The Journal of Indo-European Studies
Monograph Series

The Kurgan Culture and The Indo-Europeanization of Europe
Monograph No. 18 — Papers by Marija Gimbutas
 Edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Karlene Jones-Bley

Fifteen articles, thirty maps, 102 figures and forty Tables make up this essential collection of papers by the famed Lithuanian-born Harvard and UCLA archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas. In the introduction Professor Gimbutas describes her forty-year commitment to establishing the origins of Indo-European speech and seminal culture, which she named the Kurgan Culture after the distinctive burial mounds.

This unique collation showcases Gimbutas' epoch-making contributions to Indo-European studies and the archaeology of Europe. First is her comprehensive evidence that the geographical "homeland" of Indo-European was neither Central Europe nor Anatolia, but the steppelands of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. She details the westward migration of a warlike, horse-riding, pastoral, patriarchal peoples, beginning in the mid-4th millennium, bringing with them early I-E speech and a pantheon of sky-gods. Her presentation, originally based only on archaeology and carbon-14 dating, has since been proven by DNA analysis of skeletal remains. Secondly, these papers offer her extensive and colorful account of the earlier agricultural, matriarchal civilization of what she called "Old Europe" which the warlike patriarchal invaders overran. Gimbutas particularly highlights the striking contrast between the culture of the earlier population's chthonic goddess religion and that of the Indo-European conquerors' male sky-gods ‒ a clarification which made her become something of a heroine amongst history-oriented feminists.

The Linguistic Appendix provided by Martin E. Huld of California State University, Los Angeles and Mt. St. Mary’s College, Los Angeles, consists of over 100 reconstructed Indo-European etyma which clearly document, reinforce, and expand the findings of Professor Gimbutas.

Professor Gimbutas was one of the prime founders and the first senior editor of The Journal of Indo-European Studies.

On the Origins of North Indo-Europeans; The Indo-Europeans—Archaeological Problems; The Relative Chronology of Neolithic and Chalcolithic Cultures in Eastern Europe North of the Balkan Peninsula and the Black Sea; Proto-Indo-European Culture—The Kurgan Culture During the Fifth, Fourth, and Third Millennium B.C.; Old Europe c. 7000-3500 B.C.—The Earliest European Civilization Before the Infiltration of the Indo-European Peoples; The Beginnings of the Bronze Age of Europe and the Indo-Europeans 3500-2500 B.C.; An Archaeologist's View of *PIE in 1975; The First Wave of Eurasian Steppe Pastoralists into Copper Age Europe; The Three Waves of the Kurgan People into Old Europe, 4500-2500 B.C.; The Kurgan Wave #2 (c.3400-3200 B.C.) into Europe and the Following Transformation of Culture; Primary and Secondary Homeland of the Indo-Europeans, Comments on Gamkrelidze-Ivanov Articles; Remarks on the Ethnogenesis of the Indo-Europeans in Europe; Accounting for a Great Change; Review of Archaeology and Language by C. Renfrew; The Collision of Two Ideologies; The Fall and Transformation of Old Europe

ISBN 9780941694568
1997, Pages XIX + 404
Paperback: $76.00

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