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Mirror and Metaphor: Material and Social Constructions of Reality

The curious thing about Renfrew's new book is that although it means to argue a major professional question, it is written to the educated layperson. Chapters patiently, if succinctly, expound the question at issue and the two disciplines brought to bear upon it, linguistics and prehistoric archaeology. For a fellow archaeologist, much of the book is (or should be) padding. Current Anthropologygave its CA treatment to Renfrew's book in its June 1988 issue (29:437^168). Renfrew's reply there allows me to critique his position and arguments as he presents them following a first set of reviews. This is an important advantage, for it is no longer unfair to adduce the collection edited by Marek Zvelebil, Hunters in Transition (1986): Renfrew has seen Zvelebil's book, he has acknowledged in the CA reply that it has some worth, but he has not recanted his allegiance to the position he lays out in his book. What Renfrew proposes is twofold: (1) Indo-European languages spread throughout Europe in conjunction with the spread of agriculture in the sixth and fifth millennia, and (2) the original homeland of Indo-European languages was eastern Anatolia. What Renfrew seeks to refute is the hypothesis that Indo-European spread through invasions of horse-riding pastoralists (the Kurgan people) in the fifth and fourth millennia. That hypothesis was held by Childe and currently is prefe'rred by Gimbutas, our foremost authority on the Eastern European (including Russian) Neolithic and Bronze ages. The strength of Renfrew's proposal lies in the incontrovertible fact that the major components of European farming were indigenous to the broad region of which Anatolia is the heart. From this, Renfrew constructs a Kulturkreis—that is the term for his exercise. He borrows the maps and mathematical model of Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza to label his proposal a "wave-of-advance" model. How this might differ from a classic Kulturkreis constructed on the age-area principle, he does not tell us. Renfrew's next step is to assert that the spread of farming is the only event in European Holocene prehistory that is sufficiently discontinuous with preceding archaeological phenomena to permit the suggestion of a migration of people introducing a wholly new language. He insists that no succeeding innovations, not Corded Ware nor Beakers nor bronze, constitute real breaks in cultural continuity. Art styles he dismisses as epiphenomena distributed through trade. Zvelebil (1986:168) remarks that "From recent literature it would appear that continuity, rather than contrast, is the fashion of the day." Zvelebil concluded (1986:186) from his survey of archaeological data that the end of the Neolithic, rather than its beginning, seems to have witnessed the greatest amount of population movement: "Seen from this perspective, the early neolithic colonisation, such as there was, loses much of its presumed significance." In his CA review Renfrew does not address these statements. Repeatedly referring to Grahame Clark's 1966 paper, "The Invasion Hypothesis in British Prehistory" (Antiquity 40:172-189), which repudiates the invocation of invasions and migrations as cause of change in archaeological cultures, and repeatedly insisting on the value of a "processual" explanation, Renfrew nevertheless offers us only a slowed-down version of the standard European Volkerwanderung. His Volk are a couple of millennia earlier, they do not swing battleaxes, but they push inexorably over Eurasia. The "process" Renfrew touts is a generation-by-generation movement onto new farmlands. He compares this to the spread of Polynesians and of Euroamerican societies, though unlike his Neolithic farmers, the Polynesians colonized uninhabited islands, and Euroamericans conquered agricultural societies decimated by epidemics. Terrell's challenging examination of archaeology and language in the Pacific is significantly absent, even in the CA review (Terrell, Prehistory in the Pacific Islands, 1986). Archaeology and Language\ea\es "the puzzle of IndoEuropean origins" where it has been for decades. Renfrew handles the linguistic side of the puzzle as an amateur, quoting from Bloomfield and from college textbooks. He cavalierly dismisses the strong arguments for using extensively shared cognates to derive a northeastern European Indo-European homeland. Dumezil and Benveniste get short shrift, with Dumezil scorned for allegedly "avoiding the issue of the concrete historical reality behind" the fundamental cultural form he abstracts. This seems a strange charge in view of Dumezil's abundance of references to concrete historical events and situations in classical records. Indeed, the crux of a serious reader's difficulty with Renfrew's book is precisely his avoidance of concrete historical realities. He consistently prefers Service's textbook abstraction (Primitive Social Organization: An Evolutionary Perspective, 1962), the "chiefdom," over Eurasian historical realities such as those analyzed elegantly by Krader and by Lattimore. Many of Renfrew's exposures of facile assumptions in the literature are well taken. Having thrown his lances at these flimsy structures, and indiscriminately at some well-built structures as well, Renfrew then does no more than strip the warrior regalia from the old Volk and replace it with peasants' dress. The new costume is as ill fitting as the old, and less attractive.