24 Harald Haarmann
continuity of economic and cultural development for the period from the Mesolithic to
the Neolithic in southeastern Europe.
The history of the spread of Indo-European cultures and languages is multifaceted, in
the sense that the fabric of Indo-European identity underwent changes in the process
of spreading. Those Indo-Europeans who left the steppes of southern Russia to move
westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia were pastoralists (Gimbutas 1991:
351 ff.). Those who migrated later into western Europe were also Indo-Europeans, how-
ever, with a fundamentally different foundation for their socioeconomic outlook. They
were agriculturalists, the offspring of pastoralist ancestors who, during several gener-
ations of acculturation, had experienced a shift in their way of life. The key concepts
“Indo-European” and “Indo-Europeanness” are used here as blanket terms for describ-
ing ethnic, cultural, and linguistic agglomerations of features that do not apply to other
groups of differing affiliation.
The pre-Indo-European populations of southeastern Europe experienced an early
shift to agriculture through processes of acculturation and, from c. 6500BCEonward,
the pace of cultural development was swifter when compared with that in Anatolia.
With regard to symbolic activity and visual communication, the Paleo-Europeans (or
pre-Indo-Europeans) are to be credited with the earliest experiments with writing
technology in the Old World, and the beginnings of a vivid use of signs and symbols
in southeastern Europe (starting around 5300BCE) predate the emergence of ancient
Sumerian writing by 2,000 years (Merlini 2009; Haarmann 2011b). There are other
achievements of the ancient civilization of southeastern Europe in which the inven-
tiveness of the pre-Indo-European population is manifested, among them an advanced
pyrotechnology (for the production of high-quality pottery and ceramics) and the
invention of the potter’s turning device (preceding the actual wheel), which is first
documented around the middle of the fifth millenniumBCE. Early metalworking (of
copper since the sixth millenniumBCE, of gold since the fifth millenniumBCE)isalso
known from the Balkan region. Certain smelting techniques have a longer history in
Europe than in the Near East. The oldest gold treasure of the world was retrieved
from a Copper Age necropolis near Varna in Bulgaria, and is dated to c. 4500BCE
(Slavchev 2009).
The history of Indo-Europeanization in the European Southeast is not the story of the
advent of civilization to the region. On the contrary, the Indo-Europeans who entered
southeastern Europe absorbed much of the essence of the Old European civilization
that had flourished before the arrival of the steppe people. They did not only integrate
cultural patterns of the early agriculturalists but also thousands of lexical elements from
the language of Old Europeans into their own. The quality of pre-Indo-European bor-
rowings differs markedly from hunter–gatherer vocabulary. In fact, the substratum in
ancient Greek stems from the language of a sedentary population with agrarian lifestyles
and advanced technological skills. Among the borrowed names for plants are those for
cultivated plants (e.g.,elaia“olive” andoinos“wine”). In the domain of handicraft
and technology, the Greeks learned many things from their skilled predecessors. The
ancient Greeks adopted terms for pottery (e.g.,keramos“clay”) and for metalwork-
ing (e.g.,kaminos“furnace,”khalkos“copper”). Contrary to the diffusionists’ belief,