Year: 2007
Author: David W. Anthony
Genre: History of Europe, Linguistics, Archeology, Indo-European Studies
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 978-0-691-5887-0
English language
Format: DjVu
Quantity of pages: 553 in the book

(excerpts from the review by Klein LS on this book.The Ukrainian text of the review is contained in the collection: Kam'yana Ukrayina .- Vip 13. - Kiev: Shlyakh, 2010. - P. 291-299.)
In the book of David Anthony over 500 pages, many wonderful maps, charts, drawings and digital tables; The bibliography consists of more than 800 titles - mostly in Russian, Ukrainian and English, there are also German and French works. Despite the intriguing title, more appropriate for a popular science book, we have before us a solid research on the origin of Indo-Europeans - a classic topic of discussion among linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and, more recently, geneticists.
The author is an American (from the University of Pennsylvania) well known to the Indo-Europeanists of the West, as well as archaeologists of Russia, Ukraine and Moldavia - as his printed works, always creative, original, with bold ideas, and his participation in archeological expeditions, especially in the Volga region. He has long formed his approach to solving the problem and his own concept. Of several hypotheses of the origin of Indo-Europeans, now vividly discussed, he defends the concept of steppe origin. This concept in archeology was put forward by Ernst Valais, picked up by Gordon Child and Maria Gimbutas, and recently conducted by James Mallory. The concept is not new, arguments too. The emphasis on horses, riders and chariots as a recognizing sign of Indo-European culture was exaggerated long ago in the literature (VM Danilenko and D.Ya. Telegin, chariots - R. Drusus defended the horsemen). But Anthony gave these old arguments a new life, found new evidence, introduced new methodological principles.
Of particular interest is the fact that he summarized the enormous archaeological material accumulated in the countries of Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Poland) and that, in addition to considerations on the ways of forming an Indo-European community, he offered the Western reader a detailed review of literature and unpublished materials from this region, the results of old excavations and expeditions of recent decades. All this was inaccessible to Western archaeologists because of the language barriers and the rarity of many publications.
In the first part there are six chapters. They provide the linguistic part of the concept. The first two chapters introduce the reader mainly to the basics of the linguistic methodology for the reconstruction of the proto-languages вЂвЂ(chapter two is so called: "How to reconstruct a dead language"). The next two chapters are called "Language and Time" and differ in subheadings. They deal with the chronology of the decay of the language, the ancestral one for the Indo-European branches (in other words, the IE of the language), and for this purpose the question of glochochronology is analyzed and the link between the Indo-European dictionary and archaeological realities is analyzed. The last two chapters are devoted to territorial issues. The fifth chapter covers the issue of the localization of the Proto-Indo-European language, i.e. determines the place of the ancestral home. And in Chapter Six, the question of language boundaries and the fate of language in migrations is discussed. This issue of language transfer, assimilation.
Part two is much larger, it has 11 chapters. Its first chapter (Chapter 7 on the common account) is methodical in nature. It is called "How to reconstruct a material culture", but this is an inaccurate name. It is rather about how to properly extract archaeological data (for example, how to use and evaluate radiocarbon data) and how to overcome differences in the conceptual systems of archeology of the West and the former Soviet archeology.
Further, starting from Chapter 8, a survey of the archaeological cultures of Europe (in the main Eastern) begins and their interpretation within the framework of the chosen concept. It begins with the Neolithic Balkans and the Northern Black Sea region (Chapter 8), then the author proceeds to the Eneolithic of the same region (Chapter 9). Next, a large chapter (10) devoted to the domestication of the horse and the origin of horsemanship, based on the materials of the Early Steppe Eneolithic. Here the author has his very interesting developments. In Chapter 11, the author depicts the crisis of the agricultural "Old Europe" in connection with the deterioration of the climate and the pressure on it in the developed Eneolithic steppe population. This question is considered in more detail from the same position by V.O. Dergachev (2007) in the recently published Russian book On Scepteres, On Horses, On War.
Link to Dergachev's book http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3447199
But Anthony derives from the culture of Suvorov mounds II in Anatolia, attributing to them the construction of Troy. Chapter 12 clarifies the changes that took place in the final Eneolithic on the borders of the steppes - in Maikop culture and in the huge Trypillia protocities.
For the Bronze Age, the author reconstructs life on carts in the steppe, and, deriving Afanasyevskaya from the Repin culture, interprets this as the origin of the Tochars (Chapter 3), and then outlines the areas for the budding of Western IES, as if (including the Pragmansky) from the Usatovo culture, through late line barrel and corded ceramics, while the pit culture from Hungary influences the cultures of Bavaria and Austria, forming Proto-Celtic languages...

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