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" "Hehn argued that, it was risky, in the attempts to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European culture, to depend too much on linguistic paleontology, whose methodological accuracy he doubted. How can we be sure, for example, that the Proto-Indo-Europeans owned tame horses simply because we can reconstruct the word for horse (*h1ekuos)? Did they perhaps only know about the animal, without having domesticated it? Or how do we know that *h3evis denoted "goat" and not some other similar animal, and that it has not acquired the meaning "goat" later? (Arvidsson 2006, p. 255).
Stefan Arvidsson (born 1968) is a Swedish historian who is Professor of the History of Religions at Stockholm University and Professor in the Study of Religions at Linnaeus University.
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In Gimbutas's case I (Arvidsson) think that many readers of her work have sensed that there is another agenda behind her theoretical constructions, in addition to the clearly feminist agenda. This subtext probably is related to the fact that she was forced into exile by the Bolshevik troops who invaded her homeland, Lithuania, in 1944-45, moving across the Baltic and eastern Europe. There is something very "Cold War" about her theories and about the maps she draws of Indo-European invasions of eastern Europe and the Balkan peninsula. In any case, a connection can be observed between not idealizing, or even disapproving of, Indo-Europeans, and placing their homeland on Slavic ground (Arvidsson 2006, p.293).
For those who have approached the question of the origin of the Indo-European peoples and languages from the angle of philology, the great problem has been that there are no texts about migrations, much less about military invasions… From the Rigveda, people have taken passages that tell about the Aryans' attacks on cities and concluded that they then must have been a foreign, warlike, nomadic people. Nor does Roman, Hittite, Slavic, Celtic, or Germanic, written material mention migrations or conquests from the time when the Indo-Europeans supposedly emigrated from their original home. The philologists have, however, been able to pint to certain loanwords, especially topographic and hydrographic names, as evidence of migration. But the cornerstone of philologists' work has been linguistic paleontology, which tried to re-create, through comparisons, a vocabulary that indicates knowledge about certain objects and phenomena (Arvidsson 2006, p.295).
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