Linguistics and Archaeologyin Chapter Six) persuaded most Indo-Europeanists that the
homeland of the Indo-Europeans could not have been in north-
ern Europe. Hermes essentially showed the incompatibility of
two theses that in her day were generally accepted: the Indo-
European homeland was in northern Europe, and the Indo-Eu-
ropeans pioneered the use of the horse-drawn chariot. The
"tamed" horse, Hermes demonstrated quite conclusively, was
not known in northern Europe before ca. 1500 B.C. Her arti-
cles encouraged Indo-Europeanists to look for the Indo-Euro-
pean Urheimat in places where the "tamed" horse was attested
at an early date, and in the last forty years the favorite candi-
dates have been the steppe above the Black Sea or, alterna-
tively, Hungary and the rest of the Carpathian Basin. 4
The credentials of the Carpathian Basin, or more broadly of
the entire expanse of central Europe covered by the Early Dan-
ubian (or Bandkeramik) Culture, were urged by Giacomo De-
voto in 1962, and a more southerly variation of the same case
has recently been defended by I. M. Diakonoff. The Pontic
steppe, however, seems to have a slight edge among Indo-Eu-
ropeanists as the most likely site for the Proto-Indo-European
community. The arguments marshaled by Childe have in re-
cent decades been augmented and effectively advocated by
Marija Gimbutas, a specialist (as was Childe) in the archaeol-
ogy of prehistoric Europe and the Eurasian steppe. 5 A popular
synthesis of the two options is that the land of the PIE speakers
was a vast place, stretching from the Urals to central Europe,
and so included both the Carpathian Basin and the Pontic
steppe. This theory was favored by Anton Scherer 6 and was
- The beginnings of this controversy are chronicled in A. Scherer,
ed., Die Urheimat der Indogermanen (Wege der Forschung 166) (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968). - G. Devoto, Origini Indoeuropee (Florence: Sansoni, 1962); on
Gimbutas and Diakonoff, see below. - A. Scherer, "Das Problem der indogermanischen Urheimat," Ar-
chiv fur Kulturgeschichte 33 (1950): 3-16.