To bookend this, I reached back to a radiocarbon study this last year on the Urnfielders in the Southern domain, popularly accepted by many to be proto-Celts. The Capuzzo study takes a set of diagnostic materials like weapons or urns and lays them out spatially. The study can be reduced down to a few points:
1) Cremation as a dominant rite was gradual in its ascent and generally lagged behind weapons, etc.
2) The components of Urnfield appear to have spread at slightly different times.
3) The evidence for a massive population increase is shaky that can be explained by other factors.
4) Things moved East to West during the entire period and this is evidence, he suggests, that Koch's 'Celtic from the West' doesn't work with as formulated:
"As a conclusion for the period 1800-750 BC we can definitely exclude the existence of a West to East space-time gradient, like that one suggested as a possible hypothesis for the spread of Celtic people by Cunliffe and Koch (Cunliffe & Koch 2010; Koch & Cunliffe 2013)."
Neither this study or the former will tell you anything about Bronze Age speech, but they offer additional hard points, or windows, in which things were likely to happen across large regions. Capuzzo is sensitive to this since he is dealing with the proto-historic period in which language begins to be attested or deduced. Of course I'm a bit more interested in the LN/EBA, but the Urnfield identity has implications for that earlier time.
This study by Capuzzo shows a somewhat uneven spread of Urnfield stuff, meaning that people may have accumulated diagnostic materials over a time. This is somewhat backwards from the much earlier Beaker phenomenon IMO where the initial phase is conservative, followed by regional variation and drift.
Urnfield spread from a place where a high diversity of Centum languages existed in early history. It's possible Urnfield planted a very hypothetical Nordwestblock language from the lower Elbe down past the Rhine (basically the blue northern coastal area in the map). Also not shown above, is its spotty spread in the West and in Southern Britain (at least its artifacts).
Urnfield spread from a place where a high diversity of Centum languages existed in early history. It's possible Urnfield planted a very hypothetical Nordwestblock language from the lower Elbe down past the Rhine (basically the blue northern coastal area in the map). Also not shown above, is its spotty spread in the West and in Southern Britain (at least its artifacts).
A traditional view is that Urnfielders were Celts who later spread to the Atlantic via the Iron Age Hallstatt and La Tene cultures. If a warrior elite spread language to the Atlantic, it would have been an exceeding small aristocracy, something like the Viking kingdoms in later times.
One interesting point Capuzzo makes is this:
"It is meaningful to remember that the developing of Etruscan culture originates in the Villanovan and Proto-Villanovan cultures [a type of Urnfield] that practiced the funerary ritual of the cremation, which is also attested among the Etruscan communities"
It's possible that the Urnfield tradition or aristocracy did not speak IE at all, instead something more akin to Rhaetic, Lemnic or Proto-Eutruscan. Perhaps Etruscan instead invaded an Italy that already had widespread proto-Italic languages. It does appear that the rites and materials of Urnfield spread from the southeast if the continent.
There's also a few problems that Koch laid out. From "A Case for Tartessian as a Celtic Language" by Koch:
"However, once we recognize evidence for Celtic in the western Peninsula as early as the Orientalizing Period of the Early Iron Age (VIIIth-VIth centuries BC), then we confront the likelihood that the Atlantic Late Bronze Age had already been a largely or wholly Celtic-speaking phenomenon and that the subsequent penetration of the region by Urnfield, Hallstatt, and La Tène influences would not be relevant or only relevant as a matter of inter-Celtic dialectology.
"A Case for Tartessian as a Celtic Language" (Koch)
It seems the Atlantic LBA may not be the origin of Celtic names and peoples further east, but I think Koch has a point in that Urnfield has a ton of problems being 'Celtic' at the local levels, especially when the areas least affected are very Celtic.
If ALBA doesn't work, the old Centum languages in the West go back to the EBA, otherwise it's Urnfield. It's hard to see anything else on this scale.
First of all the probably very interesting article by Capuzzo is broken (wrong: it seems an internal Blogger page only accessible to the user).
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest:
1. Koch is very problematic and is generally rejected by linguists. His transcription of the Tartessian (Iberian-like) syllabary does not follow Untermann but his own caprice. Following Untermann, Tartessian looks very much Vasconic. So Koch is pseudo-science to me.
Said that, the Tartessian area was heavily infiltrated by Hallstatt and post-Hallstatt Celts, who invaded (along with the mysterious Lusitani) the Western Peninsula c. 700 BCE, so it's possible that some inscriptions could be in their language (but I don't know of any).
It must be said that some "Celtiberian" inscriptions could also be Vasconic and are wrongly classified.
2. The issue of Urnfields affecting proto-Etruscan civilizations does not make Urnfields a Tyrsenian phenomenon. It's more likely that cultural hybridization took place in the Etruscan area instead. Ancient Rhaetian was probably an Indoeuropean language with links to Venetic (Italo-Illyrian?), just that it had Etruscan influence. It's not just supported by many linguists but also the most parsimonious explanation.
For example the Steinberg inscription sounds totally IE (esi = (they) are, obvious for Romance-speakers):
KASTRI ESI ETU MNI LAPE - the castles are ...
RITALI ESI KASTRI MI APET - ... are the castles* my ... (* castrum → castellum → castle; castri plural nom. or sing. dative in Latin)
ESI MNESI KASTRI MALI - are memory* to the evil castles (* mnesos = memory in Greek, Greek affinities are also found in other Adriatic Italian languages)
5. AZI PESHA TIAN LAPE - ??
4. ESI TU PANU APEKER A KVE - they are ... to the dogs* (* kwe is probably dative for something very similar to PIE *ḱwṓ = dog)
6. ARISA EKI - ??
7. SAKAT ESTA NV ATE FAKATE - ... is? ...
I got the transcription from someone who claims it's old Slavic but I don't believe a word of that. Word separations are arbitrary but not mine.
3. The maps are awful in some aspects: the Ligurian area is not "Urnfield", the Atlantic Bronze area is wrongly described in both maps: the real extension includes most of France and Iberia. Inclusion of Southern Italy is undeserved, exclusion of Nordic Europe and Poland is also wrong (not core Urnfield but related cremation cultures anyhow, much as (North) Italic and Etruscan ones). Koch's map is doubly wrong because of his idea of Urnfields arising in Hungary, what nobody agrees with, and also anachronies such as including La Tène era Gaulish penetration in France (to borders that are anyhow unrealistic: for example reaching much further south than the Garonne).
The maps are terrible, I try to shy away from maps with arrows as much as possible unless it depicts hard data. I used the first one because it's fresh looking and all of the maps are equally terrible.
DeleteThanks for pointing out the dead link. Ill get that fist asap.
I'm really indifferent to a lot of this just because there's a lot of debate and a lot of scenarios. I do think that the EBA and the Urnfield are the most likely time when language would change over a vast region though.
BTW was SE France affected by either ALBA or Urnfield? Just a curiosity..
I still get a broken link: https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6886680068187530519#editor/target=post;postID=765088037448367353;onPublishedMenu=posts;onClosedMenu=posts;postNum=11;src=link
Delete:(
"was SE France affected by either ALBA or Urnfield?"
ALBA (Atlantic Bronze, I presume) is not a culture but a set of relations between various post-Megalithic cultures, which exchanged products with unusual frequency among them. AFAIK it did not include SE France but it's also apparent (see the map I linked to above) that some articles go beyond the arbitrary line: to Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, etc. It's not a precise zone.
Urnfield (core Urnfield) did affect SE France, specifically the western bank of the Rhône river and the Languedoc, as well as NE Iberia: Catalonia and Castelló province (with rare isolate findings in Baleares and SE Iberia), as well as upstream the Ebro river, which became the route by which further Celtic-plus penetration would continue in the Iron Age Urnfields and the early Hallstatt period, reaching to the southern areas of the Basque Country, La Rioja, etc.
Then, around 700 BCE, the Plateau culture known as Cogotas I was absorbed somehow and became the clearly Celtic (but also continuous) Cogotas II. From that platform Iberian Celts invaded the Western coastal areas of the Peninsula. This process seems to be quite parallel to what happened in Italy: first Urnfields (non-core) cultures in the North, then, since around 800-700 BCE (consolidated Iron Age), expansion to the South. Rome itself is said to have been founded that century (specifically 753 BCE).
Later c. 550 BCE, probably aided by the Phocaean colony of Massilia, Iberians and allies (Basques) reconquered Catalonia and the lands north of the Ebro, probably also influencing Languedoc itself, where Iberian inscriptions are found. The historical Celtiberians (a specific, more civilized, Eastern group of "Celtic" Iberians) are said to have coalesced out of these ancient struggles between Celts and Iberians, being a hybrid group. According to Roman historians, after many fights they finally reached an inclusive peace, hence the name. The fact that Basque-sounding names are found in Celtiberian territory, near the martyr city of Numantia (now Garray, an obvious Basque name), indicates that they were not merely Celtic but a potpourri of some sort. A similar situation surely happened in Galicia (whose name means "land of the Gauls"), where a variety of ethnicities surely co-existed in a hybrid culture. Instead Lusitania is described as a very rich but underdeveloped land by the Romans, suggesting large-scale devastation with the Celto-Lusitanic invasions (we know that earlier it was very populated and even central).
The detachment of Iberian Celts from their continental motherland by the Vasco-Iberian reconquest of the peninsular NE meant that their religion never became druidic (a late loan from Britain most likely). Some tribes like the Vaccei (who practiced military communism) were even described as "atheist" by the romans, i.e. lacking gods or religion.
BTW, I understand that there is a coincidence between the distribution of corded type Bell Beakers in the Rhône (western bank) and the later route taken by the Urnfield invasion. I do wonder if the corded type beakers in this particular case may have acted as some sort of "avant-guard", although there's a huge gap of many centuries between both phenomena. Just food for thought.
DeleteThanks for the reply. I've been out all evening otherwise would have answered sooner.
DeleteI think one strong possibility is that Cordedized Beakers became IE speaking, but they weren't initially.
Really, if CW was in fact IE as many suggest, then that hybrization in the Northern zone would make it possible that some of those subsequent migrations were IE from that point on. Ity all sort of jello right now.
I'll fix the link tomorrow
Delete"It is meaningful to remember that the developing of Etruscan culture originates in the Villanovan and Proto-Villanovan cultures [a type of Urnfield] that practiced the funerary ritual of the cremation, which is also attested among the Etruscan communities"
ReplyDeleteIt's possible that the Urnfield tradition or aristocracy did not speak IE at all, instead something more akin to Rhaetic, Lemnic or Proto-Eutruscan."
Something I have also noted. I don't agree with Maju's attempt explain away this inconsistency with wishy-washy notions of "hybridisation". Rather, the more sociolinguistically realistic corollary is that prehistoric (& proto historic) languages were not bounded entities confined to this or that "archaeological culture", and much less- Y lineages. Ancient Europe was likely a linguistic checker board; with high incidences of multilingualism. IMO, it is only in the late Iron Age that certain languages expanded widely and intensively; this abolishing preexisting diversity.
Rhaetic looks Indoeuropean. There's no Urnfield culture in Lemnos.
Delete"I don't agree with Maju's attempt explain away this inconsistency with wishy-washy notions of "hybridisation".
I have no idea what you mean with that, could you be more precise?
... "prehistoric (& proto historic) languages were not bounded entities confined to this or that "archaeological culture""...
Doesn't this contradict your previous claim about Urnfield supposedly speaking Tyrsenian? (Absolutely not attested in Iberia nor in any other place of Urnfield influence anyhow).
"Ancient Europe was likely a linguistic checker board; with high incidences of multilingualism".
This is possible in some cases but I don't think it can be stated in too generic terms. Languages are after all the primary social tool: the glue of society, so bilingualism is always a transitional phase or something that happens in border areas. Temporarily, spanning even many centuries, minority languages can survive (the more isolated, the better) but in the long run he mainline social language always triumphs and small isolated languages succumb.
"IMO, it is only in the late Iron Age that certain languages expanded widely and intensively; this abolishing preexisting diversity".
What about the massively demic Neolithic expansion? That must have spread a single language or family of languages (most likely Vasconic) necessarily.
Maju
DeleteNope I never connected Etruscan solely with Urnfield; rather I said the urnfield influences in future Etruscan land makes the simplistic connection beyween urnfield and "Celtic" problematic
****
Oh and early European Farmers certainly weren't all Vasconic; it's an absurd proposition because it ignores the preexisting linguistic diversity and wide geographic origins of EEF (despite their apparent genetic homogeneity); as well as the contact with European foragers, as well as subsequent divergences . In fact; Vasconic could have arrived later - during the copper or bronze ages. No everything new and mobile was IE.
My impression is that Urnfield is not yet Celtic-specific: it most probably included early Celts but also other Central European IE ethnicities, notably Italics, probably Illyrics, maybe even proto-Germanics, and proto-Balto-Slavics, at least in non-core expressions. Core Urnfield is limited to parts of West Germany, Switzerland and the expansive line towards Catalonia but even these may have included non-Celtic groups (else it's hard to explain the Lusitani).
DeleteHallstatt, continuity of Urnfields in much of its extension was probably more Celtic, at least in its Western half (the Eastern half may have been Illyric or something like that) but even with this we cannot be certain that did not include other related ethnicities like the said Lusitani.
La Tène however is clearly 100% Celtic. But there was no La Tène in Iberia and yet there were Celts, so the early phases of Celtic expansion are clearly older than this culture.
Overall it seems that between c. 1300 and c. 500 BCE, the Celtic ethnic affiliation was gaining primacy in Southern Central Europe, where all these successive cultures coalesced, culminating in La Tène. Branches like Italics were surely erased (assimilated probably) in their Central European urheimat but survived in the lands that had been conquered in previous phases.
"... early European Farmers certainly weren't all Vasconic; it's an absurd proposition because it ignores the preexisting linguistic diversity and wide geographic origins of EEF (despite their apparent genetic homogeneity)"...
DeleteThe pre-farmer linguistic diversity was most likely erased by a fast expansion that was largely demographic in nature and had also the "thechno-cultural superiority" element on its side. It may be compared to Bantu expansion in Africa, where even Pygmies have adopted Bantu languages.
There are not "wide geographic origins of EEF" but rather a single one: Greece, more specifically Thessaly. And their "apparent genetic homogeneity" is not just apparent but a very strong signature of that shared origin. I don't understand how can you deny this striking homogeneity of the mainline European Neolithic of Thessalian roots, really. If there was diversity in the origins of EEFs, then we'd see noticeable genetic differences between for example the continental branch (Painted-Linear pottery cultures) and the Mediterranean one (Impressed-Cardium Pottery culture): we do not: they are almost the same people, when they converged again at the Rhine, they could almost certainly still understand each other, even if with some difficulty, because only 1000 years had transcurred since their separation in the Balcans and in our historical experience that's not enough to fully erase mutual intelligibility.
"In fact; Vasconic could have arrived later - during the copper or bronze ages".
Which would be the model. Just saying "might" is not enough: we need a model, a theory or hypothesis that we can evaluate, one that accounts not just for Basque but for Iberian, paleo-Sardinian and the overwhelming evidence of Vasconic substrate everywhere.
You can't model something for which no evidence exists ; you can only have an open, unbiased mind and ethnographic analogies
DeleteAnd EEF didn't all come from Thessaly. You're theories are becoming less rooted in reality as each day passes
We have archaeological evidence, we have genetic evidence. So what are you talking about: the evidence is there for all to see.
Delete"And EEF didn't all come from Thessaly".
Why not? Because some relatives lived in Western Turkey? That's pointless when we know that there is a clear-cut cultural divide in Thrace (Marmara coast vs interior) that excludes that the Turkish groups could be ancestral.
"You're theories are becoming less rooted in reality as each day passes"...
That's the usual preposterous disqualification I have to read once and again, as usual with no reasoned support, let alone EVIDENCE. It's your wishful thinking vs my evidence-based thinking.
My take on Etruscan is that this was a pre-IE population that saw the IE onslaught coming and appropriated many aspects of the IE technological and cultural package allowing them to survive as a "pilot wave" fleeing the IE wave coming behind it, while most of the other pre-IE communities failed to make the necessary cultural adaptations and were crushed. It is very notable that Etruscans were not native to Northern Italy. They arrived there a couple hundred years before the Italic peoples did.
ReplyDeleteI personally argue for ancient Rhaetic (which regardless of its linguistic classification bears no relationship to the modern Swiss language of the same name) as a close dialectal relative of Etruscan, but concede that I'm not enough of a linguist to evaluate the evidence first hand, so I could be wrong on that point.
The Etruscan example is quite relevant to the Bell Beaker culture, because in my view, Bell Beaker is also a non-IE culture which had a technological and cultural package equivalent in effectiveness to the technological and cultural package of contemporaneous IE cultures such as Corded Ware. Also, in both the Etruscan-Italic case and the Bell Beaker-Corded Ware case, there is good reason to believe that key components of the technological and cultural package that defined these cultures and made them successful (in terms of cultural evolutionary fitness defined by analogy to biological fitness) probably had a common source that managed to cross across linguistic barriers.
My theory is different. I hypothesize that the Tyrsenians (probably the Teresh of the Sea Peoples, originating on the pre-Greek Aegean) were brought to Italy by the Shardana (Sardinians), along with the Shekelesh (some Semitic mercenaries), maybe initially to fight against the IE Italic incursions, which could have been similar to the later ones of Celts (settling the North but also plundering further south). In the long run the Etruscans consolidated their own niche, while the Shekelesh were instead expelled and established in Eastern Sicily (Sicels or Siculi), as well as in Calabria (some related groups).
DeleteThe Villanova initial date of c. 1100 BCE fits perfectly with the aftermath of the Sea Peoples' known history c. 1170 (collapse of the New Kingdom of Egypt, being partly subdued by another "Sea People": the Meswhesh or Amazhigh = Tunisian Berbers, also Mazyes, Massagetas).
The Urnfield initial date in Italy (and elsewhere) is instead older: c. 1300 BCE. In Italy we see these in the Canegranate culture (spanning roughly modern Lombardy) and evolving later into the Golasecca culture. Since c. 1000 the IEs reach Latium (Latial culture, which is continuous with the later Latins).
While Etruscans developed cities since c. 900 BCE, Latins did not until c. 600 BCE. This may have been caused by their different origins: one more civilized, the other more barbaric.
@Andrew,
DeleteThat may be, but I think there is little evidence to consider Eutruscan as a 'native' pre-IE language. Of course it's pre-Latin but I had read a paper months ago on its relationship to its Anatolian cousin and it appears to close to be too deep in history.
Of course it's possible Lemnic was planted by Tyrennian Sea Peoples and everything is backwards...?
I would lean that Eutruscan is a more recent addition to the Peninsula but was encroached upon by its neighbors(?)