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In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth By J. P. Mallory ( Thames & Hudson )
Release Date: 1991-04
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Scholarly search for the homeland of the Indo-Europeans
Linguists define "Indo-European" as a language entity or unity from which all Indo-european languages derived. By analyzing linguistic patterns of change, scholars can "reconstruct" the language and situate it in a time period when it was a unified language. The task is then to provide this abstract entity with a living group of people and a homeland.
This scholarly book tries to approach the homeland problem of the Indo-Europeans mainly from the linguistic perspective, but also considering evidence from other areas (comparative philology, archeology, comparative mythology, etc.). By scholarly I do not mean difficult to understand since the author writes in a very comprehensible way; by scholarly I mean that the author does not get carried away by some hypothesis, but rather presents the many existing ones and explains why they could or couldn't fit the linguistic data.
The first chapters and the last ones, where he presents the problem, geographically locates where Indo-Europeans are to be found and where he draws some conclusions, are extremely good. He lost me a bit in the middle, where he presented all the existent and often contradictory evidence and I felt that no matter how many pages I read, we were as far from the "promised homeland" as in the beginning. In his conclusion, the author himself kind of apologizes for having lead the reader through a lot of "cul de sacs", but he says that this is how this search looks like. At least he is aware of his style.
I myself prefer when an author writes more like fiction telling a clear and unified story at the expense of maybe drawing conlusions a bit to far. Then you can still read his opponent's book to have a more complete picture and enjoy both.
All in all, I learnt a lot from this book, for example, how do you analyze nomadic groups from an archeaological perspective if they left no "settlements"? Well, the answer is that they might have left some cemeteries or lonely graves and luckily some "gifts" for the deceased, as well as some ritual places or camps. The maps in the book are very useful.
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 interesting but too academic ( robcrawford )
This book is very scholarly: it gets extremely detailed about comparative linguistics as correlated with the archaeological record. I was looking for exactly that, as I have been curious about this for many years.
Unfortunately, the book errs more in the direction of academic rigor and far too little as a story-telling experience. As such, while the content is truly fascinating, it get mired in details from the names of obscure archaeological sites that are not on the lousy maps to the scholars who are advancing certain points of view about a certain common word. Bottom line: it isn't very fun.
However, I learned an immense amount and am glad to I read it. The Indo-Europeans emerged in about 4000 BC, a pastoralist "people" in the Pontic Caspian area. Unlike sedentary agriculturalists, they migrated both to Europe (North and West) and South into India. They had a common vocabulary and language, a mythology with motifs that have survived to present in many cases (like divine twins), horses (a decisive advantage for warriors and nomads), and certain advanced technologies (chariots and agricultural). These attributes enabled the Indo-Europeans to absorb an astonishing array of peoples in the areas of their migrations. Then once more sedentary, their languages became the roots of all the modern I-E languages, clearly the most commonly spoken of all the world's languages. The great contribution of this book is the merging of linguistic and archaeological observations.
For the curious, there are many many wonderful details. For example, the Persain language group generated quite a diaspora. In addition to the Iranians, you had the Alans (later the Ossetians), Medes, Parthains, and Scythians; they ranged from Aisa minor to Spain and N. Africa. The book follows their migrations and histories quite succinictly. It is very fun, as many of them are mentioned n classical histories but many are never differentiated other than being non-Greek. The book also traces how the Finno-Ubrian and Basque languages remained non-I-E.
I would recommend this book, but it is more for students of linguistics and/or archaeology than interested laymen.
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Endless Search for the Indo-Europeans ( thehunter8 )
Great info but way too many pages searching for the exact
geographic location of the original group of people, as if
they need have had one location at some particular moment.
But an important basic text for understanding the issues
of PIE.
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 Who are the Indo-Europeans.
This book is a definate must read for anyone who is studying the Indo-Europeans or the Celts or any culture derived from the Indo- Europeans.
It is a look at a language, history and culture of a great people. The author has spent time on the documentation of the sources and uses a great deal of resources which are in and of themselves interesting.
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Take all science with a grain of salt... ( wudwaen )
I truly appreciate well reasoned arguments and those few that can still write them. Some developments do not appear as clearly stated as I would find convincing. Nomadic pastoralists only happen after the aridity of a region deposes them from traditional agriculture and forces them to survive on herds navigated over ever greater and greater ranges. The Scythians are one such example. The transition is natural and climatic. While comparative linguistics and reconstructed linguistics are wonderful ideas, and I often follow them myself to see what they might imply *IF*, they have no factual value. This appears to be lost on some who accept the theoretical constructions of this science as if it were chemistry or physics with a certitude of knowledge. We can only say such and such a word existed if we have a written copy of that word, and insinuating a technology or concept to a culture because it is found in cultures of descent 500 or 1,000 years later is invalid science regardless of what we wish to believe. This does not keep the ideas from being worthy of note or interesting to explore, but always reduces my enjoyment in reading works of this type.
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