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Words Leave No Fossils: Positing The Spread Of Indo-European Languages Across Neolithic Europe, Denice J. Szafran

Denice J Szafran, Ph.D.

Various disciplines of anthropology generally accept that the Indo-European language spread throughout Europe some time after the Mesolithic era; how and when this happened is consistently debated, however. Archaeological and archaeogenetic theories on these details are wide and varied, including Gimbutas' kurgan invasions, Renfrew's peer polity, Renfrew and Bellwood's first farmers, Adams and Otte's climactic change, Robb's sociological and Cavalli-Sforza's genetic studies. Most of these give only cursory glances to linguistic theories of the methods of language diffusion and dispersal, or in the case of memetics, have attempted to combine the two divergent fields. An analysis of these theories leads …