Dating the final IE unity (was: Re: GREEK PREHISTORY AND LANGUAGE)

[Sean Crist]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

On Sat, 16 Oct 1999 X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:

> I'm beginning to suspect that the 4000BC "last date of PIE unity" is pretty
> much a linguistic conclusion and - be it right or wrong - the material
> evidence does not especially favor that date versus an earlier one.

It's quite true that the reconstructed IE vocabulary puts certain
constraints on the possible dates for the final IE unity.  For example, we
reconstruct "wheel" for the PIE lexicon.  We conclude that the speakers of
PIE at its final unity belonged to a culture acquainted with the wheel.
Dating the final PIE unity to 7000 BCE is therefore quite inacceptible,
because the wheel is not attested in the material record until much later.
Other such examples could be given.

If this is what you mean by "a linguistic conclusion", then yes, dating
the latest IE unity to 3500-4000 BCE is "a linguistic conclusion".  Are
you saying that this is a bad thing?

> Actually, there are a better reason given by Renfrew for equating the spread
> of neolithic agriculturalism with the spread of Proto-IndoEuropean.  Not the
> least of which is the extent of IE dispersal at those periods in time when
> ACTUAL DOCUMENTABLE EVIDENCE of language becomes available.

Suppose that we accept that the latest period of PIE unity was 4000-3500
BCE.  The first written records are dated to the second millenium BCE.
I'm prepared to accept that 2000-2500 years is enough time for a mobile
and warlike culture to spread over such distances.

> In response to my request for an evaluation of another item that has been
> discussed on this list, one rather eminent practioner simply wrote back to
> me:

> <<Archeologist have become increasingly unhappy using terms based upon
> language for labeling cultures which are prehistoric--ie the culture has left
> no written documents upon which a historican can exercise analysis. With rare
> exceptions, physical artefacts do not include evidence about the language
> used by those who left the artefacts recovered.>>

It depends on what you're trying to do.  If you're trying to explain the
internal economy of a prehistoric culture, to explain how and why it
changed over time, to work out the diet and life expectancy, etc., then
there's no particular need to try to figure out what language was spoken
in that culture, or whether it is the ancestor of any language attested in
the historical record.  You can do perfectly good archaeology without
concerning yourself with language.

That's not the only sort of question which one might ask, however.  We
observe that a family of related languages has a particular geographical
distribution, and we also reconstruct a particular vocabulary for the
proto-language, and perhaps also a detailed phylogeny of that language
family.  With this information in hand, it's very reasonable to ask what
the archaeological record can tell us about where and when the
proto-language was spoken, and how it came to have the later distribution
which we observe.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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