macedon - Indo-Europeanization -the seven dimensions in the study of a never-ending process

Indo-Europeanization -the seven dimensions in the study of a never-ending process_03

Friday, 6. February 2009, 00:13:34

"The free-moving, chaotic 'nomad1 is a myth. The most complex system regulates these movements by strict formal schedules, restrictions on numbers and types of animals, reserving or deferring pastu¬res, assigning members to particular pastures and controlling the amount of time spent in one pas¬ture. Thus, the organisational complexity varies greatly between different pastoral groups" (Niamir 1995.245).
The prehistoric expansion of Tripillye settlements into the steppe zone was more than a territorial oc¬cupation of former pastures; it caused more distur¬bance than an infringement of the movements of the pastoralists. The consequences of this expansion culminated in a shake-up of the nomadic socio-eco¬nomic system and in a threat to the accessibility of resources. The magnitude of this threat might have been felt differently in the regional groups of pasto¬ralists, but, in principle, the world of the agricultura¬lists exposed itself to the herders as harmful to their socio-economic sustainability.
Given these unfavorable conditions, the expansion of the agrarian system of subsistence to the east cau¬sed increasing frictions between agricultura¬lists and pastoralists, stirring up ever more competition over the exploitation of the ter¬rain. During the first half of the fifth millen¬nium BC, under the pressure of growing so¬cio-economic stress in the local communities, there are signs of cla¬shes and even warfare between the western
agriculturalists and the steppe people, as eviden¬ced by layers of ashes and an increased num¬ber of arrow-heads in the archaeological re¬cord of the easternmost settlements of the Cucu-teni-Tripillye culture.

By the middle of the fifth millennium BC, ever more settlements on the eastern periphery of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture (Cucuteni-Tripillye, respectively) A and Bl periods were fortified, and the frequency of arrow-heads in the archaeological record increases. The end of the Tripillye culture is marked by its replacement, in the northern region, by the Globular Amphora culture and, in the steppe region, by the late Pit-Grave culture.
"In the latter case, the question inevitably con¬cerns Gimbutas1 third wave of steppe invasion. However, if the equally abrupt increase in the number of artificially-fortified settlements of the final Tripolye period is due to the threat of inva¬sion by other cultures, may we infer a similar quantitative increase in fortified settlements dur¬ing the Cucuteni A-Tripolye Bl period which is at¬tributable to similar circumstances? Following the principle of analogy, there can be only one expla¬nation - invasion, and therefore, this completely confirms Gimbutas' idea of the first wave of steppe livestock breeders" {Dergachev2002.102)
Arguably, the migrations of the steppe people find their ultimate motivation in elementary counterreac-tions to these scenarios of unrest.

Early movements of steppe people to the west and the nature of Indo-European migrations

It is reasonable to assert that the early pastoralists in the Pontic-Caspian zone were challenged by the advance of agricultural practises into the region, and their reactions to this Intruding' factor triggered a chain reaction: the great Kurgan migrations. Marija Gimbutas {1974; 1991; 1992) coined this overar¬ching term to define the movement of the steppe people, and to identify the bearers of the earliest re¬cognizable Indo-European culture, that of the people who built huge burial mounds, called kurgan (a word of Turkic origin).
Gimbutas assumed that the thrust of the migrations, which she imagined as movements of populous groups, was effected by groups of horse-riders. If it holds true that the pastoralists were highly mobile, then this mobility on horse-back would be a decisive asset of any of their military operations to ensure their migratory advance. The assumed mobility of horse-riding pastoralists became the target of criti¬cism intended to discredit the Kurgan hypothesis. Admittedly, there is no evidence for the use of the horse as a riding animal in the fifth millennium BC. The validity of the Kurgan hypothesis, however, is not at the mercy of the horse as a factor to explain the swiftness and success of the migrations.
The most crucial factor in any approach to explain¬ing the movements of the steppe people is a refine¬ment of the key concept 'migration'. Migration is a comprehensive notion, with various conceptual fa¬cets in the wide array of its overall meaning (Bell-Fialkoff2000). Migration does not exclusively mean 'mass movement'. The process of Indo-Europeaniza-tion of the northwestern and western Pontic region between c. 4400 BC (beginning of the first wave) and c. 3000 BC (end of the third wave) was not ne¬cessarily the result of massive population movements.

The cultural and linguistic changes could well have resulted from the exertion of control of a ruling elite over people and territory either by intermarriage into families of local dignitaries, or by assuming po¬wer through conquest. As a rule, the culture of the elite dominates, and its language is more prestigious than that of the local population, eventually resulting in the assimilation and language shift of the latter. In this process, elements of the local language are absorbed as a substratum by the dominating langu¬age. The same holds true for cultural patterns, like the survival of cults of female divinities among the ancient Indo-European peoples in southeastern Eu¬rope (i.e., Thracians and Illyrians).
In the northwestern Pontic region, the incursions of the steppe people produce permanent patterns of change. Judging from richly equipped graves, a new social elite makes its appearance at Durankulak (northeastern Bulgaria) around 4600 BC and, a hun¬dred years later, the tradition of burials also chan¬ges at Varna. There, insignia such as a horse-headed sceptre and other ceremonial items of political po¬wer provide evidence "of the spread of steppe tri¬bes from the east to the west and in the 'Kurgan1 model of Indo-European origins is seen to reflect the first wave oflndo-Europeansfrom their home¬land in the steppelands of the Ukraine and south Russia" (Mallory and Adams 1997.557) (Map 3).
Durankulak, Varna and other sites provide 'diagno¬stic' socio-cultural profiles for the establishment of social hierarchy and elite power typical of nomadic societies.

Fusion processes of Non-Indo-European and Indo-European elements: patterns of domi¬nance and indominance

Fusion processes of cultures and languages may be compared to the endeavour to reconstruct a ship while floating in the water.
You can never succeed in replacing everything old by everything new be¬cause the vessel has to stay afloat. Therefore, there will always be old elements that persist, regardless of how many new elements are introduced. The Indo-Europeanization of the cultures and languages of Europe did not produce strategies of 'replace¬ment', but patterns of fusion in which older consti¬tuents (of non-Indo-European origin) and younger elements (of Indo-European coinage) intermingled.
The results of such fusion differ greatly in the regions where non-Indo-Europeans and Indo-Europeans in¬teracted, and they are specific for any local culture and language. According to the parameter of 'domi-nance-indominance' the following major configura¬tions can be identified in the cultures and languages of Europe.

Scenarios of a dominance of Indo-European elements over non-Indo-European elements

The fusion process in which the cultures of Indo-Eu¬ropeans and of non-Indo-Europeans participated in southeastern Europe "...not only involved those elements that survive in the archaeo¬logical record, but affected the non-material dimensions such as sto¬ries, songs, myths, rituals, and be¬liefs which function within com¬plex webs of meaning'1 (Marler 2005.60). This holds true for langu¬age, also, in this case for the fusion of linguistic elements of Indo-Euro¬pean and of local non-Indo-European origin. I refer here to the Indo-Euro¬pean language with the longest writ¬ten record, Greek. The earliest re¬cords in Mycenaean Greek, written in Linear B, date to the seventeenth century BC (Haarmann 1995.125-126).
Map J. The Kurgan migrations (after Mallory and Adams 1997.339J.

Greek is categorized as an Indo-European language. However, its lexical structures and its system of word formation differ markedly from other cognate langu¬ages such as Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, etc. The reason for this is the pre-Greek substratum, a layer of old lexical borrowings and formative elements from the ancient non-Indo-European languages that were spo¬ken in southeastern Europe before the advent of the Indo-Europeans. In ancient Greek, the old loanwords do not represent a lexical inventory which was isola¬ted from the Greek vocabulary inherited from Indo-European. Borrowed and indigenous lexical items form a symbiotic network of expressions. This can be illustrated for the various terminologies, of spin¬ning and weaving for one.
Evidence for the vertical loom dating to the pre-de-luge era cannot be given, and its appearance during the seventh millennium BC is scarce, although evi¬dence does exist from (Jatalhoyiik in Anatolia, Gre¬ece, and the Tisza valley in Hungary. Nevertheless, the presence of loom weights in cultural strata of the seventh and early sixth millennia BC demonstra¬tes the existence of a similar textile producing tech¬nology throughout Anatolia and southeastern Eu¬rope. Later, textile production proliferated and spread to various regions. "In short, we might be seeing connections southward into the Aegean, as well as northwestward into Hungary." (Barber 1991.98)
It is noteworthy that in ancient Greek weaving ter¬minology there is an abundance of borrowings that have survived from pre-Greek times. These borro¬wings of non-Indo-European origin are not isolated in the lexicon, but have been integrated into the lan¬guage, forming a broad layer of terminology that is symbiotically interconnected with expressions based on Indo-European cognates.
In the lexical structures, two integrational patterns can be discerned that indicate the fusion and persi¬stence of pre-Greek terms within Greek terminology (Tab. 6).

One is the duality of pre-Greek (non-Indo-European) and Greek terms (of Indo-European origin):
a. In the entire terminology relating to weaving, there are clusters of expressions with a specialized meaning that stem from a non-Indo-European source, and others which are inherited from the bulk of Indo-European cognates.
b. The other integrational pattern is synonymity of pre-Greek and Greek terms, which provides the an¬cient Greek language with a great potential for stylis¬tic variation.

Another domain where pre-Greek ^non-Indo-Euro¬pean) terms have survived in ancient Greek is metal¬lurgy (Fig. 2). The oldest gold treasure of the world is known from Varna and dates to c. 4500 BC, to the times of the earliest Indo-European incursions in the northwestern Pontic region.
Since some basic non-Indo-European expressions are attested for the terminology of metal-working in Greek, this is evidence that this technology was not introduced to the region by the Indo-Europeans, but had been in use before the Kurgan migrations. As specialized terms, some of these loanwords of pre-Greek origin have been mediated to our modern languages via Greek civilization, among them, metal-Ion metal and kaminos furnace. The archaeological term Chalcolithic Age is comprised of two elements of the pre-Greek substratum, khalkos copper and li-thos stone (Hofrnann 1966).
Another area of contacts of cultures and languages of different stock, non-Indo-European and Indo-Euro¬pean, is Tuscany in Italy. On the historical map sho¬wing the spread of human genes, the genetic 'foot¬print' of the pre-Roman population {i.e. the Etru¬scans) is recognizable as a divergent genomic profile {Cavalli-Sforza etal. 1994.278-279). The most pro¬minent non-Indo-European language of ancient Italy, Etruscan, was not simply 'replaced' by Latin, but in¬fluenced the colonial language of Roman supremacy, and later Italian, in manifold ways. In the cultural vocabulary of Latin, there is a significant number of Etruscan expressions {Breyer 1993). Among the terms which Latin borrowed from Etruscan are at¬rium atrium house, elementum element (original meaning: letter of the alphabet'), persona person, individual,populus people and others, and many of the old loanwords have been transferred to the lexi¬con of modern European languages.
Still today, Etruscan habits of pronouncing certain consonants are still recognizable in the sound struc¬ture of the Italian dialect in Tuscany. In the area be¬tween the rivers Arno and Tiber, called 'Gorgia toscana' (literally 'Tuscan throat'), the consonants k, p and t are regularly aspirated (to be transcribed as h, ph and th): e.g. Tuscanpoho little (for standard ШШросо), lupho wolf (for lupo), ditho finger (for dito); (Haarmann 2003a.344-345). The correspon¬ding consonants in Etruscan were aspirated. Most probably, the habits of pronouncing among those Etruscans who assimilated to Latin continued among local people and were transferred to Italian, the daughter language of Latin, that originated in the early Middle Ages.

Scenarios of a balanced distribution of Indo-European and non-Indo-European elements

Speakers of Indo-European came in contact with Uralic peoples in the southern coastal region of the Bal¬tic Sea. These were long-term contacts with far-rea¬ching repercussions. Gradually, the speakers of Ura-lic were driven to the Northeast or they were assi¬milated. Although this meant an ethnic Indo-Euro-peanization of a region with a formerly Uralian po¬pulation, in the languages that were involved in the contact, traces of a mutual influence are clearly re¬cognizable.
The stress in Germanic languages is on the first syl¬lable of a word, unless the word is a loanword or is coined on borrowed elements from another langu¬age. Deviant from the principle of the first-syllable stress is a word such as English 'replacement', formed on the basis of elements of Latin ori¬gin, with the stress on the second syllable. While Proto-Indo-Euro¬pean had a free stress, first syllable stress is an innovation in the Germanic languages. The change of the stress pattern is an Uralic substratum, that is, it stems from con¬tacts with Uralic langu¬ages, where first sylla¬ble stress is the rule (Suhonen 1995).
The Baltic-Fennic languages that continue the tradition of Uralic in the Baltic region

know a morphophonetic phenomenon which is cal¬led 'gradation' and unknown in other Uralic langu¬ages. Uralic languages operate with techniques of the agglutinative type, which means that formative elements are associated with the word stem in a way that the structure of the stem does not change (e.g. Hungarian hdz house: hdzak houses: hdzak-ban In houses': hdzaimban In my houses', with the unchanged stem form hdz). In Baltic-Fennic langu¬ages, the stem of words may change like in Indo-Eu¬ropean languages of the inflectional type.
Among the most prominent properties of the Finnish sound system is regular alternation of the word stem, or to be more precise: changes within the stem which occur in conjunction with the addition of specific for¬mative elements (Haarmann 2003b.878-882). These alternations (called in Finnish astevaihtelu 'grada¬tion') are governed by a multiple set of specific rules which cause structural changes in the stems of words. Altogether, there are 130 stem classes. Of these, 85 are declension classes (of nouns), and 45 are conju¬gation classes (of verbs). Attempts to reduce the number of classes to a few or only one have so far been unsuccessful.
As for the phonetic features which underlay the ma¬nifold variations of the word stem, these can be categorized as follows: consonant gradation, total or partial consonant assimilation, vowel mutation, and vowel loss. The operation of these realizations of change may occur singly (simple alternation) or in a combination of various techniques (complex alterna¬tion).

The realization of systematic alternation by means of consonant gradation is the most widely applied technique. In consonant gradation, two grades are distinguished, a strong grade and a weak grade. These correlate with specific syllable types. The strong grade correlates with an open syllable, the weak grade with a closed syllable. Open syllables are those ending in a vowel, closed syllables end in a consonant. The sound changes which occur when consonant gradation operates may be quantitative (e.g. pp: ip,piippu 'pipe/nominative': piipun 'pipe/ genitive') and qualitative (e.g. k: 0,joki 'river/nomi¬native':/oew 'river/genitive').
The described alternations of the word stem are a heritage from the times when Indo-European langu¬ages exerted a strong influence on the Baltic-Fennic languages in their formative period.

Scenarios of a dominance of non-Indo-Euro¬pean elements over Indo-European elements

Indo-Europeanization may articulate itself in certain ways, so that despite the massive impact of Indo-Eu¬ropean culture, life-style and language, there is no shift to a predominance of Indo-European constitu¬ents in a local culture and language. The scenario of Indo-European and Uralic in contact in the Baltic re¬gion illustrates such proportions of fusion.
In the course of their advance into central Europe, the Indo-Europeans who had left their homeland as pastoralists shifted to an agrarian subsistence. Agri¬culture, as practised by the ancestors of the Baltic tribes, reached the southern part of the Baltic region by about 1800 BC. The emergence of the Balto-Fen-nic branch of Fenno-Ugrian (as a major subdivision of Uralic) falls within the span of time when the Fen-nic population in the Baltic region experienced their transition to sedentism and plant cultivation (c. 1500-1000 BC).
It is significant that, in the Baltic region, an exceptio¬nally prolonged phase of transition can be observed, lasting some 700 years. Among the distinct featu¬res of this phase is "the existence of mixed hunting-farming groups, characterized by an extended substitutton phase..." (Zvelebil 1996.328-329). At an early date, the zone of mixed hunting-farming groups was located in an area stretching from western Prus¬sia and northern Poland to eastern Prussia and south¬ern Lithuania. From there it gradually shifted in a northeastern direction.
Concluding from the archaeological record and, par¬ticularly, judging from the existence of mixed hunt¬ing-farming groups, contacts between the southern (Baltic) agriculturalists and the northern (Fennic) foragers were friendly. The foragers had a vast hin¬terland for hunting activities where they could with¬draw with the spread of sedentism and the agrarian life-style into territories which were formerly hunt¬ing-grounds. In addition to this factor of ample space, the two groups engaged in mutual trade (Map 4).
Among the commodities of the north, one was par¬ticularly preferred by men in the south, namely wo¬men. These were mostly obtained via bride purchase. In a cross-cultural comparison of contacts between agriculturalists and foragers, it can be stated that the farming culture is viewed by both parties as more prestigious. The higher prestige of the farming cul¬ture also created images of a more advanced society among foragers, in a way that the communities of the south became more and more attractive for wo¬men of the north who had a chance to marry into the prestigious society {Haarmann 2003c.98-100).

Against the background of unilaterally directed pre¬stige relations, it is not surprising to observe that the lively social intermingling between farmers and foragers resulted in a unilaterally directed innova¬tion of the social terminology among the speakers of Fennic languages. An indicator of this is the broad layer of loanwords of Baltic origin in two sensitive sections of the basic vocabulary of Fennic languages, in kinship terminology and, in the terminology for body parts (Tab. 7). Since prestige values were associated with the culture of the south, conceptualiza-tions of prestige extended to also include the langu¬age of the south that was involved in the contact (i.e., Baltic).

Outlook

The stage of transition from a hunter-gatherer eco¬nomy to pastoralism in the steppe zone can as yet not been pinpointed with any accuracy in terms of absolute time, except for estimates of relative time in relation to the sequence of socio-cultural develop¬ments.
At present, it is not possible to distinguish different layers of the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary accor¬ding to absolute chronology {i.e., pastoralist termino¬logy vs. agrarian vocabulary). In this domain, only state¬ments about relative chrono¬logy can be made, along the lines that pastoralist termino¬logy must be older than the younger - and more scarce -agricultural vocabulary. The exclusive application of the methods of historical linguis¬tics which are available at present (i.e. lexico-statistical dating) does not produce satisfactory results for the pinpointing of the date of the dissolution of the Proto-Indo-European complex and its dispersal into regional cultures and languages. Es¬timates range from a 4500 BC to a 3000 BC.
It is essential to correlate insights about the relative chronology of transitions and events during the for¬mative period of the Indo-European complex and of the fusion processes induced by contacts with non-
Indo-European populations to an absolute time-frame. This task calls for interdisciplinary cooperation, ex¬ploring the chronological depth of the prehistory of the steppe zone in an orchestrated fashion to refine dating methods in archaeology (archaeobotany), hu¬man genetics (genomic profiles of ancient popula¬tions and their distribution), anthropology (human ecology), studies of cultural and linguistic fusion pro¬cesses, and historical linguistics.
DPhaarman ref.txt
Documenta Praehistorica XXXIV (2007)

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