The steppe theory was first formulated byOtto Schrader (1883) andV. Gordon Childe (1926),[3][4] then systematized in the 1950s byMarija Gimbutas, who used the term to group various prehistoric cultures, including theYamnaya (or Pit Grave) culture and its predecessors. In the 2000s,David Anthony instead used the core Yamnaya culture and its relationship with other cultures as a point of reference.
Gimbutas defined the Kurgan culture as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including theSamara andSeroglazovka cultures of theDnieper–Volga region in theCopper Age (early 4th millennium BC). The people of these cultures werenomadic pastoralists, who, according to the model, by the early 3rd millennium BC had expanded throughout thePontic–Caspian steppe and intoEastern Europe.[5]
Genetics studies in the 21st century have demonstrated that populations bearing specificY-DNA haplogroups and adistinct genetic signature expanded into Europe and South Asia from the Pontic-Caspian steppe during the third and second millennia BC. These migrations provide a plausible explanation for the spread of at least some of the Indo-European languages, and suggest that the alternative theories such as theAnatolian hypothesis, which places the Proto-Indo-European homeland inNeolithicAnatolia, are less likely to be correct.[6][7][8][9][10]
Arguments for the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as steppe nomads from the Pontic–Caspian region had already been made in the 19th century by the German scholarsTheodor Benfey (1869) andVictor Hehn [de] (1870), followed notably byOtto Schrader (1883, 1890).[4][11]Theodor Poesche had proposed the nearbyPinsk Marshes. In his standard work[12] about PIE and to a greater extent in a later abbreviated version,[13]Karl Brugmann took the view that theurheimat could not be identified exactly by the scholarship of his time, but he tended toward Schrader's view. However, afterKarl Penka's 1883[14] rejection of non-European PIE origins, most scholars favoured aNorthern European origin.
The view of a Pontic origin was still strongly supported, including by the archaeologistsV. Gordon Childe[15] andErnst Wahle.[16] One of Wahle's students wasJonas Puzinas, who became one of Marija Gimbutas's teachers. Gimbutas, who acknowledged Schrader as a precursor,[17] painstakingly marshalled a wealth of archaeological evidence from the territory of theSoviet Union and theEastern Bloc that was not readily available to Western scholars,[18] revealing a fuller picture of prehistoric Europe.
When it was first proposed in 1956, inThe Prehistory of Eastern Europe, Part 1, Gimbutas's contribution to the search for Indo-European origins was aninterdisciplinary synthesis of archaeology and linguistics. The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins identifies the Pontic–Caspian steppe as the Proto-Indo-European (PIE)urheimat, and a variety of late PIE dialects are assumed to have been spoken across this region. According to this model, the Kurgan culture gradually expanded to the entire Pontic–Caspian steppe, Kurgan IV being identified with theYamnaya culture of around 3000 BC.
The mobility of the Kurgan culture facilitated its expansion over the entire region and is attributed to thedomestication of the horse followed by the use of earlychariots.[19] The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from theSredny Stog culture north of theAzov Sea inUkraine, and would correspond to an early PIE or pre-PIE nucleus of the 5th millennium BC.[19] Subsequent expansion beyond the steppes led to hybrid, or in Gimbutas's terms "kurganized" cultures, such as theGlobular Amphora culture to the west. From these kurganized cultures came the immigration ofProto-Greeks to theBalkans and the nomadicIndo-Iranian cultures to the east around 2500 BC.
Gimbutas defined and introduced the term "Kurgan culture" in 1956 with the intention of introducing a "broader term" that would combineSredny Stog II,Pit Grave (Yamnaya), andCorded ware horizons (spanning the 4th to 3rd millennia in much of Eastern and Northern Europe).[20] The Kurganarchaeological culture or cultural horizon comprises the various cultures of the Pontic–Caspian steppe in the Copper Age to Early Bronze Age (5th to 3rd millennia BC), identified by similar artifacts and structures, but subject to inevitable imprecision and uncertainty. The eponymouskurgans (mound graves) are only one among several common features.
Cultures that Gimbutas considered as part of the "Kurgan culture":
Gimbutas's original suggestion identifies four successive stages of the Kurgan culture:
Kurgan I,Dnieper/Volga region, earlier half of the 4th millennium BC. Apparently evolving from cultures of the Volga basin, subgroups include theSamara andSeroglazovo cultures.
Wave 2, mid 4th millennium BC, originating in theMaykop culture and resulting in advances of"kurganized" hybrid cultures into northern Europe around 3000 BC (Globular Amphora culture,Baden culture, and ultimatelyCorded Ware culture). According to Gimbutas this corresponds to the first intrusion of Indo-European languages into western and northern Europe.
Wave 3, 3000–2800 BC, expansion of the Pit Grave culture beyond the steppes, with the appearance of the characteristic pit graves as far as modern Romania, Bulgaria, eastern Hungary and Georgia, coincident with the end of theCucuteni–Trypillia culture andTrialeti culture in Georgia (c. 2750 BC).
4000–3500: The Pit Grave culture (a.k.a. Yamnaya culture), the prototypicalkurgan builders, emerges in the steppe, and theMaykop culture in the northernCaucasus.Indo-Hittite models postulate the separation ofProto-Anatolian before this time.
3500–3000:Middle PIE. The Pit Grave culture is at its peak, representing the classical reconstructedProto-Indo-European society withstone idols, predominantly practicinganimal husbandry in permanent settlements protected byhillforts, subsisting on agriculture, and fishing along rivers. Contact of the Pit Grave culture with lateNeolithic Europe cultures results in the "kurganized"Globular Amphora andBaden cultures (Wave 2). The Maykop culture shows the earliest evidence of the beginningBronze Age, and Bronze weapons and artifacts are introduced to Pit Grave territory. Probable earlySatemization.
3000–2500:Late PIE. The Pit Grave culture extends over the entire Pontic steppe (Wave 3). TheCorded Ware culture extends from theRhine to theVolga, corresponding to the latest phase of Indo-European unity, the vast "kurganized" area disintegrating into various independent languages and cultures, still in loose contact enabling the spread of technology and early loans between the groups, except for the Anatolian and Tocharian branches, which are already isolated from these processes. Thecentum–satem break is probably complete, but the phonetic trends of Satemization remain active.
The Kurgan hypothesis describes the initial spread of Proto-Indo-European during the 5th and 4th millennia BC.[22] As used by Gimbutas, the term "kurganized" implied that the culture could have been spread by no more than small bands whoimposed themselves on local people as an elite. This idea of PIE and itsdaughter languages diffusing east and west without mass movement proved popular with archaeologists in the 1970s (thepots-not-people paradigm).[23] The question of further Indo-Europeanization of Central and Western Europe, Central Asia and Northern India during theBronze Age is beyond the scope of the Kurgan hypothesis, and far more uncertain than the events of the Copper Age, and subject to some controversy. The rapidly developing fields ofarchaeogenetics andgenetic genealogy since the late 1990s have not only confirmed a migratory pattern out of the Pontic Steppe at the relevant time[6][7][8][24] but also suggest the possibility that the population movement involved was more substantial than earlier anticipated[6] and invasive.[24][25]
Gimbutas believed that the expansions of the Kurgan culture were a series of essentially-hostile military incursions in which a new warrior culture imposed itself on the peaceful,matrilinear, and matrifocal (but notmatriarchal) cultures of "Old Europe" and replaced it with apatriarchalwarrior society,[26] a process visible in the appearance of fortified settlements and hillforts and the graves of warrior-chieftains:
The process of Indo-Europeanization was a cultural, not a physical, transformation. It must be understood as a military victory in terms of successfully imposing a new administrative system, language, and religion upon the indigenous groups.[27]
In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized the authoritarian nature of this transition from the egalitarian society centered on the nature/earthmother goddess (Gaia) to a patriarchy worshipping the father/sun/weather god (Zeus,Dyaus).[28]
J. P. Mallory (in 1989) accepted the Kurgan hypothesis as thede facto standard theory of Indo-European origins, but he distinguished it from an implied "radical" scenario of military invasion. Gimbutas' actual main scenario involved slow accumulation of influence through coercion or extortion, as distinguished from general raiding shortly followed by conquest:
One might at first imagine that the economy of argument involved with the Kurgan solution should oblige us to accept it outright. But critics do exist and their objections can be summarized quite simply: Almost all of the arguments for invasion and cultural transformations are far better explained without reference to Kurgan expansions, and most of the evidence so far presented is either totally contradicted by other evidence, or is the result of gross misinterpretation of the cultural history of Eastern, Central, and Northern Europe.[29]
In the 2000s, Alberto Piazza andLuigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza tried to align the Anatolian hypothesis with the steppe theory. According to Piazza, "[i]t is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there fromAnatolia."[30] According to Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza (2006), the Yamna-culture may have been derived from Middle Eastern Neolithic farmers who migrated to the Pontic steppe and developed pastoral nomadism.[31] Wells agrees with Cavalli-Sforza that there is "some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East."[32] Nevertheless, the Anatolian hypothesis is incompatible with the linguistic evidence.[33]
David Anthony'sThe Horse, the Wheel and Language describes his "revised steppe theory". He considers the term "Kurgan culture" so imprecise as to be useless, and instead uses the coreYamnaya culture and its relationship with other cultures as points of reference.[34] He points out:
The Kurgan culture was so broadly defined that almost any culture with burial mounds, or even (like the Baden culture) without them could be included.[34]
He does not include theMaykop culture among those that he considers to be Indo-European-speaking and presumes instead that they spoke aCaucasian language.[35]
^Mallory 1989, p. 185, "The Kurgan solution is attractive and has been accepted by many archaeologists and linguists, in part or total. It is the solution one encounters in theEncyclopædia Britannica and theGrand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse.".
^Strazny 2000, p. 163. "The single most popular proposal is the Pontic steppes (see the Kurgan hypothesis)..."
^Renfrew, Colin (1990).Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. CUP Archive. pp. 37–38.ISBN978-0-521-38675-3.
^abJones-Bley, Karlene (2008). "Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, November 3–4, 2006".Historiographia Linguistica.35 (3):465–467.doi:10.1075/hl.35.3.15koe.ISSN0302-5160.
^Grünthal, Riho; Kallio, Petri (2012).A Linguistic Map of Prehistoric Northern Europe. Société Finno-Ougrienne. p. 122.ISBN978-952-5667-42-4.
^Karl Brugmann,Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. 1.1, Strassburg 1886, p. 2.
^Karl Brugmann,Kurze vergleichende Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol. 1, Strassburg 1902, pp. 22–23.
^Karl Penka,Origines Ariacae: Linguistisch-ethnologische Untersuchungen zur ältesten Geschichte der arischen Völker und Sprachen (Vienna: Taschen, 1883), 68.
^Vere Gordon Childe,The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins (London: Kegan Paul, 1926).
^abParpola inBlench & Spriggs 1999, p. 181. "The history of the Indo-European words for 'horse' shows that the Proto-Indo-European speakers had long lived in an area where the horse was native and / or domesticated.(Mallory 1989, pp. 161–163). The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from the Ukrainian Srednij Stog culture, which flourishedc. 4200–3500 BC and is likely to represent an early phase of the Proto-Indo-European culture (Anthony 1986, pp. 295f.;Mallory 1989, pp. 162, 197–210). During thePit Grave culture (c. 3500–2800 BCE), which continued the cultures related to Srednij Stog and probably represents the late phase of the Proto-Indo-European culture – full-scale pastoral technology, including the domesticated horse, wheeled vehicles, stock breeding and limited horticulture, spread all over the Pontic steppes, and,c. 3000 BCE, in practically every direction from that centre (Anthony 1986;Anthony 1991;Mallory 1989, vol. 1).
^Gimbutas 1970, p. 156: "The nameKurgan culture (the Barrow culture) was introduced by the author in 1956 as a broader term to replace [something] andPit-Grave (RussianYamnaya), names used by Soviet scholars for the culture in the eastern Ukraine and south Russia, andCorded Ware, Battle-Axe,Ochre-Grave,Single-Grave and other names given to complexes characterized by elements ofKurgan appearance that formed in various parts of Europe".
^Piazza & Cavalli-Sforza 2006, p. [page needed]: "...if the expansions began at 9,500 years ago from Anatolia and at 6,000 years ago from theYamnaya culture region, then a 3,500-year period elapsed during their migration to theVolga-Don region from Anatolia, probably through the Balkans. There a completely new, mostly pastoral culture developed under the stimulus of an environment unfavorable to standard agriculture, but offering new attractive possibilities. Our hypothesis is, therefore, that Indo-European languages derived from a secondary expansion from theYamnaya culture region after the Neolithic farmers, possibly coming from Anatolia and settled there, developing pastoral nomadism.
^Wells & Read 2002, p. [page needed]: "... while we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes, there is little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have dispersed over the years. There is clearlysome genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues showed, but the signal is not strong enough for us to trace the distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of Indo-European-speaking Europe."
Anthony, David W.; Bogucki, Peter; Comşa, Eugen; Gimbutas, Marija; Jovanović, Borislav; Mallory, J. P.; Milisaukas, Sarunas (1986). "The "Kurgan Culture," Indo-European Origins, and the Domestication of the Horse: A Reconsideration".Current Anthropology.27 (4):291–313.doi:10.1086/203441.ISSN0011-3204.JSTOR2743045.S2CID143388176.
Gimbutas, Marija (1956),The Prehistory of Eastern Europe. Part I: Mesolithic, Neolithic and Copper Age Cultures in Russia and the Baltic Area, Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum.
Gimbutas, Marija (1970), "Proto-Indo-European Culture: The Kurgan Culture during the Fifth, Fourth, and Third Millennia B.C.", in Cardona, George; Hoenigswald, Henry M.; Senn, Alfred (eds.),Indo-European and Indo-Europeans: Papers Presented at the Third Indo-European Conference at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 155–197,ISBN0-8122-7574-8.
Gimbutas, Marija (1982), "Old Europe in the Fifth Millenium B.C.: The European Situation on the Arrival of Indo-Europeans", in Polomé, Edgar C. (ed.),The Indo-Europeans in the Fourth and Third Millennia, Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers,ISBN0-89720-041-1
Gimbutas, Marija (Spring–Summer 1985), "Primary and Secondary Homeland of the Indo-Europeans: comments on Gamkrelidze–Ivanov articles",Journal of Indo-European Studies,13 (1&2):185–201
Renfrew, Colin (1999), "Time depth, convergence theory, and innovation in Proto-Indo-European: 'Old Europe' as a PIE linguistic area",Journal of Indo-European Studies,27 (3–4):257–293
Schmoeckel, Reinhard (1999),Die Indoeuropäer. Aufbruch aus der Vorgeschichte [The Indo-Europeans: Rising from pre-history] (in German), Bergisch-Gladbach (Germany): Bastei Lübbe,ISBN3-404-64162-0
Strazny, Philipp, ed. (2000).Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics (1st ed.). Routledge.ISBN978-1-57958-218-0.
Zanotti, D. G. (1982), "The Evidence for Kurgan Wave One As Reflected By the Distribution of 'Old Europe' Gold Pendants",Journal of Indo-European Studies, vol. 10, pp. 223–234
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