Miscellanea Indo-Europea (review)

This volume contains nine papers dealing with various questions in the field of Indo-European studies, edited and prefaced by Edgar C. Polomé, a leading Indo-Europeanist whose recent death has been a great loss for the discipline. The first paper (3–73), a comprehensive bibliography collected by Alain de Benoist, consists of a chronologically arranged list of books on Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans published from 1710 up to 1998. This bibliography is bound to become a very useful tool for research in Indo-European studies. Just for the sake of accuracy, I will remark that some Spanish books from the end of the nineteenth century are missing—those interested in the historiography of Indo-European studies can easily find the references in Juan Antonio Álvarez-Pedrosa’s paper (‘La lingüística indoeuropea en España hasta 1930’, Revista Española de Lingüística 24.49–67, 1994).

Two contributions to this volume deal with the problem of the spread of the Indo-Europeans and the Urheimat. Garett Olmstead’s paper, ‘Archeology, social evolution, and the spread of Indo-European languages and cultures’ (75–116), argues that Indo- Europeans must have arisen as a mixed farming-husbandry society in central and eastern Europe in the Late Neolithic period and that their final stage of community can be dated back to the Early Bronze Age in the area of the Unětice and Otomani-Füzesabony cultures (2300–1700 bc). The spread of the Indo- European culture should be linked to the superiority of that mixed economic system—which involved a clientship society in which virtually every man could become a soldier—over purely agricultural societies with specialized, but limited in number, armies directly dependant on the elites. Alexander Häusler (‘Nomadenhypothese und Ursprung der Indogermanen’, 117–70) carefully revises the background of what is today the most widely accepted hypothesis about the origin and spread of the Indo-Europeans— Marija Gimbutas’s identification of the Kurgan culture to the north of the Black Sea with the original Indo-European culture and the explanation that the Indo-Europeans expanded from that area in succesive waves due to the advantage of mastering horse-riding. Häusler shows how Gimbutas’s explanation, in fact, owes much to outdated theories of the beginning of the 20th century and how it is now untenable in view of the advances of our knowledge of the prehistory of Central and Western Europe. The critique of Gimbutas’s hypothesis is well-founded. Haüsler argues that the Indo-Europeans are autochthonous both in Asia and in Europe, and what we call ‘Indo- European’ originated by a process of convergence between languages in a linguistic continuum from the North Sea to the Caspian Sea. Both Olmsted’s and Häusler’s papers are a sound starting point for reopening the discussion on the origin and spread of the Indo-Europeans—a subject that after the passionate debates that followed the publication in 1987 of Colin Renfrew’s Archeology and language. The puzzle of Indo-European origins (Cambridge: CUP, 1987) has been quite neglected in the last years in the mainstream of Indo-European studies.

Françoise Bader has contributed a paper (171–217) in which she studies the data concerning Pelasgian and the Pelasgians provided by Homer. Two papers deal with strictly linguistic matters. Carol F. Justus (‘Can a counting system be an index of linguistic relationship?’) starts from one of Theo Vennemann’s supposed bases for his unfounded theory of a pan-Basque substratum across all Europe— the diffusion of vigesimal systems of counting (for a documented view on the prehistory of Basque and a critique of Vennemann’s ideas see Joaquín Gorrochategui and Joseba Lakarra, ‘Comparación lingüística, tipología y reconstrucción del protovasco’ (Religión, lengua y culturas prenomanas de Hispania, ed. by Francisco Villar, Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca...