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The archaeological sources on which this summary is based... most often describe the westward cultures as derived from, or extensions from, the easte… - Johanna Nichols
" "The archaeological sources on which this summary is based... most often describe the westward cultures as derived from, or extensions from, the eastern ones. Mallory (1989) and Anthony (1991, 1995) interpret the directionality of cultural derivation as west to east. It is the east-to-west directionality of cultural derivation that would be consistent with the east-to-west linguistic trajectory, since spread of a whole culture is likely to involve language spread (and vice versa). A predominantly east-to-west directionality of cultural derivation and descent for the Eneolithic steppe would be a strong indication that the spread zone with its westward trajectories had taken shape. This is a purely archaeological question, but it is important to dating the rise of the linguistic spread zone.
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About Johanna Nichols
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is a linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation entitled, "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax."
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Additional quotes by Johanna Nichols
The location of the Anatolian branch of IE (Hittite and its sisters) is a problem, or at least a puzzle, for IE homeland studies. The Anatolian languages are attested very early in Asia Minor, removed from Europe and far from the steppe; Gamkrelidze and Ivanov ... offer as a strength the ability of their proposed homelands to account for the location of Hittite with minimal migration. Alternatively or additionally, the location of Tocharian—attested in the early centuries AD well to the east of most IE territory in present-day Xinkiang (Chinese Turkestan)—is a problem or a puzzle... Accounting for the locations of both Hittite and Tocharian is usually presented, at least rhetorically, as a major problem.
There are several linguistically plausible possibilities for the origin of Pre-PIE. It could have spread eastward from the Black Sea steppe (as proposed by Mallory 1989 and by Anthony 1991, 1995), so that the locus formed only after this spread but still very early in the history of disintegrating PIE. This large eastward spread would be a departure from the general westward trajectory of spreads in central Eurasia, occasioned by the epoch-making domestication of the horse and development of wheeled transport. Pre-PIE could have been a central Asian language long before its rapid spread; if so it had a large range before its expansion, and the dispersal began with the development of the locus in a pre-existent range. It could have come into the spread zone from the east as Mongolian, Turkic, and probably Indo-Iranian did.
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It is a basic tenet of migration and homeland theory that the geographical location of a language family’s proto-homeland is to be sought in the vicinity of the root of the family tree (i.e. in the region where the deepest branches come together on a map); or, more generally, that the homeland is to be sought in the region of present greatest genetic diversity of the family.
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