rule over the continent. The linguistic map of Europe itself is the result of military
conquest. Most Europeans west of the Rhine speak a “Roman” language because
the Romans conquered most of Europe west of the Rhine. And the Anglo-Saxons
who took over southeastern Britain in the fifth century undoubtedly left their
linguistic mark on the island.
This mechanism of language replacement is so familiar that historians can have
little difficulty with a theory that the Indo-European languages came to Europe
in the wake of military conquests. Much more difficult would be to come up with
any other explanation of how and why Indo-European languages came to be
adopted through most of Europe. Renfrew’s Archaeology and Languagewas an
attempt to substitute an agricultural “wave of advance” for Gimbutas’ riders who
Indo-Europeanize Europe as they conquer it. Renfrew’s wave of advance works
well enough for the spread of Indo-Hittite into Europe and the spread of PIE along
the Asian steppes, but if the Indo-European riders are driven from the field it
probably will be by conquerors of another kind.
It is quite clear that in Europe militarism, with chariots, first appeared in the
Carpathian basin and in Greece. This happened, on the chronology employed
here, shortly before 1600 BC. By ca. 1500 BCa military class with ties to the Car -
pathian basin had also taken control of southern Scandinavia and of northern
Italy. In these latter areas chariots were also present, but probably performed little
or no military service. In Europe, unlike the Near East, the actual employment of
military strength may have been unnecessary. For those who displayed it, the mere
appearance of military strength may have been enough to take over the lands they
coveted. I believe that the militarizing of the Carpathian basin and northern Italy
was the occasion for their Indo-Europeanization, and I suspect that the militarizing
of southern Scandinavia may have launched the Germanic subgroup of Indo-
European.
Tin bronze, and some prehistory of temperate Europe
Before exploring the arrival of militarism in the Carpathian basin, I will sketch
as best I can—which will obviously leave much to be desired—several aspects
of the prehistory of the Carpathian basin, within the broader context of temperate
Europe, down to the early second millennium BC. By that time several parts of
temperate Europe were profiting from the commencement of tin bronze metallurgy
(in this book, as the reader has been warned, the eastern limits of “Europe” are
the Gulf of Finland and the eastern arc of the Carpathian mountains). In the new
metallurgy tin, very rare in Europe and therefore a semi-precious metal, was
intentionally alloyed to copper. The standard ratio is approximately one part tin
to ten parts copper, but in the early stages of the new metallurgy the ratio was
often closer to 1–20. In the third millennium BCand even the fourth tin bronze
had occasionally been produced, but in most of the so-called bronze objects dating
before ca. 2200 BCthe metal was a mixture of copper and arsenic.^10
Through most of the third millennium BCnorthern Europe was characterized
by the enormous Corded Ware (also known as the Schnurkeramik, Battle-Axe,
134 Militarism in temperate Europe