Archaeology & Language

Calling for a synthesis between modern historical linguistics and the New Archaeology of cultural process, Professor Renfrew boldly claims that it is time to reconsider questions of language origins and what they imply about ethnic affiliation-issues seriously discredited by the racial theorists of the 1920s and 1930s. Specifically, he re-examines the intriguing problem of the Indo-European languages and how their ancestors came to spread from Anatolia and ancient Persia across Europe and much of the Indian subcontinent, with evidence for related languages found as far away as sinkiang in China. The solution he proposes is powerfully persuasive and deeply surpri-sing. Professor Renfrew argues that ealy forms of Indo-European language were spoken across Europe some thousands of years earlier thanhas long been assumed. There was, for instance, no `coming of the celts' but a parallel development of Celtic-speaking peoples in much the same areas in which they found today. These lands have been our lands, then for very much longer than is widely thought, and the British ness, or Irishness, or Spanishness of our origins goes much deeper than we have long believed.