Wheeled Vehicles.

[Mark Odegard <Odegard@means.net>]

This post considers the position that the date of (non-Anatolian) PIE
unity is rather late, ca. 2500 BCE. My discussion will center on
wheeled vehicles, and the question how, when and where.

The following quotes are from J.P. Mallory's chapter in _The
Indo-Europeanization of Northern Europe_, edited by Karlene Jones-Bley
and Martin E. Huld (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 17,
Institute for the Study of Man, 1996).

--start quotes--
[...] Stefan Zimmer has argued what we may call the "strict
constructualist" case. He argues that since a reconstructed
proto-language is essentially an abstraction and thereare no
independent ways of dating it, the only date we can meaningfully
employ is immediately before our earliest textual evidence about 2000
BC....

Now I think that both linguists and archaeologists should realize the
consequences of this "strict constructualist" date. By 2500 BC there
is hardly an archaeological solution to Indo-European origins that
does not propose that the Indo-Europeans spanned most of the breadth
of Eurasia and other than Robert Drews's recent attempt ... I am
unaware of any serious archaeological solution that envisages
expansions beginning ca. 2500 BC or later. If one follows Marija
Gimburtas' Kurgan theory, for example, then we would have
Proto-Indo-Europeans occupying the entire area from the Corded Ware
culture in Holland ... to the Afanasievo culture on the Yenisei [...]
and the Sherratt's scenario would have them at least from Denmark to
the Aral Sea [....] [p. 6]

[...] David Anthony defends the notion that the Proto-Indo-European
community must have been relatively unified up to ca. 3300 BC because
it shared a vocabular for wheeled vehicles which only began to appear
in Eurasia about this time. Against the suggestion that the words
forvehicles may have spread among the various Indo-Europeanlanguages
later, Anthony argues that the "five Indo-European roots forming the
wheeled-vehicle semantic field exhibit no internal evidence of having
been derived from any one Indo-European daughter language" and had
they come from an already differentiated language "then the linguistic
signature of that parent group should be evidence in the disseminated
vocabulary". [p.11]

The striking thing here is that the northwest languages are generally
seen to emerge as daughter branches sometime between 1500 and 500 BC
(and Tocharian would perhaps offer a similar date), Greek and
Indo-Aryan sometime between 2100-1500 BC. In a sense then the purely
linguistic picture of Indo-European might be said to fit disturbingly
well with Stefan Zimmer's proposal that Proto-Indo-European should not
date prior to 2500 BC. [p. 14]

The Neolithic argument proposes that ca. 4500-4000 BC, populations in
west and northern Europe spoke Indo-European and that it later evolved
into Celtic and Germanic. These languages contains words for wheeled
vehicles which are widely shared by other Indo-European groups.
Archaeological evidence suggests that these words could not have
entered their vocabulary at any time, no matter where they were
situated, before the fourth millennium BC. According to many of the
traditional arguments adduced for the date of linguistic divergence in
this region, the terms for wheeled vehicles could have been adopted by
either or both of these populations at anytime between ca. 3500 and
1000 BC and not be detected as a loan word. From this we can see that
while the shared wheeled vehicle terminology cannot be explained as
loan words between individual Indo-European languages, they also need
not be explained as the fourth millennium BC terms either -- they
could have diffused later. [pp. 15-16]
--end quotes--

So. When did wheeled vehicle technology become a part of the
Indo-Europeans' industrial repetoire? And where? And how?

There are some practical requirements if you are to have sturdy,
steppe-worthy wagons and carts. The first of them, of course, is a
source of wood. While there were trees the river valleys of the
steppe, the real source for lumber would have been the southern edge
of the North European forest -- the forest which is essentially
co-extensive in area as is the 'incessantly discussed' Corded Ware
horizon.

The second is tools, at least copper tools, and for a really good cart
that makes judicious use of hardwood, probably bronze tools. How early
can one reasonably impute the regular use of bronze at the
forest-steppe boundary? In his 1989 book, Mallory mentions the Ezero
culture of modern central Bulgaria (= Karanovo VII), starting 3200 BCE
as one bright point of early Bronze Age culture. We might have the
proto-Anatolians down here at this time, and who knows, they might
have even been the go-betweens for moving the knowledge of making
bronze northwards.

Mallory reminds us of the need to keep the PIE homeland within
reasonable bounds: Poland- or Germany-sized. Having an essentially
mutually intelligible continuum ranging from the Yenisey to the North
Sea is improbable, as is Denmark to the Aral Sea, or even Hungary to
the Caspian. The north Pontic area is reasonable.

Is it necessary that the steppe be monolithically IE-speaking? This
goes against the historic pattern for the area. Is it necessary that
every person who was part of the Yamnaya culture be IE-speaking? Is
it necessary for the French and Germans to speak a single language if
they are to share a single material culture? Mallory, in the closing
pages of his 89 book seems suspicious of the reputed IE-ness of the
Corded Ware horizon.

The PIEs were highly mobile. At least no one really denies that. But
what was the basis of their mobility *as a people* (and not a bunch
of bravos riding off to wreck havoc someplace). Pregnant women and
small children cannot ride bareback on horses. They had carts and
wagons. When was it possible for them to have the tools to make these
sturdy steppe-worthy vehicles, as well as the associated skills in
handling and yoking animals to pull them?

A 'disturbingly' late date seems attractive.
--
Mark Odegard   mailto:odegard at means.net