus. Indo-Hittite models postulate the separation of Proto-Anatolian before this time.
- 3500–3000: Middle PIE. The Pit Grave culture is at its peak, representing the classical reconstructed Satemization.
- 3000–2500: Late PIE. The Pit Grave culture extends over the entire Pontic steppe (Wave 3). The Corded Ware culture extends from the Rhine to the Volga, corresponding to the latest phase of Indo-European unity, the vast "kurganized" area disintegrating into various independent languages and cultures, still in loose contact enabling the spread of technology and early loans between the groups, except for the Anatolian and Tocharian branches, which are already isolated from these processes. The centum–satem break is probably complete, but the phonetic trends of Satemization remain active.
Further expansion during the Bronze Age
The Kurgan hypothesis describes the initial spread of Proto-Indo-European during the 5th and 4th millennia BC.[22] As used by Gimbutas, the term "kurganized" implied that the culture could have been spread by no more than small bands who imposed themselves on local people as an elite. This idea of PIE and its daughter languages diffusing east and west without mass movement proved popular with archaeologists in the 1970s (the pots-not-people paradigm).[23] The question of further Indo-Europeanization of Central and Western Europe, Central Asia and Northern India during the Bronze Age is beyond the scope of the Kurgan hypothesis, and far more uncertain than the events of the Copper Age, and subject to some controversy. The rapidly developing fields of archaeogenetics and genetic genealogy since the late 1990s have not only confirmed a migratory pattern out of the Pontic Steppe at the relevant time[6][7][8][24] but also suggest the possibility that the population movement involved was more substantial than earlier anticipated[6] and invasive.[24][25]
Revisions
Invasion versus diffusion scenarios (1980s onward)
Gimbutas believed that the expansions of the Kurgan culture were a series of essentially-hostile military incursions in which a new warrior culture imposed itself on the peaceful,
a process visible in the appearance of fortified settlements and hillforts and the graves of warrior-chieftains:The process of Indo-Europeanization was a cultural, not a physical, transformation. It must be understood as a military victory in terms of successfully imposing a new administrative system, language, and religion upon the indigenous groups.[27]
In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized the authoritarian nature of this transition from the egalitarian society centered on the nature/earth mother goddess (Gaia) to a patriarchy worshipping the father/sun/weather god (Zeus, Dyaus).[28]
J. P. Mallory (in 1989) accepted the Kurgan hypothesis as the de facto standard theory of Indo-European origins, but he distinguished it from an implied "radical" scenario of military invasion. Gimbutas's actual main scenario involved slow accumulation of influence through coercion or extortion, as distinguished from general raiding shortly followed by conquest:
One might at first imagine that the economy of argument involved with the Kurgan solution should oblige us to accept it outright. But critics do exist and their objections can be summarized quite simply: Almost all of the arguments for invasion and cultural transformations are far better explained without reference to Kurgan expansions, and most of the evidence so far presented is either totally contradicted by other evidence, or is the result of gross misinterpretation of the cultural history of Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe.[29]
Alignment with Anatolian hypothesis (2000s)
In the 2000s, Alberto Piazza and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza tried to align the Anatolian hypothesis with the steppe theory. According to Piazza, "[i]t is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Anatolia."[30] According to Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza (2006), the Yamna-culture may have been derived from Middle Eastern Neolithic farmers who migrated to the Pontic steppe and developed pastoral nomadism.[31] Wells agrees with Cavalli-Sforza that there is "some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East."[32] Nevertheless, the Anatolian hypothesis is incompatible with the linguistic evidence.[33]
Anthony's revised steppe theory (2007)
The Kurgan culture was so broadly defined that almost any culture with burial mounds, or even (like the Baden culture) without them could be included.[34]
He does not include the Maykop culture among those that he considers to be Indo-European-speaking and presumes instead that they spoke a Caucasian language.[35]
See also
- Hamangia culture
- Varna culture
- Animal sacrifice
- Ashvamedha
- Shaft tomb
- Revised Kurgan theory
- Germanic substrate hypothesis
Genetics
- Archaeogenetics of Europe
- Haplogroup R1a
- Lactase persistence
Competing hypotheses
- Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses
- Armenian hypothesis
- Anatolian hypothesis
- Out of India theory
- Paleolithic continuity theory
References
- ^ Mallory 1989, p. 185, "The Kurgan solution is attractive and has been accepted by many archaeologists and linguists, in part or total. It is the solution one encounters in the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse.".
- ^ Strazny 2000, p. 163. "The single most popular proposal is the Pontic steppes (see the Kurgan hypothesis)..."
- ISBN 978-0-521-38675-3.
- ^ ISSN 0302-5160.
- ^ Gimbutas 1985, p. 190.
- ^ a b c Haak et al. 2015.
- ^ S2CID 4399103.
- ^ PMID 26595274.
- PMID 31488661.
- PMID 31495572.
- ISBN 978-952-5667-42-4.
- ^ Karl Brugmann, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. 1.1, Strassburg 1886, p. 2.
- ^ Karl Brugmann, Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. 1, Strassburg 1902, pp. 22–23.
- ^ Karl Penka, Origines Ariacae: Linguistisch-ethnologische Untersuchungen zur ältesten Geschichte der arischen Völker und Sprachen (Vienna: Taschen, 1883), 68.
- ^ Vere Gordon Childe, The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins (London: Kegan Paul, 1926).
- ^ Ernst Wahle (1932). Deutsche Vorzeit, Leipzig 1932.
- ^ Gimbutas, Marija (1963). The Balts. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 38. Archived from the original on 2013-10-30.
- ^ Anthony 2007, pp. 18, 495.
- ^ Pit Grave culture (c. 3500–2800 BCE), which continued the cultures related to Srednij Stog and probably represents the late phase of the Proto-Indo-European culture – full-scale pastoral technology, including the domesticated horse, wheeled vehicles, stock breeding and limited horticulture, spread all over the Pontic steppes, and, c. 3000 BCE, in practically every direction from that centre (Anthony 1986; Anthony 1991; Mallory 1989, vol. 1).
- Single-Grave and other names given to complexes characterized by elements of Kurganappearance that formed in various parts of Europe"
- ^ Bojtar 1999, p. 57.
- ^ The New Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th edition, 22:587–588
- ^ Razib Khan (28 April 2012). "Facing the ocean". Discover Magazine Blog – Gene Expression. Archived from the original on 2013-06-09.
- ^ PMID 30872528.
- ^ Preston, Douglas (December 7, 2020). "The Skeletons at the Lake". The New Yorker. No. Annals of Science. Retrieved 13 February 2021.
- ^ Gimbutas 1982, p. 1.
- ^ Gimbutas 1997, p. 309.
- ISSN 0043-7956. Free PDF download.
- ^ Mallory 1989, p. 185.
- ^ Cavalli-Sforza 2000.
- Yamnaya cultureregion after the Neolithic farmers, possibly coming from Anatolia and settled there, developing pastoral nomadism.
- ^ Wells & Read 2002, p. [page needed]: "... while we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes, there is little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have dispersed over the years. There is clearly some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues showed, but the signal is not strong enough for us to trace the distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of Indo-European-speaking Europe."
- ^ Anthony & Ringe 2015.
- ^ a b Anthony 2007, pp. 306–307, "Why not a Kurgan Culture?"
- ^ Anthony 2007, p. 297.
Bibliography
- Anthony, David W (1991). "The Archaeology of Indo-European Origins". The Archaeology of Indo-European Origins. 19 (3–4): 193–222. ISSN 0092-2323.
- Anthony, David W. (2007), ISBN 978-0-691-05887-0
- Anthony, David W.; Bogucki, Peter; Comşa, Eugen; Gimbutas, Marija; Jovanović, Borislav; Mallory, J. P.; Milisaukas, Sarunas (1986). "The "Kurgan Culture," Indo-European Origins, and the Domestication of the Horse: A Reconsideration". Current Anthropology. 27 (4): 291–313. S2CID 143388176.
- Anthony, David W.; Ringe, Donald (January 2015), "The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives", Annual Review of Linguistics, 1 (1): 199–219,
- Anthony, David; Vinogradov, Nikolai (1995), "Birth of the Chariot", Archaeology, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 36–41, JSTOR 41771098
- Blench, Roger; Spriggs, Matthew, eds. (1999), Archaeology and Language, Vol. III: Artefacts, languages and texts, London: Routledge
- Bojtar, Endre (1999), Foreword to the Past: A Cultural History of the Baltic People, Budapest: Central European University Press
- Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca (2000). Genes, peoples, and languages. Farrar Straus & Giroux. ISBN 978-0-86547-529-8.
- Gimbutas, Marija (1956), The Prehistory of Eastern Europe. Part I: Mesolithic, Neolithic and Copper Age Cultures in Russia and the Baltic Area, Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.
- ISBN 0-8122-7574-8.
- ISBN 0-89720-041-1
- Gimbutas, Marija (Spring–Summer 1985), "Primary and Secondary Homeland of the Indo-Europeans: comments on Gamkrelidze–Ivanov articles", Journal of Indo-European Studies, 13 (1&2): 185–201
- Gimbutas, Marija (1997), Dexter, Miriam Robbins; Jones-Bley, Karlene (eds.), The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected Articles from 1952 to 1993, Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Series, vol. 18, Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, ISBN 978-0-941694-56-8.
- ISBN 0-520-22915-0
- Haak W, Lazaridis I, Patterson N, Rohland N, et al. (2015), "Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe", Nature, 522 (7555): 207–211, PMID 25731166
- Krell, Kathrin (1998), "Gimbutas' Kurgans-PIE homeland hypothesis: a linguistic critique", Archaeology and Language, vol. II, Blench and Spriggs
- ISBN 1-884964-98-2
- ISBN 0-500-27616-1.
- ISBN 0-19-507618-4
- Piazza, Alberto; Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi (2006). "Diffusion of genes and languages in human evolution". Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on the Evolution of Language. pp. 255–266. Archived from the original on 2008-12-11. Retrieved 2023-10-11.
- Renfrew, Colin (1999), "Time depth, convergence theory, and innovation in Proto-Indo-European: 'Old Europe' as a PIE linguistic area", Journal of Indo-European Studies, 27 (3–4): 257–293
- Schmoeckel, Reinhard (1999), Die Indoeuropäer. Aufbruch aus der Vorgeschichte [The Indo-Europeans: Rising from pre-history] (in German), Bergisch-Gladbach (Germany): Bastei Lübbe, ISBN 3-404-64162-0
- Strazny, Philipp, ed. (2000). Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics (1st ed.). Routledge. ISBN 978-1-57958-218-0.
- Wells, Spencer; Read, Mark (2002), The journey of man: a genetic odyssey, Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-11532-0
- Zanotti, D. G. (1982), "The Evidence for Kurgan Wave One As Reflected By the Distribution of 'Old Europe' Gold Pendants", Journal of Indo-European Studies, vol. 10, pp. 223–234