been suggested that no. 262 may also have been carved at that time.^153 South of
the Alps, however, nothing vehicular has been found in so early a context. For
no. 262 Woytowitsch suggested a date in the “mittlere bis späte Bronzezeit,”
agreeing with Emmanuel Anati’s dating of the Val Camonica carvings.^154
Obviously the Terremare wheelwrights made spoked wheels, but the earliest
in corporeevidence for other kinds of wheels in Italy also comes from Terremare
sites: a disk wheel from Castione dei Marchesi (in the Parma province), and both
a disk wheel and a cross-bar wheel from Mercurago (near Novara in the Piedmont).
These three wheels were excavated in the nineteenth century and the lack of a
clear stratigraphic context makes their dating problematic, but they too—like the
spoked wheels—seem to have been made no earlier than the middle centuries of
the second millennium BC.^155 On present evidence, therefore, it appears that the
PIE terms for wheeled vehicles were brought into Italy ca. 1500 BC, along with
the vehicles to which they were attached. I must leave to an Indo-Europeanist the
question of how the Italic languages (necessarily along with Venetic) may have
originated at that time, from the meeting of a military class’s Indo-European
language with one or more native languages of northern Italy.
Notes
1 Neumann 2009, p. 102: “Fliessende Gewässer nehmen in der gesamten Bronzezeit
in den meisten Regionen als Niederlegungsort von Waffenden ersten Rang ein.”
2 On the votive deposit see Cupitò and Leonardi 2005, and Bietti Sestieri et al. 2013.
3 For drawing of the weapons see Cupitò and Leonardi 2005, Fig. 8.
4 See Curry 2016.
5 For his catalogue of bits in Romania see Boroffka 1998.
6 On the pottery see Boroffka 2013, pp. 884–888.
7 On the genesis of languages see Renfrew 1991 and Nettle 1998. On the extinction
of languages see Nettle and Romaine 2000.
8 Haugen 1972, p. 257, noted that in the middle of the 19th century more than 100
Native American languages were spoken in well-watered California while only two
or three major languages covered most of the arid Great Plains. “In each case it is
clear that in areas where small populations could easily isolate themselves from each
other and live their lives untroubled by their neighbors, they tended also in the course
of time to develop their own language. This process of gradual and unconscious
differentiation of language over a period of time is one of the most characteristic
features of language, one which has been much studied by linguists.”
9 Hock and Joseph 1996 deal with language replacement especially at pp. 446–452, a
chapter titled, “Language Death.” Less prestigious and less useful languages
constantly give way to languages that are more prestigious or more useful. In
discussing language “death,” Hock and Joseph differentiate between “suicide,” when
speakers of a low-status language voluntarily abandon it, and “murder,” when
authorities exert themselves to suppress or eradicate a language.
10 O’Brien 2015 is mostly a study of copper mines in central and western Europe, Britain
and Ireland, but is also helpful (pp. 187–193) on the vast Kargaly mines of the southern
Urals. See also Harding 2000, pp. 197–241, for an excellent description of the
working of metals in Bronze Age Europe.
11 On European settlements in the Early Bronze Age see the second chapter (“The Bronze
Age House and Village”), pp. 22–72 in Harding 2000.Militarism in temperate Europe 167