A Scholar’s Quest To Find The Ancestral People Of The Most Influential Language On Earth – Interview
Who and where were the Proto-Indo-Europeans? Almost 450 languages spoken by 4 billion people descend from their tongue—and J.P. Mallory has been on a life-long journey to reconstruct their world.
A deeper reach into human history is now possible, thanks to a growing body of archaeological data collected using advanced technologies and patient scholarly detective work accumulated across recent decades. Research into the reconstruction of lost parent languages of the ones we speak today is included in that process. One of the most studied and reconstructed languages is known as Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.
PIE is the parent for most primary languages spoken today in the Americas, western and northeastern Eurasia, and the Indian subcontinent. English, Romance languages, including Spanish and French, German, Slavic, Baltic languages, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi are all children of PIE. Some PIE speakers and their descendants got deep into the lands of modern China. This spread has intrigued many scholars who are trying to answer questions such as: who were these people, when and where exactly did they emerge, what were they like, and was their spread a random occurrence or was there something about them that allowed PIE-speaking descendants to break “correlations between geography and genetics” to quote Harvard scientist David Reich, whose lab is at the forefront of researching the origins of the Indo-Europeans.
J.P. Mallory is among the most accomplished scholars to investigate the language, culture, and archaeology of the far-flung Indo-Europeans. Across decades, he has published about waves of migration and cultural combination that produced the Irish in far Western Europe, all the way to Northeast Asia, to try and piece together who the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin in China were. Now, an emeritus professor at Queen’s University, Mallory has released a new book, The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story, which recounts the history of scholarship about them across the past few centuries and offers new insights into the debates about their origins, using archaeology, linguistic research, and ancient genetics.
The research by Mallory and other scholars into the origins of PIE and their speakers is more than an interesting research project. Misinformation about Indo-Europeans—cultivating the notion of a homeland that produced a dominant culture that spread across the Earth—has been used for political advantage, from Nazi Germany to ethno-nationalist groups in Eurasia and the Americas. Accurate and deeper scholarship that explains the connections to the many descendant cultures and their profound connections should have a powerful clarifying effect that precludes the misuse of this information. It’s powerful information that provides 3.4 billion people, or 42 percent of the world’s population, an authentic shared frame of reference and history across almost 450 languages.
It’s one of many new areas of research into the past that have the potential to become an engine for the betterment of humanity—as it percolates through the centers of influence—and helps us grow accustomed to relying on a wider and global human historical evidence base as reference. This information is valuable context for understanding ourselves, but so is the process of learning it. Society will greatly benefit from minds that are trained to think in deeper timescales than a millennium or two—archaeology and biological sciences are increasingly furnishing useful insights and pattern observations into humanities at a historical depth spanning millions of years.
I reached out to Mallory to learn about his latest research and future directions in finding the lost PIE speakers and thought it would be interesting for readers.
Jan Ritch-Frel: You identify the Pontic Steppe that spans from the northwestern Black Sea coasts across the northern Caucasus into Kazakhstan as the most likely homeland of the Proto-Indo-European speakers. In the decades of research, have you landed on some of the broad cultural and social markers of these people as you looked through the archaeological evidence of that region?
J.P. Mallory: There have been a lot of assumptions made regarding the steppe populations during the Eneolithic-Early Bronze Age, but so far it has been extremely difficult to produce a convincing image of their social structure, hierarchies, etc., from archaeological data.
The problem lies in the nature of the evidence: almost entirely burials, so it is difficult to reconstruct an entire culture from the burials alone. This is compounded by the fact that the burials tend to be poor—the majority lack any grave gifts—and those that do have grave gifts are often limited to a pot, maybe some stone tools or animal remains.
These graves are a lot poorer in objects and information than the Corded Ware culture or many of the Neolithic cultures of Europe. For example, a rough count of the presence of metal objects in a few of the major databases (where we have about 1,000 burials for a given region), reveals that 2 percent or less had a metal object in the grave.
Because of this, we have a range of opinions based on various studies suggesting that the steppe cultures were egalitarian—at one end—to enjoying a tripartite class society resembling that expressed in the Indo-Aryan class system. While we can point to some very rich burials, for example, employing the burial of a wagon and other objects, this is in no way typical of the burials.
One of the greatest research needs is an aggregated database of all Yamna burials (this would probably number well over 12,000 excavated burials) that could be analyzed. Where are the 19th-century German scholars when you need them?
Ritch-Frel: What are some of the most interesting subplots in the pursuit of understanding PIE origins and Indo-Europeans?
Mallory: There are several major aspects of the hunt for the homeland that I find particularly interesting. First, there is the non-linear nature of our progress. By this I mean that unlike many other linguistic problems, we do not find a narrative of discovery and consensus-building progressively unfolding over time, with each conference bringing us closer to a final solution. The only way it can be presented as such is if you concentrate solely on a single strand of argument and ignore the glorious free-for-all that was going on from about 1870 onward.
Some have criticized me for discussing now long-discarded solutions to the homeland problem, presuming that one only needs to dwell on those issues that give us our current answer. What you miss here is that for more than two centuries, the scholarly world has regarded the models of their own time as the definitive solutions, and, at least from the time of Roger Latham around 1860, there have always been multiple camps of diametrically opposed scholars. Often, what constitutes “new evidence” derives from a different discipline than the one that supports an alternative theory and does nothing to address its validity. Moreover, what have often been regarded as long-discarded solutions have had an uncanny ability to be resurrected by later generations.
A related issue is what I have termed the “constituency problem,” i.e., where scholars from various disciplines believe that there are core factors in the solution that cannot be ignored or overturned by evidence from another discipline. Sometimes they are apparent within the same discipline, for example, there are those who argue for a deep genetic or contact relationship between Indo-European and the Uralic family (Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, etc.). This indicates that the homeland must have been located in or near Eastern Europe, while others emphasize early contacts or relationships between Indo-European and languages of the Near East or south Caucasus, which would locate the homeland south of the Caucasus.
On other occasions, the evidence is disputed across disciplines, for example, the craniometric evidence failed to support any case for relating the Corded Ware culture with the Pontic-Caspian steppe, while ancient DNA firmly supports the derivation of the majority of Corded Ware population from the steppe.
Ritch-Frel: What kinds of industries, specializations, and lifestyles do you think PIE people would have been aware of—boating people, mining, winegrowing, etc. Along the Caucasus and the coasts of the Black and Caspian seas.
Mallory: This is guesswork for me but given the fact that metals were mined in the Balkans and transported as far east as the Volga, many would have been aware that such objects came from a distant land, and they would know in which direction that land lay. Obviously, the traders or smiths who transported the copper would be well aware of their source.
As for the coastal areas of the Black Sea and the Caucasus, the fact that the genetic signature indicates that nearly 50 percent of the steppe population had ancestors from that direction, and that there were exchange currents still running between the steppe and the Caucasus, they would know their larger world.
Ritch-Frel: Your book dwells heavily on the sociological factors that might have explained the spread of the PIE and Indo-European speaking populations. Do you think it’s worth considering the density and portability of the livelihoods of PIE speakers and specialized knowledge as a key enabler for their ability to challenge the boundaries of geography and genetics?
Mallory: I would think that the increased mobility of the steppe societies is probably a major key in their expansion, since it exponentially increases the territory that one can interact with and possibly control. The key issue here, as I explain in my book, is that pastoral nomads have had an extremely poor record in Europe in spreading their own language (excepting the Magyars and perhaps we can also count the Turks). So why did Eneolithic pastoralists succeed so well?
One possible reason is that they were the first, so there really was a step change between them and the settled farmers of Europe, while all later pastoralists encountered cultures that already possessed vehicles and horse riding. Who knows?
Ritch-Frel: What parts of the archaeological record and related scholarship would you recommend to curious people who want to know more about the PIE and the Indo-European world and why?
Mallory: Doug Q. Adams and I produced an Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (1997) and The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World (2006), which introduced readers to most of the topics listed above. For the archaeological cultures, David W. Anthony’s The Horse. The Wheel, and Language (2007) is the go-to book.
- Author Bio: Jan Ritch-Frel is the executive director of the Independent Media Institute.
- Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
