Talk:Kurgan hypothesis

Precursors

The idea to locate the Indo-European homeland in the Eastern European steppe regions is certainly not original to Gimbutas; according to p. 19, Theodor Benfey had already advanced it in the 19th century. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:43, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

On p. 38, Gimbutas herself acknowledges Otto Schrader as a precursor. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:58, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

People proposed just about everywhere between the North Pole and the Ganges in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Precursors should certainly be acknowledged, but if Gimbutas was the first one to correlate Soviet archaeological discoveries etc. into an overall synthesis, the existence of precursors does not take that away from her... AnonMoos (talk) 23:44, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Huh? I've done no more than pointing precisely that fact out (the existence of precursors). I certainly did not intend to take anything away from her. Quite the opposite, if anything, the existence of precursors (especially if they used sensible arguments from reconstructed lexicon or the like, which at least Schrader actually did) adds even more weight to her KH: it's even more mainstream and less controversial and arbitrary than some of the anti-KH polemics make it out to be.

It's very far from the ideology-guided crank idea some people caricature it as – not infrequently because it contradicts their own ideology and sometimes crank ideas. That includes not only nationalistically motivated propagandists, but also well-meaning, honestly confused people, including scholars from fields outside (and sometimes even inside) linguistics and archaeology. I see it all the time on Wikipedia and elsewhere. Some also think that because most of Gimbutas' later ideas have (to put it charitably) little merit, all of her ideas have little merit. Rather, she did monumental and valuable work here. It's also notable that despite persistent attempts to link the steppe Urheimat hypothesis to NS ideology (or its 19th-century precursors), the Nazis never latched onto the hypothesis even though it was already around and not completely incompatible with their ideology. (Even if it was admittedly much more convenient to see Germany or Scandinavia as the Urheimat and not the Ukraine or even Russia. Still, ideologies tend to find rationalisations around such problems – medieval Mongol/Turkic admixture in the Slavic peoples was actually used to justify their status as Untermenschen IIRC.) Instead they stuck with the Corded Ware hypothesis (whose popularity even among unideological academics prior to Gimbutas' work is, however, understandable in hindsight). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:07, 23 June 2014 (UTC)

As a scholar said, "In short, the first IE specialists – imbued with European colonialism of the 19th century - chose to see the Proto-Indo-Europeans as a superior race of warriors and colonizers, who would have conquered the allegedly "pre-IE" Neolithic Europe in the Copper Age, and brought their 'superior' civilization to it. (...). At the same time, while the concept of the Arian super-race gave shape to the myth of the Battle-Axe horse-riding invaders, another myth, within the Arian larger myth, emerged: Pangermanism. Within the Arian superior race, the German father-founders of IE studies saw the Germanic people as the supermen, the purest and the closest to the original blessed race, and chose the Germanic area as the Urheimat of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. After WW2, with the end of Nazi ideology, a new variant of the traditional scenario (i.e. scenario "imbued with European colonialism of the 19th century"), which soon became the new canonic IE theory, was introduced by Marija Gimbutas, an ardent Baltic nationalist: the PIE Battle-Axe super-warriors were best represented by Baltic élites, instead of Germanic ones (Gimbutas 1970, 1973, 1977, 1979, 1980). Interestingly, also the central idea of the NDT, namely that the inventors of farming were the Indo-Europeans, rather than the 'real' Middle-Eastern, Sumerian and/or Semitic, people, is yet another vein of this often unwitting ethnocentrism that runs through the history of research on IE origins." --Ragdeenorc (talk) 22:12, 23 June 2014 (UTC)