Indo-Europeanization -the seven dimensions in the study of a never-ending process_02
Thursday, 5. February 2009, 03:30:05
Among the pertinent borrowings of pre-Greek ori¬gin, we find nouns, adjectives and verbs which rep¬resent foreign derivational types (Haarmann 1995. 44-47). The occurrence of verbs in the repertory of borrowings {e.g. ancient Greek iapto 'to throw', dy-namai 'to be capable, potent') points to the fact that the contacts between Greeks and the pre-Greek au¬tochthonous populations were intensive. Most exten¬sive is the pre-Greek layer in the domain of names for plants. A considerable number of borrowings are also found in terms for natural phenomena, utensils, clothing, social relations, handicrafts, etc.
The archaeological record shows continuity of set¬tlement in the areas north of the Black Sea from the end of the Ice Age (beginning of the Holocene) into the Neolithic period. This means that the local popu¬lations were indigenous and that there was no mi¬gration from outside into those regions during that span of time. The people that lived there left their genetic 'footprints', which testify to ethnic diversity. On the genetic maps, two distinct genomic profiles are discernible (Map 2):
• a genomic concentration in an area north of the Azov Sea which has been identified as the putative Indo-European homeland;
• a genomic concentration further north which has been identified as the homeland of Uralic popula¬tions.
The Neolithic cultures in the area of the Indo-Euro¬pean homeland (Seroglazovo culture) and the Uralic homeland (Agidel culture) demonstrate a continuity of lithic industries from the Mesolithic period (Mal-lory 1989192-193; Parpola 1999.181-187). The homeland question both for Proto-Indo-Europeans
and Proto-Uralians has been much debated. As for the Uralic homeland, a nuclear area (Volga-Kama re¬gion) of more concentrated settlement and an exten¬sion of a more thinly populated area stretching from the Baltic to the Urals have been identified {Carpelan et al. 2001). There is a growing consen¬sus focusing on the Caspian depression (with an ex¬tension into the region between Volga and Don) as the area of the Indo-European homeland. This hypo¬thesis is seemingly being accepted by archaeologists and linguists alike as the most plausible of all home-land candidates (see Mallory 1997; Carpelan et al. 2001; Dergachev 2005.14-40; Haarmann 1998b; 2006a. 154-160 for the history of this scholarly de¬bate).
Historical linguistics has reconstructed grammatical structures and lexical roots which are similar in both Uralic and Indo-European. These linguistic traces at¬test to conditions of a long-term cultural and lingui¬stic convergence when both Uralians and Indo-Euro-peans were still foragers. Since the genetic 'foot¬prints' of the ancient populations in the northern Pontic area can be made visible (see Map 2), the lin¬guistic reconstructions of an early period of Uralic-Indo-European convergence gain in profile. In the languages of both families, there is a core vocabu¬lary and a set of grammatical forms which testify to a genealogical relationship (see Haarmann 2006a. 137-146 for the reconstruction of the Nostratic su-perphylum). These elements are not borrowed in either language family, but belong to the core inven¬tory of forms inherited from oldest times (Tab. 1).
The emergence of pastoralism in the steppe zone
The eighth millennium BC brought about decisive environmental changes. According to Ryan and Pitman (1998.157-158, 174-178\ the circum-Pontic zone experienced a stage of progressive desiccation after the mid-tenth millennium BC. The second melt-water spike (beginning about 9400 BC) never rea¬ched the ancient Euxine Lake, and the aridification of the area north of the freshwater lake proceeded rapidly. The ecological preconditions for the begin¬nings of pastoralism among Proto-Indo-Europeans are found in the forest-steppe zone during this pe¬riod. The ongoing process of desiccation in the north¬ern Pontic zone caused an extension of the steppe zone in the south and a receding of the forest-steppe belt to the north.
These environmental changes had long-term reper¬cussions on human ecology. Gradually, the develop¬ment in the south shifted, economically, culturally and linguistically. This was a prolonged process that might have taken more than a millennium to unfold. The people in the southern steppe zone experienced a socio-economic transition from foraging to herding. Since the climatic effects of desiccation enhanced the transition to pastoralism in the Pontic steppe zone, the development there in the communities of Proto-Indo-European stock detached itself from the former socioeconomic, cultural and linguistic basis of convergence with the Proto-Uralians, resulting in the formation of a gravitational epicentre of Proto-Indo-European culture (as distinct from the Proto-Uralian epicentre further north).
In the course of the seventh millennium BC, the dif¬ferences between foraging, as the major type of proto-Uralian economy, and pastoralism, as practiced by Proto-Indo-Europeans, became more marked and the geographical zone of each type of economy more concentrated.
The process of the dissolution of the former basis of convergence and of the formation of the Proto-Indo-European epicentre was of local coinage. This means that - beyond the assumed internal population mo¬vement in the Pontic steppe zone after the flood -there was no population influx from either the steppe zone of central Asia or from the region of agrarian population of Ukraine and central Europe.
Eventually, the two epicentres with their differing ethnic stock also became characterized by divergent proto-languages, which can be reconstructed with the methods of historical-comparative linguistics (see Beekes 1995124-257 for Proto-Indo-Еигореад Haj¬du and Domokos 1987.179-271 for Proto-Uralian).
At first sight, it may seem problematic to conflate a linguistic term with the assumed speakers of a lan¬guage, such as to identify the northern foragers (with Uralian cultural patterns who are assumed to have spoken Proto-Uralian) as 'the Proto-Uralians,' and to identify the pastoralists further south (with Indo-European cultural patterns who are assumed to have spoken Proto-Indo-European) as 'the Proto-Indo-Europeans.' And yet, the archaeological record indicates the continuity of distinct cultural pat¬terns in each area where, at a later date, the presence of Indo-European languages (in the Pontic steppe re¬gion) and Uralian languages (further north) are documented by linguistic interferences (Haarmann 1996.9-10; Koivulehto 2001). Since there is no evidence of population influx from outside, the local Neolithic po¬pulations must be ancestral to the la¬ter Uralian and Indo-European spea¬kers of each region.The transition from a foraging to a pastoralist economy was accompa¬nied by changes in life-styles. As part of the process of Neolithization, this transition has been a matter of much debate. There are those who explain the shift to herding and pastoralism as resulting from the spread of technologies relat¬ing to the 'agricultural package' (technologies of plant cultivation and of stock-breeding) that were introduced to the steppe zone from the northwest¬ern Pontic area. The term 'agricultural package' has been defined as "the sum of traits that appear re¬peatedly in the Neolithic assemblages of SW Asia, Anatolia and SE Europe'1 (Qilingiroglu 20053)- Ot¬hers see a direct transition without the participation of agrarian technologies and relating forms of cat¬tle-raising.
As far as the Proto-Indo-Europeans and their home¬land are concerned, two basic assumptions have been elaborated which stand in absolute contradic¬tion to one another.
Pastoralism in the steppe zone emerged inde¬pendently and its origins are not associated with agriculture
Although the archaeological evidence for this early transition is scarce, historical linguistics has recon¬structed an old layer of common lexical roots for the domain of pastoralism. This terminology forms part of the core vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European, the re¬constructed common basis from which all Indo-Euro¬pean languages derive. The old layer of terms for her¬ding "appear to be widespread across the entire range of IE (Indo-European) stocks'1 (Mallory and Adams 1997.7) (Tab. 2).
While the Proto-Indo-Europeans ex¬perienced their shift to a pastoralist economy, the Proto-Uralians, in their homeland in the forest zone further north, continued to live on foraging. Therefore, such terminology relating to early pastoralism reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European is absent from the basic vocabulary of Proto-Uralic.An inspection of the core termino¬logy of pastoralism that can be re¬constructed for Proto-Indo-European reveals that the diagnostic terms re¬ferring to goat and sheep - the old¬est known animals that played a role in Indo-European herding - as well as to field and herd are either wide¬spread in the branches of this langu¬age family (see Tab. 2, nos. 1, 2, 5, 6 and 9), or seem to be best preserved in the eastern Indo-European languages (see Tab. 2, nos. 3, 4, 7 and 12). The wide distribution is an indication of the general importance of this vocab¬ulary for the early Indo-Europeans. The persistence of the old diagnostic terms, especially in the eastern Indo-European languages, points to the steppe zone as the area of pastoralism's origin.
Based on observations about the lack of an old la¬yer of agricultural terminology in the Indo-Iranian branch of languages, it was assumed that the pasto-ralists who spoke such languages knew nothing about agriculture. Given the lack of old agricultural terminology in this major branch of Indo-European, it is tempting to deny the existence of old agricultu¬ral terms for the Indo-European protolanguage.
The meaning of the lexical material referring to agri¬culture is, in many cases, diffuse and does not allow the reconstruction of a very old layer. For example, there is no old term for 'wheat' and no general term for 'barley'. The more extensive agricultural termino¬logy becomes in historical languages, the younger is the lexical layer (often relating to stages of linguistic development of the fifth millennium BC or later).
To sum up, the linguistic and archaeological evidence speaks in favor of pastoralism as having developed independently of farming in the steppe zone of southern Russia.
Is pastoralism an offshoot of a farming eco¬nomy?
This view has been advocated by Renfrew (2002a. 4-7) and others. It is argued that hunter-gatherers would not have experienced a transition to pastora¬lism without a previous stage of animal husbandry, and this would have been intrinsically associated with farming practises. Renfrew categorically denies the possibility that hunter-gatherers might have star¬ted to herd wild sheep and goats - the essential ani¬mal domesticates - without the parallel stage of far¬ming. It is admitted that the horse was used by hun¬ter-gatherers and that the early users might have been horse-herders. But it is denied that these horse-herders could have been horse-breeders.
It is hazardous to discard, in a discussion of Neoli¬thic economies of the seventh and sixth millennia BC in eastern Europe, any alternative a priori {e.g. nega¬ting a direct transition from a foraging to a pastoral economy). There are well known examples of a tran¬sition to herding and breeding without the participa¬tion of farming practises from the historical period.
The earliest traces of reindeer herding date to the fifth millennium BC, as evidenced in rock carvings at Alta in northern Norway (see Helskog 1988 for the pictures of Bergbukten I). Among the Saami peo¬ple of the North, reindeer herding and breeding de¬veloped as an independent economic system, and there was no influence from farming communities with animal husbandry which would have provided the incentive for breeding. Similar processes of a transition from hunting and gathering to reindeer herding and breeding evolved in northern Siberia among the ethnic groups of Samoyedic, Altajic and Paleoasiatic stock (Funk andSillanpdd 1999.16,39, 62, etc.).
In the case of the Proto-Indo-European context, a pro¬minent factor gives additional weight to this assump¬tion of a direct transition, and this is the chronologi¬cal continuum. Pastoralism can be readily assumed to have emerged no later than the seventh millen¬nium BC. However, agriculture did not reach the eastern Pontic zone prior to 5500 BC (see the iso-chrones in the map presented by Carpelan andPar-pola 2001.63). Pastoralism in the region clearly an-tedates the practise of farming. The lexical layer of Proto-Indo-European terms for herding is older than the terminology of the 'agricultural package' which arrived on the western fringes of the steppe zone at a later time.
Diagnostic items of early Indo-European cul¬ture
The horse is of special significance for the Indo-Eu-ropeans and their culture. There is consensus about this basic fact among scholars. What is disputed, though, is the process of the domestication of this animal and since when it was used for riding. A le¬xical root for 'horse' (*hekuos in simplified transcrip¬tion) can be reconstructed for the Proto-Indo-Euro¬pean vocabulary, and this root is common for the equivalents in all the local languages of this phylum (Tab. 3). There is a linguistic feature which makes the issue of the horse and all that is related to it dif¬ficult. In the Indo-European terminology, no diffe¬rence is made between the wild and the domestica¬ted horse.
According to the original version of the Kurgan hypo¬thesis, propagated by Gimbutas, it was assumed that the Indo-Europeans left the steppes on horseback, and that it was the military supremacy of mobile horse-riders which gave the pastoralists the edge du¬ring their expansions. However, horse-riding is not attested for the fifth millennium BC. The archaeolo¬gical record of the steppe zone of southern Russia points to c. 5000 BC as an early date for the appea¬rance of the horse motif in imagery (Gimbutas 1991. 353)- The existence of imagery relating to this pro-minent animal as such does not entail that the horse was already domesticated at that time. The imagery might well relate to mythical conceptualizations of wildlife among the early pastoralists.
In the beginnings, the wild horse might have been hunted for its meat. Most probably, the domestica¬tion of this animal to become used for riding was a prolonged process {Levine et al. 1999). And yet, it seems reasonable to assert that humans "would ra¬pidly have recognized the greater potentiality of the horse as a means of transport and a powerful cultural symboT (Dolukhanov 2002.18).
Judging from ethnographic literature and from em¬pirical observations of traditional herding in recent nomadic cultures, the role of the horse may at first have been marginal for the socio-economy and its significance might have increased gradually. Shishli-na {1997) draws attention to a certain custom among herders of the modern steppe zone in Kalmykia who keep horses as draught animals and, for another special purpose. In winter, when the snow cover of the pasture may be too hard for sheep and goats to find fodder, the horses break the cover with their strong hoofs and provide access for the smaller ani¬mals to the grass below. Such a function can be con¬jectured to have been the first possible use of the horse by the Kurgan pastoralists.
At a later stage, the horse was certainly used as a draught animal. This can be assumed for the mi¬grants who, coming from the eastern steppe, arri¬ved at Durankulak, and later at Varna in the north¬western Pontic zone. The movement of the Kurgan people from their homeland in the Pontic-Caspian region to the southwest can be traced on the basis of the spread of a diagnostic cultural item, the horse-headed sceptre (Fig. 1).
Those groups of steppe people who reached the northwestern Pontic region introduced a technolo¬gical innovation: wheeled wagons. Horse-riding be¬came a custom at a later date. Although this means that the first migrants who made their incursions in the region where the agriculturalists settled were not horse-riders, it does not follow that the Kurgan hypo¬thesis would lose its value as an explicative model. The advance of a powerful elite imposing their or-der on the local population would be a realistic sce¬nario to explain the early stage of movements of the Kurgan people (Kurgan I).
Non-Indo-Europeans and Indo-Europeans: sce¬narios of contact and conflict
The drifting apart of the socio-economic systems cau¬sed a shift in culture and language, too. This meant the gradual dissolution of the older network of No-stratic convergences, with the cultural as well as lin¬guistic differences between Uralic and Indo-European becoming more marked in time. The Proto-Indo-Eu ropeans who roamed the steppe in search of pastures for their herds had a life-style that differed markedly from that of the Proto-Uralians who had continued as hunters and gathe¬rers in the northern forest zone.
The population of the south, the Proto-Indo-European pastoralists, did not experience a development of their culture and language in iso¬lation. From the earliest times of the formation of the Indo-European com¬plex the pastoralists engaged in con¬tacts, social interaction and trade re¬lations, with their neighbors in the north (Proto-Uralians) and further south (Proto-Northern Caucasians).
Conflict-free contacts between pastoralists and hunter-gatherers in the sixth and fifth millen¬nia BC
Despite the differences in life-styles, the hunter-ga¬therers from the north maintained contact with the pastoralists from the south. The social interaction of populations in the former Nostratic zone of con¬vergence changed its nature and transformed into patterns of contact between bearers of distinct cultu¬res and speakers of distinct languages. The contacts which the Proto-Indo-Europeans established with the northern neighbours date to the sixth and fifth millennia BC. Evidence for these early contacts of Proto-Uralians with Proto-Indo-Europeans are the loanwords which were borrowed from Indo-Euro¬pean into the Uralic vocabulary (Tab. 4).
The movement of lexical borrowing was unilaterally directed from the Indo-European south to the Uralic north. This observation supports the assumption that the language of the pastoralists and their culture were considered to be prestigious by the Proto-Ura¬lians. Judging from the distribution of the old Indo-European loanwords in the sections of the Uralic le¬xicon it can be concluded that the Indo-Europeans engaged in trade (see the borrowing for the idea 'to sell') and had prestigious goods (such as honey) and technologies (such as spinning and construction) to offer to the hunter-gatherers of the north.
There were also contacts with the southern neigh¬bours, the indigenous population of the Caucasus. Most probably, interactions between Proto-Indo-Eu¬ropeans and local people in the northern Caucasus began to unfold in the early fifth millennium BC. Apparently, the same kind of prestige that the Proto-Indo-Europeans enjoyed with their Uralian neigh¬bours also dominated contacts with the people in the south. Among the Indo-European borrowings in northern Caucasian languages, we find diagnostic terms of pastoralism such as expressions for 'goat' and 'cattle', lexical evidence for trade relations (i.e., 'payment'), and for the transfer of trade goods (i.e., 'axe', 'ring'); (Tab. 5).
The scenarios of contact involving Proto-Indo-Euro-peans, Proto-Uralians and Proto-Caucasians unfolded under the auspices of peaceful relations, with no re¬cognizable agenda of conflict. As is known from eth¬nographic literature and from comparisons of the world's cultures, contacts between pastoralists and hunter-gatherers are, in principle, friendly in nature, and this is because there is no competition over re¬sources. The hunter-gatherers do not need the pas¬tures of the pastoralists, and there is no advantage for the pastoralists to move with their herds into the hunting-grounds of foragers. As a rule, hunter-gathe¬rers assign a higher prestige to the culture of pasto¬ralists and to their trade goods.
Contacts between pastoralists and agricultura¬lists with agendas of conflict
On the western periphery of the steppe, where the terrain that was frequented by the pastoralists and their herds bordered the area of arable land (i.e., in southern Ukraine), the boun¬daries between the two eco¬nomic systems of pastoralism (the eastern tradition) and of agriculture (the western tra¬dition) began to float soon af¬ter c. 5000 BC. The initial con¬tacts between pastoralists and agriculturalists may have been peaceful, but things changed when the socioeconomic sphere of the Cucuteni-Tripil-lye culture experienced its ex¬pansion to the East and new agrarian settlements were es¬tablished in areas formerly frequented by pastoralists.
The direct consequences of this expansion were an in¬fringement of the movements of the pastoralists and a re-duction of their resources, the pastures that had been turned into fields. And yet, there were other consequences that had an even stronger impact on the sustainability of pas¬toralism in the contact region. And this had to do with the ways herding as a socio-eco¬nomic system operates. A true understanding of the ways of pastoralist economy is not sel¬dom hampered by stereotyp¬ing views that outsiders carry in their minds.
WIDGETIZE
Avgerinos Moesiotes # 6. February 2009, 02:37