Linguistics and Archaeology
eludes that neither the wagon in the early third millennium
nor the chariot in the early second was pioneered on the Pontic
steppe. Hausler's review of the evidence, in fact, argues that
the wagon was in use in the Balkans before it was adopted by
the peoples above the Black Sea.I2 Finally, David Anthony has
now submitted a comprehensive criticism of the "Kurgan hy-
pothesis" from an archaeological and anthropological perspec-
tive.' 3
A somewhat eccentric response to the various chronologies
that have been proposed for the PIE speakers' migrations, and
to the archaeological arguments that undergird these chronol-
ogies, was registered by Colin Renfrew, who suggested (al-
though tentatively) that the entire notion of an "Indo-Euro-
pean homeland" was unwarranted: archaeological evidence, he
argued, does not indicate that massive migrations ever inun-
dated Europe, and perhaps the various Indo-European lan-
guages that we find there in the historical period were de-
scended from indigenous Indo-European languages of the
neolithic period. 14 Renfrew's suggestion is in some ways a less
radical version of Herbert Kiihn's thesis that the period of
Proto-Indo-European unity must have been the Ice Age, and
- A. Hausler, "Neue Belege zur Geschichte von Rad und Wagen
im nordpontischen Raum," Ethnogr.-Archaolog. Zeitschrift 25 (1984): 629—
- On page 675, Hausler comments that the chronological priority of the
Balkans over the Pontic steppe in the adoption of wheeled vehicles "ist ein
entscheidendes Argument gegen das von Gimbutas vertretene militante
Geschichtsbild der alles iiberrollenden ostlichen Erobererscharen."
- D. W. Anthony, "The 'Kurgan Culture,' Indo-European
Origins, and the Domestication of the Horse: A Reconsideration," Current
Anthropology 27 (1986): 291—304.
- C. Renfrew, "Problems in the General Correlation of Archaeo-
logical and Linguistic Strata in Prehistoric Greece: the Model of Authoch-
thonous Origin," in Bronze Age Migrations, ed. Grassland and Birchall,
263-75. A longtime critic of diffusionist theories, Renfrew based his argu-
ment entirely on the negative evidence of archaeology. For a linguist's re-
sponse, see Grassland's comments on Renfrew's paper, ibid., 276-79.
