The Coming of the Greekssecond ca. 3400 B.C. (a linguist has recently assigned the Hit-
tite invasion of Anatolia to this "Indo-European ll" wave), 10
and the last ca. 2800 B.C. (it was in this third wave that the
Proto-Greeks arrived in Greece). The Aryan invasions of India
and Persia, on this theory, occurred much later than the mi-
grations to Europe and were of a different kind.
Although Gimbutas's "Kurgan hypothesis" enjoys high
standing among Indo-Europeanists, it is becoming increas-
ingly suspect in archaeological circles. Stuart Piggott finds the
thesis "not susceptible of demonstration by direct archaeolog-
ical evidence, but at best by second-order inferences or sheer
assumptions"; he also complains that "where direct archaeolog-
ical evidence is used to support the 'Kurgan' thesis, it is too
often treated in an uncritical, if not tendentious manner." 11
Piggott's special concern was Gimbutas's claim that wheeled
vehicles originated in the Eurasian steppe ca. 4500 B.C., and
that the innovation was introduced into Europe by invaders
who came from the steppe above the Black Sea and the Cauca-
sus (this claim is one of the principal underpinnings of the
"Kurgan hypothesis"). Piggott's conclusion is that the diffu-
sion of the wheeled vehicle throughout much of Europe oc-
curred at the end of the fourth or the beginning of the third
millennium. In addition, Piggott argues that the diffusion was
not the result of invasions from the east: the wheeled vehicle
was not invented until late in the fourth millennium, and its
spread into much of Eurasia was the result of a "technological
explosion," or the rapid adoption of a "rather specialized tech-
nological contraption." Another very recent but narrower ar-
chaeological study of wheeled vehicles in the Pontic steppe
supports Piggott's reservations about the "Kurgan Peoples" as
disseminators of wheeled transport. Alexander Hausler con-
- F. Adrados, "The Archaic Structure of Hittite: The Crux of the
Problem," JIES 10(1982): 1-35.
U.S. Piggott, The Earliest Wheeled Transport: From the Atlantic Coast
to the Caspian Sea (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), 61.
3°