Twentieth Century Theories

Nineteenth century perceptions of the Indo-European homeland rested largely on linguistic considerations, leavened with a knowledge of broad historical events. In the twentieth century, archeology has taken a major role in any attempt to understand the Indo-Europeans. Unfortunately, linguistic and archeological evidence do not always correlate well, and there are areas of debate within each discipline. In linguistics, reconstruction of PIE reveals considerable variation. While many of these variations could be understood as having existed at different points of time within a single, constantly changing proto-Indo-European language, it is quite possible that instead PIE was always a collocation of several similar languages. The concept of a single PIE language has also been blurred by the discovery that any theoretical PIE language(s), along with several other language families, form a supra-family known as Nostratic, which also includes Hamito-Semitic , Dravidian (a language family of India), Kartvelian (the major language family of the southern Caucasus ), Uralic , and Altaic . Meanwhile, the archeological record frequently is at odds with the old image of massive waves of folk migration, spearheaded by warrior hordes that subdued the indigenous population. Increasingly, the evidence suggests that in many - and perhaps most - situations, the Indo-Europeans constituted a minority population in the lands they entered, but their languages and culture came to dominate the local environment. A recent study has argued that this minority influence was possible in some cases because the Indo-European minority was a military elite who were masters of, and disseminators of, the technology of the war chariot.

Twentieth century perspectives on the Indo-European homeland have shifted. While Europe still has its staunch defenders, a number of theories look once again to Asia. In a model favored by many Indo-Europeanists, Marja Gimbutas has argued that the Proto-Indo-Europeans are to be identified with a people known as the Kurgan Folk (kurgan means "gravemound" in Russian, and kurgans are a major feature of the culture). The Kurgan Folk are found on the Pontic steppes, north of the Black and Caspian seas. By this theory PIE culture was in existence by the fifth millenium BCE and soon after began to spread outward in a complex series of waves. More recently, the Russian linguists T. V. Gramkelidze and V. V. Ivanov have produced a laboriously detailed argument that the Indo-European homeland was in or around modern Armenia. And so the investigation continues.