PIE Speakers and the Horsecation of Indo-Europeans with the domesticated horse ex-
presses itself in the assumption that when one finds evidence
for domesticated horses (even when they were nothing but food
animals), one has found evidence for Indo-Europeans. Thus
Homer Thomas, in looking for archaeological evidence that in
the second half of the third millennium an Indo-European lan-
guage was already being spoken in southeastern Europe, ob-
serves that "the horse, which the philologist has long associ-
ated with the Indo-Europeans, offers further evidence that
these invaders were Indo-Europeans." 23 Similarly, in rounding
up "data which prove the presence of ethnic Indo-Europeans,"
Gamkrelidze and Ivanov give pride of place to "the remains of
domesticated horses." 24 In so doing, the linguists were merely
echoing James Mellaart, who presented horse bones as "archae-
ological evidence" that there were "Indo-European speakers"
in Anatolia in the middle of the fourth millennium. 25
A less extreme version of the association between PIE speak-
ers and the horse is the assumption that the "tamed" horse,
which is to say the horse used as a riding animal or a draft
animal, was peculiar to Proto-Indo-European society. The
belief that PIE speakers pioneered the taming of horses and
introduced the wheeled vehicle to Europe is imbedded in the
foundation of Gimbutas's "Kurgan hypothesis": her Proto-Indo-
Europeans who invade Europe in the middle of the fifth millen-
nium are "horse-riding pastoralists from the Pontic steppes,"
who bring with them ox-drawn wagons (the more likely pos-
sibility is that wagons did not exist until ca. 3000 B.C.). 26 By
Peoples," JIES 9 (1981): 177—204; J. P. Mallory, "The Ritual Treatment
of the Horse in Early Kurgan Tradition," ibid., 205—26.
- Thomas, "Dating the Indo-European Dispersal in Europe,"
- Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, "Problem," 179.
- Mellaart, "Anatolia and the Indo-Europeans," p. 137.
- Gimbutas, "Old Europe in the Fifth Millennium B.C.: The Eu-
ropean Situation on the Arrival of Indo-Europeans," in The Indo-Europeans in
the Fourth and Third Millennia, ed. E. C. Polome (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ka-