“Kurgan hypothesis”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory or Kurgan model) or steppe theory is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe, Eurasia and parts of Asia.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|The Kurgan solution is attractive and has been accepted by many archaeologists and linguists, in part or total. It is the solution one encounters in the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse.{{sfn|Mallory|1989|p=185}} }}{{refn|group=lower-alpha|The single most popular proposal is the Pontic steppes (see the Kurgan hypothesis)..."{{sfn|Strazny|2000|p=163}} }} It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). The term is derived from the Russian kurgan ({{lang|ru|курга́н}}), meaning tumulus or burial mound.

The Kurgan hypothesis was first formulated in the 1950s by Marija Gimbutas, who used the term to group various cultures, including the Yamnaya, or Pit Grave, culture and its predecessors. David Anthony instead uses the core Yamnaya culture and its relationship with other cultures as a point of reference.

Marija Gimbutas defined the Kurgan culture as composed of four successive periods, with the earliest (Kurgan I) including the Samara and Seroglazovo cultures of the Dnieper–Volga region in the Copper Age (early 4th millennium BC). The people of these cultures were nomadic pastoralists, who, according to the model, by the early 3rd millennium BC had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into Eastern Europe.{{sfn|Gimbutas|1985|p=190}}

Three genetic studies in 2015 gave partial support to Gimbutas's Kurgan theory regarding the Indo-European Urheimat. According to those studies, haplogroups R1b and R1a, now the most common in Europe (R1a is also common in South Asia) would have expanded from the Russian and Ukrainian steppes, along with the Indo-European languages; they also detected an autosomal component present in modern Europeans which was not present in Neolithic Europeans, which would have been introduced with paternal lineages R1b and R1a, as well as Indo-European languages.^[1]^[2]^[3]

History

Predecessors

Arguments for the identification of the Proto-Indo-Europeans as steppe nomads from the Pontic–Caspian region had already been made in the 19th century by German philologists Theodor Benfey^[4] and especially Otto Schrader.^[5]^[6] In his standard work^[7] about PIE and to a greater extent in a later abbreviated version,^[8] Karl Brugmann took the view that the urheimat could not be identified exactly at that time, but he tended toward Schrader's view. However, after Karl Penka's 1883^[9] rejection of non-European origins, most scholars favoured a Northern European origin. The view of a Pontic origin was still strongly favoured, e.g., by the archaeologists V. Gordon Childe^[10] and Ernst Wahle.^[11] One of Wahle's students was Jonas Puzinas, who in turn was one of Gimbutas's teachers. Gimbutas, who acknowledges Schrader as a precursor,^[12] was able to marshal a wealth of archaeological evidence from the territory of the Soviet Union (and other countries then belonging to the eastern bloc) not readily available to scholars from western countries,{{sfn|Anthony|2007|pp=[https://books.google.com/books?id=nLIufwC4szwC&pg=PA18 18, 495]}} enabling her to achieve a fuller picture of prehistoric Europe.

Overview

When it was first proposed in 1956, in The Prehistory of Eastern Europe, Part 1, Marija Gimbutas's contribution to the search for Indo-European origins was an interdisciplinary synthesis of archaeology and linguistics. The Kurgan model of Indo-European origins identifies the Pontic–Caspian steppe as the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) urheimat, and a variety of late PIE dialects are assumed to have been spoken across the region. According to this model, the Kurgan culture gradually expanded until it encompassed the entire Pontic–Caspian steppe, Kurgan IV being identified with the Yamnaya culture of around 3000 BC.

The mobility of the Kurgan culture facilitated its expansion over the entire region, and is attributed to the domestication of the horse and later the use of early chariots.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|name=blenchspriggsIII181|Parpola in {{Harvcoltxt|Blench|Spriggs|1999|p=181}}. "The history of the Indo-European words for 'horse' shows that the Proto-Indo-European speakers had long lived in an area where the horse was native and/or domesticated {{Harvcol|Mallory|1989|pp=161–63}}. The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from the Ukrainian Srednij Stog culture, which flourished c. 4200–3500 BC and is likely to represent an early phase of the Proto-Indo-European culture ({{Harvcolnb|Anthony|1986|pp=295f.}}; {{Harvcolnb|Mallory|1989|pp=162, 197–210}}). During the Pit Grave culture (c. 3500–2800 BC), which continued the cultures related to Srednij Stog and probably represents the late phase of the Proto-Indo-European culture – full-scale pastoral technology, including the domesticated horse, wheeled vehicles, stock breeding and limited horticulture, spread all over the Pontic steppes, and, c. 3000 BC, in practically every direction from this centre (Anthony 1986, 1991; {{Harvcolnb|Mallory|1989|loc=vol. 1}}).}} The first strong archaeological evidence for the domestication of the horse comes from the Sredny Stog culture north of the Azov Sea in Ukraine, and would correspond to an early PIE or pre-PIE nucleus of the 5th millennium BC.{{refn|group=lower-alpha|name=blenchspriggsIII181}} Subsequent expansion beyond the steppes led to hybrid, or in Gimbutas's terms "kurganized" cultures, such as the Globular Amphora culture to the west. From these kurganized cultures came the immigration of Proto-Greeks to the Balkans and the nomadic Indo-Iranian cultures to the east around 2500 BC.

Kurgan culture

Cultural horizon

Gimbutas defined and introduced the term "Kurgan culture" in 1956 with the intention of introducing a "broader term" that would combine Sredny Stog II, Pit Grave, and Corded ware horizons (spanning the 4th to 3rd millennia in much of Eastern and Northern Europe).{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Gimbutas (1970) page 156: "The name Kurgan culture (the Barrow culture) was introduced by the author in 1956 as a broader term to replace and Pit-Grave (Russian Yamnaya), names used by Soviet scholars for the culture in the eastern Ukraine and south Russia, and Corded Ware, Battle-Axe, Ochre-Grave, Single-Grave and other names given to complexes characterized by elements of Kurgan appearance that formed in various parts of Europe"}} The model of a "Kurgan culture" brings together the various cultures of the Copper Age to Early Bronze Age (5th to 3rd millennia BC) Pontic–Caspian steppe to justify their identification as a single archaeological culture or cultural horizon, based on similarities among them. The eponymous construction of kurgans (mound graves) is only one among several factors. As always in the grouping of archaeological cultures, the dividing line between one culture and the next cannot be drawn with hard precision and will be open to debate.

Stages of culture and expansion

Gimbutas's original suggestion identifies four successive stages of the Kurgan culture:

In other publications{{sfn|Bojtar|1999|p=57}} she proposes three successive "waves" of expansion:

Timeline

Further expansion during the Bronze Age

The Kurgan hypothesis describes the initial spread of Proto-Indo-European during the 5th and 4th millennia BC.^[13] As used by Gimbutas, the term "kurganized" implied that the culture could have been spread by no more than small bands who imposed themselves on local people as an elite. This idea of the PIE language and its daughter-languages diffusing east and west without mass movement proved popular with archaeologists in the 1970s (the pots-not-people paradigm).^[14] The question of further Indo-Europeanization of Central and Western Europe, Central Asia and Northern India during the Bronze Age is beyond its scope, far more uncertain than the events of the Copper Age, and subject to some controversy. The rapidly developing field of archaeogenetics and genetic genealogy since the late 1990s has not only confirmed a migratory pattern out of the Pontic Steppe at the relevant time,^[1]^[2]^[3] it also suggests the possibility that the population movement involved was more substantial than anticipated.{{sfn|Haak|2015}}

Revisions

Invasion versus diffusion scenarios (1980s onward)

Gimbutas believed that the expansions of the Kurgan culture were a series of essentially hostile military incursions where a new warrior culture imposed itself on the peaceful, matrilinear (hereditary through the female line), matrifocal, though egalitarian cultures of "Old Europe", replacing it with a patriarchal warrior society,{{sfn|Gimbutas|1982|p=1}} a process visible in the appearance of fortified settlements and hillforts and the graves of warrior-chieftains:

In her later life, Gimbutas increasingly emphasized the authoritarian nature of this transition from the egalitarian process of the nature/earth mother goddess (Gaia) to a patriarchal society and the worship of the father/sun/weather god (Zeus, Dyaus). This supposed egalitarian, mother-goddess-worshipping society is not the same as a matriarchy in Gimbutas's view. Matriarchal hierarchy structures in Gimbutas's opinion are the same as a patriarchal society, not the actual opposite: an egalitarian society without hierarchy.

J. P. Mallory (in 1989) accepted the Kurgan hypothesis as the de facto standard theory of Indo-European origins, but he recognized criticism of any alleged, but not actually stated, "radical" scenario of military invasion; the slow accumulation of influence through coercion or extortion – Gimbutas's actual main scenario – was often taken as general and immediate raiding and then conquest:

Alignment with Anatolian hypothesis (2000s)

Alberto Piazza and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza have tried in the 2000s to align the Anatolian hypothesis with the Steppe theory. According to Alberto Piazza, writing in 2000, "[i]t is clear that, genetically speaking, peoples of the Kurgan steppe descended at least in part from people of the Middle Eastern Neolithic who immigrated there from Turkey."{{sfn|Cavalli-Sforza|2000}} According to Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza (2006), the Yamna-culture may have been derived from Middle Eastern Neolithic farmers who migrated to the Pontic steppe and developed pastoral nomadism.^[15]{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza: "...if the expansions began at 9,500 years ago from Anatolia and at 6,000 years ago from the Yamnaya culture region, then a 3,500-year period elapsed during their migration to the Volga-Don region from Anatolia, probably through the Balkans. There a completely new, mostly pastoral culture developed under the stimulus of an environment unfavorable to standard agriculture, but offering new attractive possibilities. Our hypothesis is, therefore, that Indo-European languages derived from a secondary expansion from the Yamnaya culture region after the Neolithic farmers, possibly coming from Anatolia and settled there, developing pastoral nomadism.^[16]}} Wells agrees with Cavalli-Sforza that there is "some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East."{{sfn|Wells|2002}}{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Wells: "... while we see substantial genetic and archaeological evidence for an Indo-European migration originating in the southern Russian steppes, there is little evidence for a similarly massive Indo-European migration from the Middle East to Europe. One possibility is that, as a much earlier migration (8,000 years old, as opposed to 4,000), the genetic signals carried by Indo-European-speaking farmers may simply have dispersed over the years. There is clearly some genetic evidence for migration from the Middle East, as Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues showed, but the signal is not strong enough for us to trace the distribution of Neolithic languages throughout the entirety of Indo-European-speaking Europe."{{sfn|Wells|2002}}}} Nevertheless, the Anatolian hypothesis is controversial.{{sfn|Anthony|Ringe|2015}}

Anthony's revised steppe theory (2007)

David Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel and Language describes his "revised steppe theory". David Anthony considers the term "Kurgan culture" so lacking in precision as to be useless, instead using the core Yamnaya culture and its relationship with other cultures as a point of reference.^[17] He points out that

He does not include the Maykop culture among those that he considers to be IE-speaking, presuming instead that they spoke a Caucasian language.{{sfn|Anthony|2007|p=297}}

History

Predecessors

Overview

Kurgan culture

Cultural horizon

Stages of culture and expansion

Timeline

Further expansion during the Bronze Age

Revisions

Invasion versus diffusion scenarios (1980s onward)

Alignment with Anatolian hypothesis (2000s)

Anthony's revised steppe theory (2007)

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links