Linguistics and Archaeologythe old dates), Gimbutas has in the last twenty years raised her
chronology by almost a millennium.
Not surprisingly, Indo-Europeanists must now choose be-
tween several chronologies for the Indo-European Volkerwan-
derungen. In the reconstruction offered by Bosch-Gimpera,
the Proto-Indo-European community existed from the fifth
millennium onward, but about 2000 B.C. , disturbances in the
Eurasian steppe dislodged portions of both the satem and the
centum provinces, sending PIE speakers southward. The chro-
nology constructed by Homer Thomas, almost entirely on
the basis of pottery, is somewhat earlier, and dates the main
dispersal to the middle of the third millennium. The same
conclusion, supported by both archaeological and linguistic
arguments, had been presented by Devoto: the Proto-Indo-
European community began to break up before 2500 B.C.,
with some PIE speakers (whose language would develop into
something other than Greek) reaching Thessaly during the
neolithic period. Devoto concluded that a second wave of PIE
speakers brought Minyan Ware and Proto-Greek into Greece
ca. 1900 B.C., and that the Aegean was thus Indo-European-
ized by degrees.
Among Indo-Europeanists, however, the most influential
chronology for the folk migrations appears to be the very high
chronology that serves as a scaffold for Gimbutas's "Kurgan
hypothesis." 9 According to Gimbutas, Indo-European pasto-
ralists from the Kurgan Culture of the Pontic steppe migrated
into Europe in three massive waves: the first ca. 4400 B.C., the
- The thesis has been regularly recast (the successive revisions
pushing the dates upward), but remains fundamentally what it was. For rel-
atively recent and succinct statements of her position, see Gimbutas,
"Proto-Indo-European Culture: The Kurgan Culture during the Fifth,
Fourth and Third Millennia B.C.," in Indo-European and Indo-Europeans, ed.
G. Cardona et al., 815-36; "The First Wave of Eurasian Steppe Pastoralists
into Copper Age Europe,"J1ES 5 (1977): 277-338; "The Three Waves of
the Kurgan People into Old Europe, 4500—2500 B.C.," Arch, suisses d'an-
thropol. gen. 43 (1979 [1981]): 113-37-