Further Reading

The book that launched a thousand ships! This reader-friendly, popular science book is the culmination of years of research by Reich and associates. A reader with basic science knowledge, but unfamiliar with population genetics, should still find this book digestible. Reich covers all of the major archaeogenetic results (up until the time of his publication) and discusses population genetics and migration for the entire human race. New discoveries since 2018 have finessed some of his results further, but its main conclusions are still valid. The scope and depth of this book are truly staggering and the curious reader will find plenty of topics to explore further. I highly recommend this book first if you are interested in the subject of human migrations and genetic history.

When this book was first published in 2007, the field of population genetics was still too young – and analytical methods insufficiently advanced – to conclude much about prehistoric population movements. However this didn’t stop Anthony – an archaeologist – from sewing together threads from linguistics, and multiple branches of his own field, and bringing us this magnificent work of academic synthesis.

By examining the genetics and archaeology of the domesticated horse, the linguistic evolution of horse and wagon-related terms, and the early history of bronze metallurgy, Anthony concludes that the people known to archaeologists as the Yamnaya Culture were the origin of Indo-European language and culture.

The book is heavy on archaeology, but still not so specialized that the educated reader will take nothing from it. It will give the reader a good taste of the practice of archaeology and the challenges faced therein. Nearly a decade after publishing, Anthony’s thesis was proven largely correct by the corroborating evidence of archaeogenetics.

While the field of archaeogenetics has only just blossomed, the field of Indo-European studies has existed for centuries largely focused on comparative linguistics and cultural studies. This book focuses on the epic poetry and mythology of cultural traditions derived from Indo-European: Greek, Roman, Celtic, Hindu, Norse and several others. West pieces together various themes prominent within each and traces these back to their Indo-European progenitors. Ranking most prominently are the myths of the Sky-Father, Earth-Mother, Storm-God and Serpent. However this book delves quite deeply and the curious reader, looking to go beyond those tropes, will be able to explore further.

The importance of horse domestication cannot be overstated – it was possibly the defining material factor enabling the spread of the Yamnaya in their first push from the Pontic Steppe. However we still understand very little about the role horses played. In this monograph Drews examines the evidence for early riding: the archaeology of the earliest surviving bit-pieces, pictorial evidence of wagons and chariots, and mentions of riding and horsemanship in epic poetry. He concludes several important things: (1) Horses were first domesticated for meat; (2) The evidence for riding as early as the 5^th Millenium BC is circumstantial at best, men did not likely ride horse for millennia; (3) Even when the Yamnaya did become riders they never fought on horseback – reins, saddles, bridles and stirrups were each invented much later ; and (4) the first use of horses in battle was likely by means of chariots some time in the late 3^rd Millennium BC.

While most of the foregoing books concern themselves with scientific archaeology, this book examines ancient religious practices from Indo-European-derived cultures, and traces rituals back thereto. We often forget that prior to the spread of monotheism spiritual practice was dominated by ritual, not by belief in any specific moral code or adherence thereto. Serith extrapolates what Indo-European rituals may have entailed by triangulating the common themes in various pagan and Hindu rituals, hymns and practices.

The Indo-Europeans did not emerge in a vacuum: the late Aeneolithic (Copper Age) World was one where other great civilizations/cultures were declining. The most notable of these was the so-called Cucuteni-Trypillia Culture of south-eastern Europe. While archaeologists previously put more emphasis on the emergence of their Mesopotamian contemporaries (Ur and Uruk), the fact is these societies once included settlements with populations ranging as high as forty thousand people!

This book is less ‘technical archaeology’ and more ‘broad survey’ (with lots of photographs) of the material goods from this once thriving farming society. We now know that the Cucuteni-Trypillia people were descended from the first of the Early European Farmers to arrive in what is now Greece from Anatolia. For centuries their culture spread far and wide, producing beautiful striated pottery (like the Venus of Cucuteni) and mysterious sculptures (like the Cernavoda Thinker).

Émile Benveniste was a French linguist and semiotician concerned principally with Indo-European languages and culture. His work on the subject was published in 1973, just three years before his death, and covers aspects of cultural intercourse within and across Indo-European successor languages on such topics as family, marriage, debt, honor, property, promises and oaths. While his work is primarily linguistic this book is a tour de force from a brilliant thinker summarizing a life’s worth of scholarship and reflection on Indo-European society.

Carlos Quiles is a Spanish academic whose research interests include the origin of Indo-European peoples and their languages. While he is just one academic, with one perspective, he has undertaken a synthesis of linguistic, archaeological and genetic information in both a book series and an extensive website. Both the website and these books have attempted to do what no other academic, writer or scientist has done: to unify the current state of knowledge into common themes, using visualization and maps.

While these books could use some additional editing, and haven’t yet been updated to include the most recent findings, they still offer a good starting point without having to read separate books on linguistics, genetics and archaeology. I applaud Quiles’ bold undertaking and look forward to future revisions of his work and website.

This book is the latest (though certainly not the last) assembly of cross-disciplinary work on the subject of the Indo-Europeans. This agglomeration of research includes data from many smaller disciplines like palynology (extrapolating climate information from pollen samples) as well as useful glossaries on Indo-European terms related to the invention of metallurgy. It’s edited by one of the giants in the field, Kristian Kristiansen, and includes some of his most recent work on the archaeogenetics of the Corded Ware Culture, demonstrating their proximity to the Yamnaya not as a child population but closer to a cousin lineage.