David W. Anthony > Quotes

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead pergaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptbility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive de world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, wheter or not we look down to acknowledge them.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“It is oddly ironic that capitalist archaeologists made the mode of production central to their definition of the Neolithic, and Marxist archaeologists ignored it.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The Rig Veda was a ritual canon, not a racial manifesto. If you sacrificed in the right way to the right gods, which required performing the great traditional prayers in the traditional language, you were an Aryan; otherwise you were not. The Rig Veda made the ritual and linguistic barrier clear, but it did not require or even contemplate racial purity.10”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Both linguists and archaeologists have made communication across the disciplines almost impossible by speaking in dense jargons that are virtually impenetrable to anyone but themselves.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Although cow bones and charred seeds cannot easily be displayed in the national museum, archaeology is not about collecting pretty things but about solving problems, so in the following pages much attention is devoted to animal bones and charred seeds.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Amazement, of course, is a close cousin of suspicion.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Colonist speech generally is more homogeneous than the language of the homeland they left behind. Dialectical differences were fewer among Colonial-era English speakers in North America than they were in the British Isles. The Spanish dialects of Colonial South America were more homogeneous than the dialects of Southern Spain, the home region of most of the original colonists. Linguistic simplification has three causes. One is chain migration, where colonists tend to recruit family and friends from the same places and social groups that the colonists came from. Simplification also is a normal linguistic outcome of mixing between dialects in a contact situation at the destination.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Between about 14,000 and 12,000 BCE the warming climate that ended the last Ice Age melted the northern glaciers and the permafrost, releasing their combined meltwater in a torrential surge that flowed south into the Caspian basin. The late Ice-Age Caspian ballooned into a vast interior sea designated the Khvalynian Sea. For two thousand years the northern shoreline stood near Saratov on the middle Volga and Orenburg on the Ural River, restricting east-west movement south of the Ural Mountains. The Khvalynian Sea separated the already noticeably different late-glacial forager cultures that prospered east and west of the Ural Mountains.4 Around 11,000–9,000 BCE the water finally rose high enough to overflow catastrophically through a southwestern outlet, the Manych Depression north of the North Caucasus Mountains, and a violent flood poured into the Black Sea, which was then well below the world ocean level. The Black Sea basin filled up until it overflowed, also through a southwestern outlet, the narrow Bosporus valley, and finally poured into the Aegean. By 8000 BCE the Black Sea, now about the size of California and seven thousand feet deep, was in equilibrium with the Aegean and the world ocean.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Other post-Roman ethnolinguistic frontiers followed the same pattern. After the fall of Rome German speakers moved into the northern cantons of Switzerland, and the Gallic kingdom of Burgundy occupied what had been Gallo-Roman western Switzerland. The frontier between them still separates ecologically similar regions within a single modern state that differ in language (German-French), religion (Protestant-Catholic), architecture, the size and organization of landholdings, and the nature of the agricultural economy. Another post-Roman migration created the Breton/French frontier across the base of the peninsula of Brittany, after Romano-Celts migrated to Brittany from western Britain around 400–600 CE, fleeing the Anglo-Saxons. For more than fifteen hundred years the Celtic-speaking Bretons have remained distinct from their French-speaking neighbors in rituals, dress, music, and cuisine. Finally, migrations around 900–1000 CE brought German speakers into what is now northeastern Italy, where the persistent frontier between Germans and Romance speakers inside Italy was studied by Eric Wolf and John Cole in the 1960s. Although in this case both cultures were Catholic Christians, after a thousand years they still maintained different languages, house types, settlement organizations, land tenure and inheritance systems, attitudes toward authority and cooperation, and quite unfavorable stereotypes of each other. In all these cases documents and inscriptions show that the ethnolinguistic oppositions were not recent or invented but deeply historical and persistent.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Sound changes are rule-governed probably because all humans instinctively search for order in language. This must be a hard-wired part of all human brains.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The animal-bone evidence from the Near East suggests that wool sheep appeared after about 3400 BCE. Because sheep were not native to Europe, domesticated Near Eastern sheep were imported to Europe by the first farmers who migrated to Europe from Anatolia about 6500 BCE. But the mutation for longer wool might have appeared as an adaptation to cold winters after domesticated sheep were introduced to northern climates, so it would not be surprising if the earliest long-wool sheep were bred in Europe.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The oldest written Indo-European languages belonged to the Anatolian branch. The Anatolian branch had three early stems: Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The myth of Man and Twin established the importance of the sacrifice and the priest who regulated it. The myth of the “Third one” defined the role of the warrior, who obtained animals for the people and the gods. Many other themes are also reflected in these two stories: the Indo-European fascination with binary doublings combined with triplets, two’s and three’s, which reappeared again and again, even in the metric structure of Indo-European poetry; the theme of pairs who represented magical and legal power (Twin and Man, Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr); and the partition of society and the cosmos between three great functions or roles: the priest (in both his magical and legal aspects), the warrior (the Third Man), and the herder/cultivator (the cow or cattle).”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The steppes resembled the prairies of North America—a monotonous sea of grass framed under a huge, dramatic sky. A continuous belt of steppes extends from eastern Europe on the west (the belt ends between Odessa and Bucharest) to the Great Wall of China on the east, an arid corridor running seven thousand kilometers across the center of the Eurasian continent.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The agricultural towns of Old Europe were the most technologically advanced and aesthetically sophisticated in all of Europe between about 6000 and 4000 BCE.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The only field in which we can find absolute certainty is religion. In all other activities we must be content with the best (meaning both the simplest and the most data-inclusive) interpretation we can advance, given the data as they now stand.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The people who spoke Pre-Celtic and Pre-Italic lost contact with the eastern and northern groups of Indo-European speakers before the sat∂m and ruki innovations occurred. We cannot yet discuss where the boundaries of these linguistic regions were, but we can say that Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic departed to form a western regional–chronological block, whereas the ancestors of Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic, and Armenian stayed behind and shared a set of later innovations. Tocharian, the easternmost Indo-European language, spoken in the Silk Road caravan cities of the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, also lacked the sat∂m and ruki innovations, so it seems to have departed equally early to form an eastern branch.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The Rig Veda was a ritual canon, not a racial manifesto. If you sacrificed in the right way to the right gods, which required performing the great traditional prayers in the traditional language, you were an Aryan; otherwise you were not. The Rig Veda made the ritual and linguistic barrier clear, but it did not require or even contemplate racial purity.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Cattle and sheep herds can grow rapidly with a little luck. Vulnerable to bad weather and theft, they can also decline rapidly. Herding was a volatile, boom-bust economy, and required a flexible, opportunistic social organization.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Most linguists at least agree that the fauna and flora designated by the reconstructed vocabulary are temperate-zone types (birch, otter, beaver, lynx, bear, horse), not Mediterranean (no cypress, olive, or laurel) and not tropical (no monkey, elephant, palm, or papyrus). The roots for horse and bee are most helpful.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The twelve branches of Indo-European included most of the languages of Europe (but not Basque, Finnish, Estonian, or Magyar); the Persian language of Iran; Sanskrit and its many modern daughters (most important, Hindi and Urdu); and a number of extinct languages including Hittite in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and Tocharian in the deserts of Xinjiang (northwestern China) (figure 1.2). Modern English, like Yiddish and Swedish, is assigned to the Germanic branch.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“We can say with great confidence that wheeled vehicles were not invented until after 4000 BCE; the surviving evidence suggests a date closer to 3500 BCE. Before 4000 BCE there were no wheels or wagons to talk about.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“in 1868, August Schleicher was able to tell a story in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, called “The Sheep and the Horses,” or Avis akvasas ka. A rewrite in 1939 by Herman Hirt incorporated new interpretations of Proto-Indo-European phonology, and the title became Owis ek’woses-kwe. In 1979 Winfred Lehmann and Ladislav Zgusta suggested only minor new changes in their version, Owis ekwoskwe.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Ancient European tribal identities—Celt, Scythian, Cimbri, Teuton, and Pict—are now frequently seen as convenient names for chameleon-like political alliances that had no true ethnic identity, or as brief ethnic phenomena that were unable to persist for any length of time, or even as entirely imaginary later inventions.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The image of the mother that is retained through each of the daughters is the form the mother had before the detachment of that daughter branch. Each daughter, therefore, preserves a somewhat different image of the mother.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“comparisons between most Indo-European languages still yielded replacement rates in the core vocabulary of about 10–20% per thousand years. Comparing the core vocabularies in ninety-five Indo-European languages, Kruskal and Black found that the most frequent date for the first splitting of Proto–Indo–European was about 3000 BCE. Although this estimate cannot be relied on absolutely, it is probably “in the ballpark” and should not be ignored.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Pots are not people” is a rule taught to every Western archaeology student since the 1960s.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Most Vedic specialists agree that the 1,028 hymns of the Rig Veda were compiled into what became the sacred form in the Punjab, in northwestern India and Pakistan, probably between about 1500 and 1300 BCE. But the deities, moral concepts, and Old Indic language of the Rig Veda first appeared in written documents not in India but in northern Syria.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Languages normally have dialects—regional accents—and, within any region, they have innovating social sectors (entertainers, soldiers, traders) and conservative sectors (the very rich, the very poor). Depending on who you are, your language might be changing very rapidly or very slowly. Unstable conditions—invasions, famines, the fall of old prestige groups and the rise of new ones—increase the rate of change.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“The connection between animals, brothers, and power was the foundation on which new forms of male-centered ritual and politics developed among Indo-European-speaking societies. That is why the cow (and brothers) occupied such a central place in Indo-European myths relating to how the world began.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World