Much of Colin Renfrew's early work was in the field of European prehistory, looking at processes of culture change, and he came to realize that many of the diffusionist ideas current in the fifties and sixties were based on assumptions which undervalued the originality and the creativity of the cultures of prehistoric Europe. Innovations were often seen as originating in the Near East and spreading to Europe by a process of diffusion.
History
A Talk With Colin Renfrew
RENFREW: Lately I've been interested in the possibility of unifying our separate visions of the human past. When we look at the archeological record, we have some story that emerges from the archeological record about human prehistory. The archeological picture of the past is a very concrete one, and it's very well dated, because of radiocarbon dating, but it doesn't actually say much about language.
On the other hand when we look at the pattern of the world's languages, the diversity of the world's languages, we come up with another kind of history. The linguists are looking at language families, like Indo-European, or Afro-Asiatic, or the Bantu languages, or the Austronesian languages. They clearly understand, and it seems very plausible that there is a history to these languages, there is a reality behind these language families, so that the Indo-Europeans had an origin, maybe as a group of people who spoke a proto-Indo-European language, in a particular part of the world at a particular time, and so on for each of the other recognized language families.
Thus the linguists build up a kind of history, which in a way implies an archeology. But they're not very good at working out exactly when these people lived in this or that place, these hypothetical people, yet historical linguists do have their picture of the past.
The curious thing is there's very little harmony between these two visions. I assume we can make the axiom that there was only one past, though accessible to us in different dimensions; people spoke, people lived.
Then there's a third dimension. The third element, which is only just coming into play seriously, is the molecular genetics.
As you very well know, you look today at people's mitochondrial DNA, or at other genetic evidence, and you can make inferences about the population history from that present DNA. I'm not talking about ancient DNA, which is another very interesting question, although it hasn't developed so far yet. If you take these present day mitochondrial DNA samples from communities in different parts of the world, by looking at the similarities and differences you can put together a notional history. Of course you know about the work 10 or 15 years ago now about the so-called mitochondrial Eve. That's when you go right back to a point of convergence in these terms among all living individuals and groups, however long ago it is, when you go back to human origins probably in Africa. But I'm more concerned with slightly more recent population histories, like those over the past 20,000 years. So we do have a third independent source of information about human history, namely molecular genetics. The meeting ground between these three dimensions is population history.
The interesting thing about these three dimensions of human history - archeological, linguistic, genetic - is that each is autonomous, each is authentic and valid, each gives a picture of the history of the human past, but the three have to be reconciled and brought into coherence. Because there were individual people who had their genes and their languages and their material culture, there is a synthesis that remains to be worked out. It is being worked out, but it turns out to be very difficult to reconcile these three dimensions.
But fortunately the radiocarbon revolution confirmed that many European innovations were of earlier date than their supposed Near Eastern prototypes. More recently he looked at comparable assumptions surrounding the question of the Indo-European languages and other aspects of the early cultures of Europe which were often ascribed to the effects of incoming Indo-European tribes supposedly arriving at the beginning of the bronze age. This has led to a wider interest in the prehistory of languages, and the implications which the distribution of language families in the world carry for our understanding of the prehistoric past. In the linguistics field it's a very different situation. I find it very difficult to get through to see it clearly. Most of the well-respected linguists are specialists perhaps in a single language family. If you're an Indo-Europeanist, you know a lot of the Indo-European languages, but you may not know so much about other language families. There are not very many people who like to look at this language family and that other and geographically distant language family to see if they have a similar pattern. One of the people who does like to do that is Joseph Greenberg at Stanford, and he is very much a synthesizer among linguists, but he's also very much criticized by linguists.
Aharon Dolgopolsky at the University of Haifais another synthesizer; he is very much a member of that Russian school, the so-called Nostratic School. They take the view that if you look at the major language families, primary language families of Eurasia like Indo-European, and Afro-Asiatic, Uralic and so on, then you can see some relationships between some of those, that make them feel that at a greater time depth there was a broader linguistic grouping, a macro-family, the Nostratic macro family, as they name it, which embraces these families. That takes you, if you believe it, if you accept it, to a greater time depth. It takes you to proto-Nostratic. Only perhaps a 50th of the languages of the world would be described as Nostratic.
There's little clear evidence that there was a single ancestral language, though there may have been at a very much earlier point in time. But even this Nostratic business, and Greenberg's enterprise, which is an analogous one, don't perfectly harmonize. But the goal is to look at larger family units, which would therefore be earlier family units. The problem there is that many of the best linguists, certainly many of the most careful linguists, say that you simply can't talk in these terms. Many believe that it's very difficult to go beyond a time depth of four or five thousand years ago.
As a non-linguist, my problem is that I can understand what the generalists, the synthesizers are talking about. I read what they're saying, their ideas seem to me interesting. The criticisms made of them seem to me sometimes not very valid- they're expressed as a principle which is that you can't go beyond 5,000 years. But what principle is that? It doesn't make any particular sense at all.
It's an extraordinary situation that I can't, really, find any dialogue between these two groups of linguists. We've actually got a grant for my Institute from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to seek to go beyond where we are now, and see what may be possible. We're hoping to make some progress in that. I'm not a linguist myself, but I do see where the archaeology comes in; I think that's my contribution, and I also do see where the genetics comes in, although I'm not a geneticist.
As I was saying earlier, the real problem is the interface between these three fields of archeology or culture-history, genetics, and historical linguistics. And nobody's a master of all these fields, so I don't feel too diffident; one's always an amateur if you're going between them.
