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
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1997, Pages XIX + 404
Paperback: $76.00
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JIES
Private Individual Subscribers receive 20% discount
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