ABSTRACT
Once upon a time, no one really knows how long ago, there lived a community that spoke a common language. For almost two centuries scholars have been trying to locate the time and the place, and to reconstruct the language of that community. The language is referred to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and is ancestral to the Germanic, Slavic, Romance, Iranian, Indic, Albanian, and Greek languages. Several recent works by archaeologists and linguists, involving the origins and eventual spread of PIE related languages from India to England, offer new perspectives on this centuries long debate. Among these the work of Renfrew (1987), Mallory (1989), and Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1984, 1995) are of great interest. Renfrew, the archaeologist, contends that the PIE settlement was located in Anatolia c.7000–6500 Bc. Its subsequent spread he attributes to a superior technology: their invention of agriculture. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, the linguists, situate the homeland of the PIE a few millennia later in the nearby Caucasus. Mallory agrees with their fifth to fourth millennium date but places the homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe region.
