IE "Urheimat" and evidence from Uralic linguistics

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Tue Jan 25 09:25:09 UTC 2000


>Georg at home.ivm.de writes:

>What are the ideological reasons which lead people to what you call extreme
>anti-diffusionism and anti-migrationism ?

-- As Martin Luther once said, humanity in general behaves like a drunken
peasant trying to ride a horse; it falls off on one side, gets back on, then
falls off on the other.  Prior to the 1960's, and especially prior to WWII,
it was fashionable among archaeologists and prehistorians to attribute every
cultural change or new style of pot to the in-migration of a new ethnic
group, and to assume that nothing was ever invented more than once and
necessarily spread from that center.   That was the way to get published.

(Coon, for example, sometimes went overboard that way, although he's a giant
compared to some of the pygmies who've attacked his work.)

Since then, in the English-speaking world, they've swung to the opposite
extreme and there's been a systematic down-playing of evidence for population
movements.  Until recently (there are signs of a welcome swing of the
pendulum) _that_ has been the way to get published.

Renfrew's an example, trying to rule out migration/diffusion explanations
unless there is the most exhaustive and unambiguous sort of archaeological
evidence for them -- hence he attributes the spread of Indo-European to
something that _can_ be directly traced in the physical record, namely the
spread of agriculture in the early Neolithic, claiming there must be some
grand technological innovation to account for it.

Even though there are historically attested migrations (the Scotii to
Scotland, for instance) which _did_ result in language change but which did
_not_ leave much stones-and-bones trace.

He does leave an "out" for cases of "elite dominance", although unfortunately
in his first article on that (which I read in Scientific American) he used an
example (the Mongol conquests) which did _not_ result in the spread of the
conqueror's language.

A critic of Renfrew's once remarked that if it weren't for the written
records, Renfrew would confidently assert that the site of Jamestown in
Virginia was the result of indigenous developments in Pohwatan Indian
culture, with at most the arrival of a "cult-package" or some intermarriage
from abroad.

"British Archaeology" published an editorial not long ago predicting that
soon some graduate student would write a paper "proving" that the first human
beings in the British Isles were not immigrants, but instead purely
indigenous, symbolically transformed reindeer.

The reasons are both ideological and methodological.  Migration often implies
conflict, which many archaeologists have attempted to read out of the record
because of a distaste for the idea of war.  It was also associated
peripherally with racist explanations of change in the past, which gave it a
political "taint".

Migration also presents very serious methodological problems for
archaeologists who are trying to focus on long, continuous sequences of
indigenous change.

If a migration can come in from outside their area of study and "reformat"
the local culture, and also do so without leaving much in the way of an
unambiguous physical trace, then the long sequences of culture-change they
delight in mapping out become meaningless.

This would require a much higher degree of modesty on the part of prehistoric
archaeologists... 8-).

Myself, I'd say that since population movements of various sorts (conquests,
folk-migrations, refugees, colonizations, etc.) are common as dirt in the
historical record as far back as we can see, and since they're also common in
preliterate societies whenever these come under the observation of literate
observers (18th and 19th-century Africa is full of them, for instance) then
we have to assume that this was the case in prehistory.



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