and the “New Archaeology” was looking not for signs of migration and displace -
ment but for evidence of the evolution in situof material cultures. Radiocarbon
dating also tended to weaken the belief in migrations, the resultant dates often
conflicting with the supposed dates of a migration.
The folk migration model was also undone by common sense, as in a manifesto
from Oliver Dickinson:
I will state flatly that I find it extremely implausible that, once established,
basically agricultural communities—such as almost all the prehistoric peoples
of Europe and nearer Asia were from the Neolithic period onwards—were
as ready as this model requires to uproot themselves and leave the land that
represented their economic capital, held the burials of their dead, and had other
cultural and religious associations for them. I am particularly reluctant to
envisage this for periods when the vast majority of any community would
have had no faster means of travel than their own feet.^15For these and other reasons, Völkerwanderungenare no longer so likely as
formerly they were to cloud discussions about the spread or dispersal of the Indo-
European languages.
The homeland of the Proto-Indo-Hittite language
No less important than the vindication of the Indo-Hittite theory and the fading
of the Volkswanderung is the growing evidence that the Anatolian language
family was indigenous to south-central and western Anatolia. This was proposed,
although less clearly than it could have been, in Colin Renfrew’s Archaeology
and Language,^16 and it has been supported by subsequent research. It nevertheless
is still resisted by many linguists and possibly even by most. In his chapter, “The
Position of Anatolian,” soon to be published in Handbook of Indo-European
Studies, Melchert writes “I follow here the long-standing majority view that the
Indo-European languages of Anatolia are intrusive to Asia Minor, having moved
there from some point further north in Europe.”^17 Melchert concedes, nevertheless,
that the supposed folk migration into Anatolia could not have occurred late in the
third millennium BC, as many linguists once assumed:
Contrary to earlier views, there has now developed a consensus among linguists
that entry of Indo-European speakers into Asia Minor was much earlier than
previously assumed.... The gist of the argument is that the attested degree of
differentiation of the IE Anatolian languages such as Luvian and Hittite already
by the beginning of the second millennium requires at a minimum that their
divergence from Proto-Anatolian began by the middle of the third millennium.
It may easily have begun as early as the end of the fourth.^18Whether or not linguists have reached a consensus on this point, there could
have been no migration of Indo-European speakers (or, let us say, of Indo-Hittite
Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European 5