What language did Neolithic pots

speak? Colin Renfrew’s European

farming-language-dispersal
model challenged
Kristian Kristiansen∗

The author argues that Colin Renfrew’s farming language dispersal hypothesis for the spread of
the Indo-European languages is unverifiable, and rests on dubious theoretical and methodological
assumptions. Archaeology is better at recognising institutions than language, and present
knowledge defines the Bronze Age, rather than the early Neolithic, as the formative period
for the development and spread of so-called of Proto- and Early Indo-European institutions.
Keywords: Europe, Neolithic, Bronze Age, farming, pottery, language

Introduction – the historical context

Colin Renfrew’s book Archaeology and Language – the puzzle of Indo-European origins
(Renfrew 1987, modified in 1999 and 2001) was a bold attempt to reopen the dialogue
between two historical disciplines. The debate had more or less shut down since the Second
World War, although the Journal of Indo-European Studies and the work of Maria Gimbutas

Debate
had continued a pre-war archaeological approach linking migrations and the spread of
language to the so-called Kurgan waves (Gimbutas 1970). Paving the way for a new
perspective, Renfrew studied and discussed a number of central issues such as models
for language change and social change and the notion of ethnicity exemplified by the Celts.
He then applied a processual theory to the problem, and created a model that linked the
spread of the Proto-Indo-European language to the spread of agriculture from Anatolia into
Europe, taking it several thousand years back in time.
Some formidable methodological and empirical obstacles stood against such a hypothesis,
but Renfrew had the courage to overcome (or ignore) them. Since only attack can lead to
victory (at least in military tactics), he opened several flanks: one against the method of
glottochronology and linguistic reconstruction (chapter 5), one against the current model
for Proto-Indo-European society, especially as represented by Dumézil, (chapter 10), and
one against the notion of migrations in later prehistory (chapter 2). In this way Renfrew
endeavoured to free himself from what he considered to be restrictive paradigms. This new

∗
Department of Archaeology, University of Gothenburg, Box 200, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden.
(Email: k.kristiansen@archaeology.gu.se)
Received: 4 May 2004; Revised: 16 December 2004; Accepted: 28 February 2005
antiquity 79 (2005): 679–691
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 What language did Neolithic pots speak?

freedom was then employed to develop a model of great time depth for the origin and spread
of Indo-European languages.
What went rather unnoticed, however, was the fact that the new model also meant a partial
retreat from those very same theoretical and methodological demands Renfrew himself had
advanced. It also introduced an unhappy marriage between language, archaeology and
genetic studies whose ingredients can very easily be misused in the hands of nationalist
extremists. An understandable enthusiasm for expanding the limits of what can be known
(Renfrew 2000) seems to have blinded Colin Renfrew to his own otherwise strict demands
for theoretical and empirical coherence and consistency. The model has been maintained
in spite of serious factual critique of important aspects of it (lucidly summarised in Yoffee
1990, also in Stefanovich 1989). As this direction of research has now been propagated in
several recent conferences and monographs (Renfrew & Boyle 2000; Renfrew et al. 2000),
I find it timely to make a critical re-assessment of its basic theoretical and methodological
principles. In doing so I shall expose two key opponents in the discussion: Renfrew (the
earlier) versus Renfrew (the later).
Since we should confine ourselves to testable models, I start by proposing that while we
cannot track the course of languages archaeologically, we can map the institutions with which
they are associated. On this basis I want to show that Renfrew’s critique of the Bronze Age as
providing a context for the adoption of Proto-Indo-European institutions does not now stand
up. I argue that these institutions can be recognised in terms of identifiable components,
and that they are adopted successively across Eurasia during the second millennium BC. By
contrast, there is no new evidence that would equate the Indo-European language with the
spread of farming in the early Neolithic.

Social transformations during the third and early

second millennium BC
Renfrew argued that prehistoric people would only have migrated during the early Neolithic,
and then again in the Iron Age, when textual evidence testified to it. This rather surprising
scenario suited Renfrew’s interpretation and that still remains the best explanation for
it. Only by denying mobility to societies between the fourth-second millennium could
he make his model fit, as he did not consider the theoretical possibility of a change of
language without migration. This remarkable interpretative manipulation was said to rest
on modern archaeological work, which basically were a few articles by Steve Shennan, whose
conclusions were against the traditional concept of culture rather than against migrations
(Shennan 1978). Renfrew’s model thus rested on the dubious theoretical assumption that
the tribes and chiefdoms of the Copper Age and the Bronze Age were unable to carry out
the so-called conquest migrations. This was empirically unjustified, as I have demonstrated
at length (Kristiansen 1998, 2001).
Alternative models were already at hand. Andrew Sherratt’s pioneering work on the
secondary products revolution (Sherratt 1981) had demonstrated the spread of technological
and economic innovations during the late fourth and third millennia BC, with new
social and religious practices and institutions linked to them. Here was a context for the
spread of Indo-European languages, as indeed later proposed by Andrew and Susan Sherratt

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(1988), that Renfrew did not generally take up (but see Renfrew 1989: 121-4). New habits
need people to carry them and transmit them into new contexts. Some movements of people
are always part of the spread of innovations and there did occur migrations during the third
millennium in some regions (Kristiansen 1989, also Prescott & Walderhaug 1995). What
is more, those technological and economic innovations that spread over large areas especially
during the late fourth and third millennium are part of Proto-Indo-European vocabulary.
Indeed, Colin Renfrew only needed to apply his own original theoretical concept of
peer polity interaction (Renfrew 1986) to create an alternative model for the spread of
Indo-European institutions and language and link them to the third millennium BC. In
his language and farming dispersal model (LFD) he argued that language could only spread
through migration, demic diffusion or conquest. But in his work on Peer Polity Interaction
(PPI) Renfrew had argued for the spread of social institutions through interaction based on
small-scale journeys. Both these paradigms imply the transmission of new institutions and
some movements of the people and language linked to them (also Renfrew 1998). Although
some adjustments were made to take the critique of the demic diffusion model into account,
the original model was maintained for eastern and central Europe (Renfrew 2001). Once
again the early Renfrew presented theoretical and interpretative concepts that were ignored
by the later Renfrew.
Today it can be stated with some certainty that the third and early second millennia BC
was a period of major social change over wide areas in Eurasia (summarised in Sherratt 1997,
and, for a new linguistic model, in Sherratt 1999). Further, this change was in part linked to
a complex pattern of interaction, varying from small-scale population movements to some
large-scale migrations. It was based upon the formation of a new economy and a concomitant
new social and religious order of society with a tremendous capacity for expansion and
social incorporation. Regional series of radiocarbon dates define the beginning of this major
expansion within a very narrow time span during the early part of the third millennium BC.

Debate
In addition, recent developments in stable isotope analysis of human remains are
producing compelling evidence for the movement of individuals in later prehistory (Ezzo
et al. 1997; Price et al. 1998; Grupe et al. 1997; Price et al. 2000; Montgomery et al.
2000). Skeletal evidence also testifies to a change of population in some regions such as
Denmark and Poland in the third millennium BC (Petersen 1993, Dzieduszycka-Machnik &
Machnik 1990). In Poland, the two populations lived side by side and were buried in different
cemeteries. In both countries a people taller than previous Neolithic people emerge on the
scene, and led to a general increase in population from the late third millennium onwards.
In Denmark the average height of males increased by 7-8cm from the Megalith period of
the late fourth millennium to the early Bronze Age of the late third millennium BC. During
this period Bell Beaker metallurgists were highly mobile (Price et al. 1998, 2004). Finally,
recent evidence of early farming dispersal in Europe demonstrates a complex pattern that
tends to undermine, or at least demands heavy modifications, of Colin Renfrew’s hypothesis
(Gkiasta et al. 2003; Bentley et al. 2003) that his later adjustments take into account only
in part.
All in all there is mounting archaeological and scientific evidence for the formation of
a new historical epoch by the third millennium BC, with antecedents in the later fourth
millennium originating in the Caucasus and Anatolia (Sherratt 2003). This historical change

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was in part linked to the rise of proto-state societies and urban life in Mesopotamia and the
Near East. There developed new needs to establish relations with the outer world to get access
to a number of essential goods, such as copper, tin and, later on, horses, located outside their
own territories. The so-called Uruk expansion of the later fourth millennium BC (Algaze
1989; Stein 1999) created these new links that circulated copper from the Caucasus in
exchange for new types of prestige goods and technological knowledge (Dolukhanov 1994:
326ff.; Sherratt 1997/1991).
From this interaction there emerged new ranked chiefdoms in the Caucasus (Maikop
Culture) whose influence was later transmitted further on to steppe societies and even
south of the Caucasus as the Kura-Araks Culture (Dolukhanov 1994: 301ff and Fig. 6.18,
Kohl 2001). The latter represented a new type of socio-economic network that apparently
monopolised the production and distribution of metal in the Levant and Mesopotamia.
We may here be encountering those early Caucasian-speaking groups mentioned in later
written sources as Hurrians, who rose to power in the early second millennium BC in the
Mittani state, and paved the way for other Indo-European-speaking groups, among them
the Hittites, who according to historical and linguistic knowledge were intruders in Anatolia
(Yoffee 1990: 306-8).
From the Pontic region to the Balkans, this was a period when new agro-pastoral
economies expanded. They shared many traits in economy and burial ritual such as the
construction of tumuli over graves and the predominance of individual burials (Yamna,
Corded Ware, Battle-Axe and Catacomb Culture). Recent botanical evidence has made it
clear that the third millennium BC saw the formation of open-steppe-like environments for
grazing animals from the Urals to north-western Europe (Andersen 1995, 1998; Odgaard
1994; Kremenetski 2003; Shislina 2000, 2003). The mobile lifestyle is exemplified in
the employment of mats, tents and wagons, sometimes found in burials (Ecsedy 1994;
Burmeister 2004). The Caucasian region rose to prominence as a metallurgical centre of
production, and from 3200 BC to 1800 BC there developed a Circum-Pontic metallurgical
province, including Anatolia, that received most of its metal from the huge Caucasian
mines (Chernykh 1992; Chernykh et al. 2002). Around the centres of production and
distribution there emerged a series of stratified societies, burying their dead in impressive
and richly furnished kurgans. Sometimes they would contain imports not even present
in the centres such as the famous Maikop burials from the late fourth millennium Uruk
expansion (Chernykh 1992: chapters 3-5, Figures 17 and 31; Sherratt 1997/1991). From
here the new social and economic organisation was adopted in the southern steppe where it
proved highly dynamic.
A second period of cumulative changes linked to developments in metallurgy, mining
and trade began around 2300 BC (Hansen 2002; Müller 2002; Zdanovich & Zdanovich
2002). It culminated in the centuries after 2000 BC when metallurgy reached a new level of
sophistication as bronze alloying became widespread (Pare 2000). Long distance trade and
travels of warriors and other specialists linked the societies from Eurasia to the Aegean
and Scandinavia, from the Urals to Mesopotamia. This corresponds to the spread of the new
social institution of warrior aristocracies and the light two-wheeled war chariot (Anthony
1995; Kristiansen 2001). The chariot transformed not only warfare but also social and
religious institutions from Scandinavia to Mesopotamia and later India (Kuzmina 2001),

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where they are evidenced in contemporary written sources. These changes represented a new
level of social complexity although based upon the previous social and religious framework.
It thus spread along known lines of travels and exchange.
During the third millennium BC, therefore, there emerged a new historical epoch in
Eurasia based upon the transmission of a new social and economic order. Widespread
travels in combination with seasonal transhumance and some migrations accompanied
these changes. Laid on these foundations and within these very same regions, networks of
social complexity developed during the first half of the second millennium BC. It is proposed
that these historical changes represent the most plausible framework for the formation and
spread of Proto-Indo-European institutions, and therefore language.

Defining and tracking second millennium institutions

The problem – or the challenge – of tracing the origin of institutions is that foreign
material evidence is often translated into the local cultural vocabulary, which means that
only bits and pieces of the original evidence survives. It is acculturated and recontextualised.
In this process the original meaning and message is often carried over in a selective way
leading to the adoption of new value systems, practices and eventually institutions to
reinforce them. If that is the case, it is only by interpreting and comparing institutions that
we are able to understand, and eventually explain the true historical impact of social and
economic interaction between societies. Methodologically it demands a retreat from a strictly
typological approach based upon formal similarity. Such studies may give an indication of
interaction and the introduction of new prestige goods and value systems. But it is only by
adopting a comparative structural approach of intercontextual interpretation that we shall
be able to trace and understand the formation, reproduction and expansion of institutions
in the past.

Debate
Thus, an intercontextual, interpretative strategy requires us, firstly, to trace key symbols
throughout all the contexts where they appear, and, secondly, to interpret and reconstruct
the meaning and institutional structure of this new intercontextual universe in time and
space – structural homologies in Renfrew’s terminology (Renfrew 1986: 4f.). As institutions
often display a longue-durée and a wide geographical distribution, it is often possible to add
textual evidence as a supplementary interpretative context. In Figure 1 I have exemplified the
components of an intercontextual, interpretative strategy. However, we have no guarantee
that intercontextual meaning will always connect specific strong symbols: it remains to be
tested in each case. But I do suggest that it represents a powerful interpretative mechanism,
as I shall demonstrate.
With the introduction of the chariot, the composite bow, the long sword and the lance,
warfare took on a new social, economic and ideological significance from the beginning
of the second millennium BC. This was reflected in burial rituals where chiefly barrows
became a dominant feature. A new class of master artisan emerged to build chariots, breed
and train horses, and to train users and producers of the new weapons. This package of skills
was so complex that it demanded the transfer of people, horses and warriors to be properly
adopted. Once adopted it changed the nature of society, as it introduced a whole series of
new economic and social demands, as well as a new ideology of aristocracy linked to warfare

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 What language did Neolithic pots speak?

Figure 1. Intercontextual interpretation. A model.

and political leadership. Thus, it represented a new institution of warrior aristocracies and
their attached specialists that changed Bronze Age societies throughout Eurasia and the Near
East. The adoption of the new institutions happened so rapidly that it is impossible to trace
its origin with archaeological dating methods. What we can demonstrate, however, is that
it spread as a package, and we can further demonstrate its impact on local societies.
To define the new institution and its geographical impact I have chosen to map the cheek
pieces used on horse-harness. They can be found in burials where the horses were buried with
the warrior and the chariot, but they are also found in settlements. In Figure 2 we see the
structured distribution of three interregional networks, signifying travel, trade and possibly
conquest. The first network belongs to a steppe tradition employing bone bits with circular
cheek pieces (large circles in Figure 2). It extended from the Urals to the Carpathians, and
represents the first historically attested appearance of the so-called steppe corridor from the
Black Sea to the Altai and beyond. The second network is given by a Near Eastern/East
Mediterranean tradition employing bronze-bits of similar type as the steppe (diamonds in
Figure 2), and the third, by an east-Central European tradition employing antler bits (small
circles in Figure 2). The horse-bits were part of the warrior/chariot package that included
new types of long swords, bow and arrow, and lance with a similar distribution. The three
traditions meet in the Aegean and in the Carpathians. From here new regional links were
established with the east Mediterranean and northern Europe (Penner 1998; Larsson 1997,

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Figure 2. Distribution of the three major types of bits in the chariot complex in Eurasia and the east Mediterranean during
the early to mid second millennium BC. It demonstrates the existence of three interregional networks, which met in the Aegean
and the Carpathians (drawing based on Boroffka 1998 and Penner 1998).

1999a, 1999b; David 2001; Engedal 2002). Thus the new chariot/warrior aristocracy was
distributed along these regional trading links to northern Europe (Kristiansen 1998: Fig-
ure 191), and possibly to the east Mediterranean, if not the Near East (see below). The

Debate
three distributions are further unified by a specialised style of waveband decoration linked
to these objects, which are mostly foreign to the local style tradition (Figure 3).
The distribution of this new package thus fulfils the criteria for the expansion of a new
institution that was adapted to local traditions throughout Eurasia and the Near East.
In the initial phase in the earlier second millennium it was still unified by a number of
common traits, among them the specialised waveband decoration and large well bred steppe
horses, as found in early Mycenaean burials at Dendra (Payne 1990). As it demanded the
transfer of new skills, craftsmanship and horses, we have to envisage the migration of small
groups of warriors, craftsmen and horse breeders that were welcomed at chiefly courts along
the networks just described. The occurrence of identical and nearly identical objects in the
Carpathians, Mycenae and Anatolia (the Hittite town of Kanesh) implies that direct personal
contact and long distance travel were involved in the creation and expansion of the new
institution. We cannot exclude that conquest was also part of the scenario in some regions,
where the package appears as ‘intrusive’. This is true of the Hyksos in Egypt, just like the
emergence of the shaft grave dynasties with its links to the steppe region both in terms
of burial ritual and anatomical type (Angel 1972; Manolis & Neroutsos 1997). The latter
should be taken with some caution as the notion of anatomical typology has undergone
critical revisions (extensive discussion in Day 2001).

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 What language did Neolithic pots speak?

Figure 3. Examples of the waveband decoration, here mostly on handles for whips, another new tool in the chariot package
(after David 1997: Taf. 7).

It adds strength to our historical scenario that textual evidence from Anatolia, Egypt and
the Near East describes this period as one of disruption. Whether or not one wishes to
agree with Robert Drews about the coming of the Greeks (Drews 1988), he nonetheless
points to a series of interrelated historical changes in the Near East during the eighteenth to
sixteenth century BC. They were linked among other things to the spread and adaptation
of the Indo-European ‘chariot package’, which demanded both skilled specialists and the
importation and training of horses from the steppe. It coincides with disruptions and social
changes, including conquest and migrations over large areas. The Kassites in Mesopotamia,
the Aryans in India (Kuzmina 2001), the Hyksos in Egypt and a new chiefly dynasty in
Mycenae (the B circle), just as Indo-European speaking people are emerging in Mittani texts
and other sources from the Levant and Palestine. In all cases we are dealing with rather small
groups linked to the ruling elite, being warriors and specialist, sometimes rulers: ‘The new
rulers are in most cases a dominant minority, constituting only a tiny fragment of the population.
This was especially true of the Aryan rulers in Mitanni and the Aryan and Hurrian princes in
the Levant; it seems also true of the Kassites in Babylon and the Hyksos in Egypt. The Aryan

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speakers who took over Northwest India may have gone there en masse but were nonetheless a
minority in their newly acquired domain’ (Drews 1988: 63).
One can hardly overlook the interrelatedness of these major historical events, which also
had far-reaching implications in central and northern Europe, as we have seen. However,
after this initial period of interaction between the steppe, the Near East and central and
northern Europe, new lines of exchange rose to dominance. Disruption in the Carpathian
tell cultures and the expansion of the Mycenaean power into the western Mediterranean
led to the formation of new lines of exchange between the Tumulus Culture in southern
Germany and southern Scandinavia between 1500 and 1300 BC.
It was not only new social institutions of warfare that were channelled through these
networks of travelling warriors and specialists. New religious knowledge and new divinities
were transmitted in the process, linking Scandinavia and Old Vedic India to a common
religious structure during the Bronze Age. This can be demonstrated by the appearance of
the religious and political institution of the so-called Divine Twins of Proto-Indo-European
origin (Olmsted 1994; Ward 1968). It spread throughout Eurasia and the Aegean along
the same lines of interaction, and their attributes are repeatedly found in pair-wise votive
deposits, figurines, iconography and symbolism. As this evidence is published elsewhere, I
shall not restate it here (Kristiansen 2004; Kristiansen & Larsson 2005).

Conclusion
I have briefly demonstrated the establishment of new international networks connecting
Bronze Age societies throughout Eurasia and the Aegean during the early second millennium
BC, and this can account for the widespread appearance of Proto-Indo-European institutions
and their material culture. They include the institution of warrior chiefs and two wheeled
chariots and the institution of the Divine Twins. In addition, contemporary or near

Debate
contemporary texts verify these interpretations. I have further given a historical explanation
for the occurrence of similar Proto-Indo-European institutions from India to Scandinavia.
We can thus propose that the central institutions belong in the second millennium BC,
with possible origins in the social and economic transformations that characterised Eurasia
during the third millennium BC. The proposal is that the language appeared at the same
time, an idea that would seem to be in accordance with John Robb’s model for a social
prehistory of European languages (Robb 1993).
Colin Renfrew’s so-called farming-language-dispersal (FLD) hypothesis rested on
opposing a third millennium Eurasian spread of new social and economic practices (bringing
with them a new language), a critique that is now obsolete. He also assumed that a ranked
Proto-Indo-European society as described in texts and comparative mythology was not
possible until the Iron Age, a critique that is also obsolete. We can see here that while there
is good new evidence in the archaeological record for the existence of Proto-Indo-European
institutions in the second millennium BC, there is no new evidence for the FLD hypothesis
other than resorting to dubious assumptions about correspondences between genes, culture
and language (Sims-Williams 1998). The FLD hypotheses could only be sustained if one
assumed a separation between the dating of the proto-Indo-European language and the
dating of its institutions.

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Henceforward, lines of interpretation should (among other things) be based upon the
recognition that people travelled and migrated throughout prehistory – in smaller and
larger groups and for various reasons with various historical consequences that we need to
study and learn more about. We should also acknowledge that prehistoric societies from
the later fourth millennium onwards were indeed complex and stand in no opposition
to the various descriptions and interpretations of their social organisation and mythology
presented by Dumézil, Olmsted, Ward and others. Finally we should acknowledge that non-
literate Proto-Indo-European societies, their languages and institutions, could have emerged
through a dynamic process of local transformations and interactions with the literate state
societies of the Near East. The process by which ideas, institutions and languages spread may
be more clearly modelled, in my view, by Peer Polity Interaction than by farming language
dispersal. Thus Colin Renfrew emerges as both a winner and a loser in the debate.

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