Twenty-first-century light over the Indo-European homeland: triangulating language, archaeology and genetics

Abstract

The reviewed volumes represent the past and future of triangulating human prehistory. Both works address the integration of the knowledge embedded in the Indo-European group of languages into the interpretation of archaeological and genetic data, but approach this very differently. By enlisting the expertise of scholars from the three different fields, with 22 contributions from more than 40 scholars from more than 10 different countries, The Indo-European puzzle revisited is both a seminal work and a resounding commentary on the, by its very nature, limited perspectives voiced by Jean-Paul Demoule as a sole archaeologist author of his book The Indo-Europeans. The title of the former is based on the subtitle of Colin Renfrew's Archaeology and language: the puzzle of Indo-European origins (1987), another archaeologist's foray into historical linguistics.