Taking a Dig at History : Archeology: Russian and U.S. researchers eagerly await a mission that could prove that the Mother Tongue of modern language originated in the Russia steppes.
The quest for the origins of the Indo-Europeans has all the fascination of an electric light in the open air on a summer night: It tends to attract every species of scholar or would-be savant who can take pen to hand. --J.P. Mallory, “In Search of the Indo-Europeans”
To the untrained eye, the Volga-Don Steppe in southern Russia is a monotonously flat plain, its horizon broken only by occasional small hills. For Karlene Jones-Bley, an interloper from a faraway culture, the land holds remarkable potential.
Beneath those mounds of earth lie 6,000-year-old human bones and artifacts that may do more than reveal an ancient culture. They also may solve mysteries about the origins of modern languages.
Like Indiana Jones and his celluloid search for the Ark of the Covenant, the hunt for the Mother Tongue is a story full of adventure, intrigue, and man-made and natural obstacles. But, like any adventure story worth its salt, this one also has a twist: For starters, take a few former mortal enemies--Americans and Russians, archeologists and linguists--joining hands in a common goal.
Linguists and archeologists are usually isolated from one another and have traditionally sparred over the roots of language and culture. But a small group of researchers is breaking barriers and seeking evidence to corroborate each other’s work.
“It’s a matter of finding the archeology that fits the linguistics,” says Jones-Bley.
The idea is not quite as obscure as it sounds.
For centuries, linguists have theorized that two-thirds of the world’s modern languages sprang from a common source--a nomadic people called Indo-Europeans who once lived somewhere in north-central Europe. Until now, though, that theory derived solely from studying and comparing languages that shared common word roots--a seemingly dry and esoteric work.
Jones-Bley, 51, a UCLA postdoctoral student and the first Western archeologist in 50 years allowed to do fieldwork in Russia, hopes to change all that.
She and a Russian archeologist are planning a dig this July in the area northeast of the Baltic Sea known as the Pontic steppes. They believe evidence found there may help prove that the Indo-Europeans and their language--called the Mother of Languages--originated in the Russian steppes.
Obviously, life would be a lot easier if the Indo-Europeans had buried a tape recording of a few fireside chats. Absent that, Jones-Bley and her team will rely on other methods.
One way, Jones-Bley says, is through religion. Indo-Europeans worshiped the sun, which has been traced to a variety of words in different languages. “We have the terms Zeus and Jupiter and Deos , which is the Hittite word for God,” she says. “All of these God words, in fact, mean sun in one way or another.”
But the sun also can be traced archeologically, she explains: “Sun symbolism is very prevalent in artifacts later on. The swastika is just a very, very old Indo-European sun symbol.”
What archeologists and linguists hope to see is physical evidence for word origins. Several species of trees, for example, were first named by Indo-Europeans. If fossil pollens from some trees could be uncovered there, experts say, it would corroborate the theory that Indo-Europeans dwelt there and named the trees of that region.
Jones-Bley, a student of famed UCLA archeologist Marija Gimbutas, has already uncovered enough artifacts to whet researchers’ appetites worldwide. In 1990, she made her first trip to the steppe region, where she and Russian colleagues found skeletons in grotesque contortions--one appeared to be in mid-scream--that date to 2500 BC.
Although no Temple of Doom, the excavation site wasn’t exactly hospitable. Nor were her living conditions exactly the Ritz.
“We were in tents. The loo was the trees,” recalls Jones-Bley. “I had mosquito bites from head to toe. I kept checking my legs for blood poisoning.”
But after excavating her first kurgan--or burial mound--she was hooked. She returned to the site the next summer to plan an even more extensive dig on a kurgan more than 16 feet high and 250 feet across.
Martin Huld, a Cal State Los Angeles linguistics professor who is following events, believes the presence of metal tools in the kurgan would go a long way toward proving the Indo-European theory.
“I would be very happy to see evidence of metals like copper, for which there are Indo-European words,” he says. “If we were able to find a particular constellation of cultural artifacts, that would be a signal that these were the Indo-Europeans.”
For Vladislav Ivanovich Mamontov, the Russian archeologist who will dig with Jones-Bley in the steppes, the July exploration will be significant on more than one level.
The excavation represents not only “a chance in a lifetime” to learn more about ancient steppes dwellers but also an opportunity for the small circle of Indo-European researchers in the East and West to forge ties. For Mamontov, an archeology professor at the Volgograd State Pedagogical Institute, those ties have been a long time coming.
Until recently, Mamontov’s sole connection with Western colleagues was through research papers and journals that he could obtain only through a labyrinthine procurement procedure from Moscow or St. Petersburg universities.
One researcher particularly intrigued him. For years, Mamontov followed Gimbutas’ work. And in some ways, she became his mentor, he says, stoking his imaginative flames.
In 1965, Gimbutas published a book that was the first to establish the steppes theory of Indo-European origins. Russian scholars read that work with interest, he says.
But that’s as close as the two archeologists ever got. For more than 25 years, Mamontov seemed much like a man stranded in the desert with an ice-cold bottle of beer but no opener. He had physical access to the steppes, but was frozen out of the world’s scholarly community because of the Cold War.
Then came perestroika and a new spirit of cooperation; Mamontov seized the opportunity to invite Gimbutas to help excavate the kurgans.
Unfortunately, the invitation came a bit late. Gimbutas, who says she would have jumped at the opportunity to explore the steppes’ underground world, had retired and was in poor health. She encouraged students, including Jones-Bley, to go in her place.
“I’m too old for starting new research,” Gimbutas says. “But I’m quite happy that my student could start something.”
Jones-Bley, whose doctoral dissertation researched burial patterns of the Celts and who suspects a connection between ancient graves in Russia and Ireland, has taken on the assignment with the enthusiasm of a new generation.
“Gimbutas has had to lean on the literature that she could get from the Russians and deal with their site reports. And she has never excavated a kurgan,” Jones-Bley says. “The advantage is that . . . I don’t have to depend on someone else’s interpretation of what’s in the ground.”
How Jones-Bley and Mamontov interpret what’s in the ground, however, may not earn universal acceptance. Russian linguists Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov aren’t convinced the archeologists will find the Indo-Europeans’ homeland, since they believe the origins are farther southeast, in what is now Turkey and Armenia. They suggest the Indo-Europeans may have moved to the steppes but didn’t originate there.
“In general, I’m not against” the steppes theory, says Ivanov, now a visiting professor of Slavic languages at UCLA. “But one cannot speak about one homeland. The steppes may have been the origins of a certain dialect.” Ivanov concedes his hypothesis is based on linguistic theory, not archeology. Still, he believes traces of Indo-European language may date 2,000 years earlier than the steppes.
Says Gimbutas of that hypothesis: “They’re good linguists, but they don’t know archeology.”
Archeology, of course, includes the study of culture, which Jones-Bley doesn’t plan to ignore.
In July, Jones-Bley hopes to include a cultural anthropologist to determine the sex of the skeletons, something she says has never been effectively done. Earlier research, she notes, was hampered because “artifacts are taken out of the ground, then taken to museums before they are analyzed.”
She wants to determine whether there are as few women in these graves as speculated. In some catacomb or pit graves, which were discovered more recently in the area and which date to 2500 BC, some warrior women have been found buried with bronze and iron weapons.
“The significance is: What’s the role that women played?” Jones-Bley asks. “What actually is the social structure of the early Indo-Europeans? . . . It’s been said that women had a very low position on the totem pole. But this . . . hasn’t actually been investigated through an excavation.”
Now, perhaps more than at any other time in history, Russian and American archeologists recognize the need to excavate quickly. With the fall of communism, cold economic reality is settling in.
Mamontov worries that the trend toward privatization of Russian land will render the site inaccessible or even lead to land development and destruction of the burial mounds.
“Soviet archeologists are concerned with excavating that area before construction takes place,” says Mamontov. “That’s why I want to attract the attention of American scholars.”
Further, he says, the economic situation is so unstable that costs for mounting the excavation may soon become prohibitive. It is ironic, he adds, that research projects could usually get state funding before perestroika : “Now, the red tape is less complicated, but there is no money.”
He has raised nearly half the estimated $100,000 needed for the July dig through a grant from Resta, a European foundation for ecological reconstruction.
Jones-Bley must raise the other half at a time when research funding, particularly in the humanities, is hard to find. She has applied to the National Geographic Society and to the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Regardless, she’s determined to go anyway, even if she must scale back the expedition. Time, she says, is running out.
More than 50 years after the Don River was dammed as part of Stalin’s hydroelectric program, the water table is persistently rising near the dig site, Jones-Bley says: “The consequences of this . . . from the archeological point of view (are) a disaster.”
