Archaeology

There has long existed a link between historical linguistics and archaeology, especially in the domain of Indo-European linguistics, where Old World archaeology contributed substantially to the understanding of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe, parts of western Asia and much of India.  Modern views of the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans have turned in no small part on the archaeological proposals of M. Gimbutas (e.g. 1973) in her version of the Pontic Steppes hypothesis.  Gimbutas’ initial work led to the refinements by J. Mallory (1989), the innovative proposals of C. Renfrew (initially 1987), and others, all of whom have established archaeology as a constant partner to historical linguistics in the debate over prehistory.  Renfrew's introduction of the demic diffusion model of demographic expansion by farming has stimulated a rethinking of the dating and dispersal of the IE languages into their historic homelands from an Anatolian origin in the period of about 7000-6500 BCE.  This proposal has received some recent support in various mathematically-based proposals  (e.g. Warnow, Ringe and Taylor 1996), and the matter has been reviewed in detail by Nichols (1998).  The farming-language connection is explored on a worldwide basis by Bellwood (2005), who also provides a three-stage model for language expansion and develops a more elaborated model of the spread of the IE languages.