Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins

by Colin Renfrew

In this book Colin Renfrew directs remarkable new light on the links between archaeology and language, looking specifically at the puzzling similarities that are apparent across the Indo-European family of ancient languages, from Anatolia and Ancient Persia, across Europe and the Indian subcontinent, to regions as remote as Sinkiang in China. Professor Renfrew initiates an original synthesis between modern historical linguistics and the new archaeology of cultural process, boldly proclaiming that it is time to reconsider questions of language origins and what they imply about ethnic affiliation--issues seriously discredited by the racial theorists of the 1920s and 1930s and, as a result, largely neglected since. Challenging many familiar beliefs, he comes to a new and persuasive conclusion: that primitive forms of the Indo-European language were spoken across Europe some thousands of years earlier than has previously been assumed.

Genres: History, Archaeology, Language, Linguistics, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Prehistory

368 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 1987

About the author

Andrew Colin Renfrew, Baron Renfrew of Kaimsthorn was a British archaeologist, paleolinguist and Conservative peer noted for his work on radiocarbon dating, the prehistory of languages, archaeogenetics, neuroarchaeology, and the prevention of looting at archaeological sites.
Renfrew was also the Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and was a Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

This is another one of those books which I've read and enjoyed.

The basic idea is that the dominance and spread of Indo-European languages is a puzzle, where did the first speakers come from and how did they get to be ubiquitous from Scandinavia to North India. Renfrew has a neat answer to this by suggesting that the earliest Indo-European languages where the languages of the first farmers. As agriculture can support a far larger population than hunter-gathering (or herding) this would provide an easy model for the natural numerical dominance and spread of those languages out from Anatolia/northern fertile crescent west into Europe and east into India. As natural population expansion would oblige each generation to set up a new village down the road, and so slowly, spreading out from the fertile crescent, as a corollary Basque we can understand to be a surviving language of a pre-Indo-European language speaking people who managed to adapt to agriculture before being completely out numbered by the newcomers. This in contrast to the alternative view has been that Indo-European languages were carried into their current locations by waves of horse riding invaders.

The waves of horse riding and chariot I tend to imagine chariots in ancient Europe as being rather like a billionaires' super yacht today, impressive not not necessarily practical, my mind easily fills with axles groaning up gradients,splintering spokes,piles of broken horses and woodwork, followed by a support crew of carpenterscharging invaders pouring down off the tartar steppe seemed intrinsically ridiculous to me, if you wanted to do it the time to launch such an invasion would be now- as we have motorways, bridges and service stations even though these probably tend not to stock much hay while in pre-historic Europe there were instead all kinds of wet lands, ancient forests and wide meandering rivers as well as not much grazing land this the result of draining wet lands and clearing forests.

Renfrew points out that in her Kurgan hypothesis Marija Gimbtas at once invented the ur-phantasie of the cold war and told her own life story - ie peace loving Marija was swept westwards from her Lithuanian heimat fleeing from incoming eastern invaders with their militaristic ways, fancy weaponry, and strange new ways of honouring their dead leaders from Kurgan to Kremlin wall I suppose. However we can equally take Bryan Ward-Perkins' argument from The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization and apply it to Renfrew and for that matter to my non-professional self historians working today after a long period of European peace, integration and economic security can be suspected of wanting to find models or previous examples for peaceful European integration and development in the past, even amongst sword wielding Visigoths and Vandals so in the age of Empires interpretation tended towards aggressive incomers pushing out indigenous peoples, now in an age of globalisation we get far travelling people, perhaps in search of health cures, sharing their knowledge of new technologies. More subtly perhaps we're inclined to read the familiar present on to the distant past rather than accepting it wie es eigentlich gewesen, the slightly awkward problem if even if one were so inhuman as to be value neutral we still would not know what actually happened due to absence of evidence. Equally people being what they are, the big questions remain the interesting ones. Were our ancestors canny farmers who only ever lifted an axe to fell a tree al though there does seem to be evidence of a fair amount of violence - start as you mean to go on I suppose or were they glorious freebooting horse riders who took what they wanted from hapless pedestrians and then boozed all night, with no fear of hangovers.

Recently there have studies, at least according to all mighty Cloud God Wikipeadia who claims only modest contributions from its puny worshipers, that purport to show that genetics proves an influx into Europe at least from the steppe of presumed proto-Indo-European speakers India remains apparently up for grabs the sample size of 67 looked small to me, but then there probably isn't an abundance of material and in any case genetics determines language no more than you have to speak Korean to watch a Korean made television. Peter Heather in Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe has a discussion about languages - it is a struggle to find an example of the language spoken by a minority group completely replacing the language spoken by a majority, even though as with Norman-French or Afrikaans it can function as the language of an elite ruling over a numerically dominant group speaking their own languagesalthough post colonialism there are plenty of examples of incomers languages sitting alongside pre-existing ones . Perhaps today with radio, television, state education and the pull factors of a modern economy to do this it might be possible, although as far as I understand there still are Kurdish speakers in Turkey. In prehistory I suppose one way to accomplish this would be a rather exhausting process of individually hand-crafted and carried out by artisans mass extermination, or perhaps more reasonably that both cattle herding chariot using incomers and early farmers spoke closely related languages with the incomers simply contributing their terms for axles and yokes and what have you to the developing linguistic porridge. No doubt over time further complexities will emerge to delight and bedevil the curious observer.

Of course it is all gloriously confused because we can only see what people spoke once we get literate societies, which is to say extremely recently compared to the long silent reaches of prehistory.

[Manybooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truth be told, I read Colin Renfrew's 1987 Archaeology & Language (and with very much personal interest I might add) as a university library book around 1994 while studying for my First Comprehensive Exam for the PhD at the University of Waterloo (which tested general linguistics, Western European and in particular German language history and finally both Old High German and Middle High German language and literature) and thus of course also almost fifteen years before I joined Goodreads. And yes, while I do remember the basic tenets and considerations of Colin Renfrew's main theory (namely that he believes the spread of the Indo-European languages into especially Western Europe was not as has been proposed by the majority of scholars through conflict, subjugation and massive fluxes of invasions from patriarchal horse riding and heavily armed pastoralists eager to obtain more land and thereby expand their influence in particular from east to west, but rather through the slow movement north, west and east of basic farming technology from Anatolia, from what is now Turkey, of farmers moving steadily onwards as they kept peacefully expanding their fields), I also do not recollect all that much of the specific details (of Colin Renfrew's presented evidence and proofs) except to say that while I have certainly very much enjoyed Archaeology & Language I do still find the author's main theory (while without a doubt intriguing and interesting) also more than a bit suspect and majorly problematic (full of intellectual holes) in places.

And indeed, for me, the main issues with Colin Renfrew's musings and assertions as he features them in Archaeology & Language are and always will be first and foremost that in my opinion, if one actually does take a look not so much at the archeological evidence the author shows as proof for his theory (of the slow movement from the Anatolian peninsula into Europe of farming supposedly being what caused the gradual but steadily successful spread and influx of PIE) but if one also and primarily then takes a look and considers the basic vocabulary of the extant Indo-European languages of today and the fact that the modern Indo-European languages considered to be the likely most conservative in structure and therefore also probably the closest to what we now propose Proto Indo-European to have been like (namely the Baltic languages, particularly Lithuanian and to an extent Latvian) are NOT located in ancient Anatolia but in the area that has been for many many decades proposed as being the so-called and possible homeland of Proto Indo-European (namely the steppes, plains and forests of what is now the Baltic States) this does make one question how reasonable it is for Colin Renfrew to assume and declare that the origin of the Indo-European languages is the area of present day Turkey (and that of course this would mean that Colin Renfrew would likely take the now extinct Hittite language as being the closest to PIE).

However, and please bear with me, as I am neither an archaeologist nor a trained linguist (although I do indeed and certainly have considerably more knowledge in linguistics than in archaeology simply because as mentioned above, I had to learn basic linguistics and language history during my PhD studies), I also must wonder and have always questioned a bit why the concept of where the homeland of PIE and its original speakers might have been and how it has spread so successfully needs to always seemingly be an either/or scenario, why it could not also have been at the same time a both/and situation, with some spreading of Proto Ind0-Euopean happening via invasion from in particular horse riding migrants and nomadic pastoralists and some equally and also occurring through the more steady and slow spread of farming. For we do know that Indo-European tongues were spoken both on the steppes and grasslands of what are now the Baltic states and Russia and equally in what is now Turkey (and in my opinion, it should at least be entertained that perhaps the conquering spread of the Indo-Europeans and the Indo-European languages might well and also have been a combination of both invasion and a slower and more gradual movement ahead through farming and farmers).

And no, I am most definitely NOT making ANY assertions here that my speculations are in any manner the truth and likely correct, but I do think that perhaps the often in conflict with one another camps of Indo-European origins should perhaps and indeed consider working more closely together a bit and thinking outside of the proverbial box so to speak, that perhaps, Indo-European origin theories need to be more inclusive and more combinatory (for a more combinatory approach would definitely and especially make Colin Renfrew's Archaeology & Language both less problematic and more potentially realistic to and for me personally, and yes, this could also and likely should also be said about those scholars who adhere very strictly to the Indo-European homeland being the grasslands, the forests, steppes and plains of Russia and Lithuania theory).

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE is Colin Refrew's presentation for laymen of the problem of the linguistic affinity of most of the peoples of Europe and ancient Western Asia. Written by a scholar influenced by Britain's current disbelief against historical migrations, Renfrew argues that common linguistic elements spread through the ancient world not through the sudden invasion of a single people, but through the peaceful spread of agriculture out of Anatolia.

On one hand, it is nice to see a challenge to Marija Gimbutas theory, which got increasingly weird the longer she articulated it, that the Indo-Europeans were bloodthirsty patriarchal invaders who swept into matiarchal and peaceful old Europe introducing war. Renfrew, however, goes to far in the opposite direction and the work has serious problems, many of which are common to the works of Renfrew's school. The author has no problem speaking of the occupation of the Carpathian basin by the Magyars, and presumably he believes in recent Turkic migrations, but he refuses to accept migrations in pre-historical times. One of his three points against an South Russian origin is simply "It is a migrationist view." The Indo-Europeans are a people uniquely identified with horsemanship--look at the popularity horses in Greek and Germanic onomastics, and the words for "axle", "yoke", and "horse" itself are common to nearly all branches, so moving over long distances would certainly be within their reach. Yet, Renfrew asserts that there is no evidence that horsemanship was important to ancient speakers of IE languages.

Renfrew is also not a very committed historical linguist. His presentation of family trees is overly simplistic, with flat-out inaccuracies such as saying that German is descended from Gothic and all of the Slavonic languages from Old Church Slavonic. He seems to be quoting mostly from introductory handbooks of comparative IE linguistics instead of speaking from deep personal familiarity. The only authorities I would really trust to present this material are either amazing polymaths who are simultaneously excellent archaeologists and linguists, or archaeologist-linguist collaborations.

If you are interested in the fascinating question of IE origins and the various solutions which have been proposed, I'd recommend J.P. Mallory's IN SEARCH OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS, which is not perfect but does a good job of showing many viewpoints.

[yashfa · Rating 2 out of 5]

brought up some good questions but overall i didn't feel too satisfied with answers

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published on my blog here in December 1999.

It is very obvious that Romance languages such as Italian and Spanish are very similar, and the reason that this is the case is not hard to find - Roman domination leading to Latin dialects becoming the main languages spoken over much of south western Europe. It was only from the beginning of this century that scholars began to realise that many more languages were related to a lesser degree, covering most of Europe and, surprisingly, India - the Indo-European group of languages. This realisation immediately begs the question of what the reason for this might be, and this has been the subject of much speculation ever since.

By the thirties, the theory that became the consensus view was established. This was that there was a single race, the Indo-Europeans, which had, at some point in the prehistoric past, suddenly exploded from their homeland (thought to be in the Russian steppes) and established rule over a large area, changing the local language through a process known as "elite dominance". This theory rather unfortunately gained the attention of Adolf Hitler, and formed the justification (such as it was) for his view of the Aryans (from the name Aryas given to Indo-European speakers in the Sanskrit oral tradition in India) as a superior race.

By the seventies, the traditional view was strongly questioned, though the alternatives presented also seemed rather implausible. The problem is basically that the connections between the linguistic and archaeological evidence is tenuous at best, and often involves circular reasoning (the linguistic ideas are assumed when the archaeology is interpreted, and the results are then cited as evidence for the linguistic theory). Many of the arguments originally used to establish the theory are now considered simplistic, such as the assumption that a change in culture (in the archaeological sense of a distinctive style of surviving material goods) implies a change of language, and vice versa. In particular, no real evidence has been found of the destruction that would accompany a successful invasion of the type proposed.

Renfrew used this book to propose a new theory, one which seems a lot more convincing than those it sought to replace. Instead of elite dominance, which doesn't always change the language (think of India post independence, for example), he looks at other mechanisms by which the language of an area could change.

His theory is to do with the ways in which agriculture could well have spread in the early Neolithic period. Instead of conquest, this would have been more by infiltration as each successive generation created new fields a few miles beyond their parents'. As agriculture would have brought a vast increase in population density, the dominant language of a region would become the farmers', rather than that of the hunter gatherers they replaced. Pockets of non-Indo-European languages in Europe - the Basque still survives; others such as Etruscan were still spoken in historic times - mark places where the Mesolithic peoples learnt agriculture for themselves.

Renfrew puts forward many arguments to support his hypothesis, but the most telling is that it doesn't suffer from the problems of the standard theory. He says that it is untestable, but I suspect that useful evidence could perhaps today be obtained through DNA testing of prehistoric human remains.

[Vera Santomé]

libro precioso e antigo que paga a pena xa só polas figuras

[Carl · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an interesting problem: to look at the today’s languages and try to figure out where they came from. This book concentrates on the Indo-European family of languages – the largest language family in the world, which stretches from Ireland to India – and tries to follow it back into the dark abyss of time.

I came away from the book with a lot of respect for the erudition, industry and imagination of the scholars in this area, but little faith in their results. There is just not enough solid data to work with. Lots of good ideas, and lots of good reasons not to trust them. For example, (ignoring our ample historical records) the tools of historical linguistics were used on the modern Romance languages to guess at what Latin looked like, and there were some serious errors.

We can’t be sure if the Indo-Europeans migrated from their homeland, or if the languages migrated, or even in which millennia it happened.

[Anise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though I don't agree (in my amateur opinion) with Dr. Renfrew's ultimate conclusion in this book that Indo-European languages arose eight or nine millennia ago in Anatolia (a theory which I have read that he has modified in the years since he authored this book), this book does did open my eyes by pointing out flaws in the assumptions that went into the formulation of the competing Kurgan hypothesis. While I'm still more inclined toward the Kurgan hypothesis, it is good to keep several points of Dr. Renfrew's in mind, most notably for me his discussion of the limitations of linguistic reconstructive method and glottochronology.

[Roar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was increadibly fascinating when I read it, but it seems that theories closer to the classical theory about the Indoeuropeans still have a stronger position.

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I'm going to agree with a lot of the previous reviews that said there were a lot of problems with the book. It had a lot of good thought provoking questions but not a lot of good answers.

[Abby]

As an archaeologist who took few archaeology classes, I sort of missed the whole theory bit. It took reading this decades-old book to figure out that processual archaeology focused on describing social processes, creating hypotheses to test our understanding of those processes against the evidence in the ground. At least, this is what I'm gathering. ("My point is simply that language spread often is indeed associated with intelligible social, demographic, and economic processes which the archaeologist can well aspire to study and understand: that is the nub.") It's an adventurous but carefully argued book, and I think one can learn a lot about how to make an archaeological argument by reading it.

I am only reading it, decades belated, because I like the title. And while I'm sure Renfrew's every argument has been revised many times by now, it did give me the kind of broad introduction to Eurasian archaeology that I wanted. The story of decoding Linear B and the scripts of other languages that I did not know existed remains my favorite part. A few of his arguments do look a bit strange from my side of the Atlantic–his assertion that it was "the spread of a new farming pattern" that drove European population expansion in the Americas is...short-sighted at best.

But when I think about how hard I've worked to achieve even my current knowledge about all the intersecting people and pottery and languages of my region, let alone my continent, I have to admire the scale Renfrew works on here. There is a lot going on when you zoom out this far in time and space. It is hard to make generalizations that make sense, and hard to determine what evidence matters when evidence to the contrary can always be found in specific situations. I'm suspicious of generalizations but I love being able to see this much at one time.

[A. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Review: Archeology & Language by Colin Renfrew

Having a modest facility in language and an interest in archeology, I anticipated reading this book, which is primarily concerned not with language in general, but our language family, the Indo-European. I am sorry to report that I had to force myself through this very boring book.

Dr. Renfrew lays out a scenario for the distribution of the Indo-European language family which radically challenges the majority of linguists, archeologists, and sub-specialists with the merest of speculations. Perhaps others will enjoy this book, some, possibly may be persuaded, but I was not.

Mr. Graziano is the author of From the Cross to the Church. The Emergence of the Church from the Chaos of the Crucifixion.

[Kevin Rohan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I, for one, am convinced of Renfrew's "first farmers" argument explaining the spread of the Indo-European languages throughout Europe. Obviously, there are some holes in the argument (and how could there not be?), but this is still a worthy read and an excellent counter theory to Gimbutas' Kurgan hypothesis. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the "Indo-European problem".

[Don LaVange · Rating 4 out of 5]

Renfrew believes that the Indo-European languages spread from Anatolia into Europe (into Greece and beyond). He says it spread with the expansion of farming. Interesting.

[Renée · Rating 4 out of 5]

As not a great adherent of Renfrew's Indo-European homeland solutions through secondary literature on the subject, but never having read his work I felt obliged to give it a go

[Guto · Rating 2 out of 5]

Diddeall. Darllen difyr ond mae diffyg deall o newid iaith yn tanseilio'r cwbl.

Lack of engagement with and worrying lack of understanding of language change undermines the whole theory. Sadly.

[Narjiss Thanoon]

nice

[Steve Clark]

Edition: New Ed

[Doris Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

While I did not read this book from cover to cover, I still enjoyed what I did read. Colin Renfrew's work has interested me every since we visited Orkney and learned of his work there.

Renfrew finds that one crucially important episode in the prehistory of Europe and the Near East which transformed the way of life at the time was the inception of farming. He says that it seems likely then that the first Indo-European languages came to Europe from Anatolia around 6000 BC, together with the first domesticated plants and animals.