GREEK PREHISTORY AND IE (EVIDENCE?)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 2/5/00 8:56:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, mcv at wxs.nl
writes:

>He's saying that "a massive amount of archaeological evidence associated with
 fundamental technological-economic transformation requires a linguistic
change", as it were.  Which is true.  >>

-- not necessarily.  What Renfrew desperately wants to establish is that
linguistic change (and therefore cultural change) can't happen _without being
visible to archaeologists_.

Many countries have gone through massive technological-economic changes
without a change of language; conversely, many changes of language have not
been accompanied by massive technological-economic change.

Eg., for just one example, the spread of Slavic.  Or of Indo-Iranian into
Iran and India, for another, which is definitely post-neolithic.

It's probable -- but unprovable -- that a new language/language family
entered Europe with agriculture, but there's no evidence whatsoever that it
was IE, and much that it wasn't.

It would be nice to have a tidy archaeological sequence to associate with the
spread of IE languages (incidentally, I'd bet the Corded Ware phenomenon is
linked with the Indo-Europeanization of the area between the Rhine delta and
Moscow) but the world doesn't arrange itself in so tidy a fashion.