The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Paperback – Illustrated, August 15, 2010

I've been fascinated by the nomads of Central Asia, especially the Scythians, since I was in high school, but few accounts begin as far back as the point where this one leaves off. I've never read a full-length history of the neolithic period before, and I found this one absolutely fascinating. I'm giving the book five stars, because I think David Anthony does an excellent job of supporting what could be game-changing theories about Bronze Age civilization. However, it's a bit of a rarified read, full of technical detail, and the style and content may not make it fun for everyone.The very concept of Proto-Indo-European has long suffered from an association with all manner of bogus racial theories and rampant speculation about who the "real" Aryans were. Even Amazon's recommendation engine now seems to think I'm interested in a lot of thinly-veiled screeds and conspiracy theories. But one of the most valuable aspects of this book is that it tries to distance the concept of Proto-Indo-European from nearly two centuries of racist claptrap by pinning linguistic theories to recent archaeological discoveries. The persistence of those inaccurate racial theories had a lot to do with a lack of physical evidence; there was nothing to prove them either right or wrong, and this allowed imaginations to run wild. But after reading Anthony's account, it seems entirely plausible that the archaeology supports the linguistic hypothesis that Indo-European languages share a common ancestor. Since the 1990s, an explosion of archaeological discoveries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia has given us a huge new range of information about neolithic peoples, their movements, technology, and apparent contact with and influence on one another. Anthony weaves this new evidence in with linguistic methodology to create a compelling argument for who the "Aryans" (the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European) were, where they lived, and how their language became the foundation for dozens of modern languages.Of course, to do this, Anthony needs to get very deep into the archaeological records. The latter 2/3 of the book analyzes dozens of finds across an area of thousands of square miles at a fairly granular level. Many readers have found this tedious, but it lets him pin a set of hypotheses down with an impressive series of data points. And he's making some pretty big claims, pushing milestones like the domestication of horses, the production of wool, and the use of chariots back by hundreds of years, in a way that changes the widely-accepted narrative of prehistory considerably.I thought that was interesting enough to make all the descriptions of pottery and tools relevant. There were always enough big ideas interspersed with the small facts to keep me turning the pages. However, the scope of the book is so vast and the level of detail so intense, I think it may be more than most people would enjoy. If I wasn't already intensely interested in the archaeology of this region, it might have overwhelmed me, too. The parts about domestication of the horse could have stood alone as a book, and I suspect the author had a lot more to say about this, but simply couldn't fit it into this already-sprawling text. I understand why Anthony thought this research needed to be part of a continuous volume, as it is all interconnected, but the flip side of this is that it's a bit difficult to tease any one thread out of the whole as you're reading.The weakest points of the book are where Anthony seems to let his own political and ideological leanings show through, although mercifully he keeps this brief. It seems, like many archaeologists, he pines for some sort of idealized paleolithic Eden, when humans lived in small, peaceful groups, before agriculture created modern inequality. At least he doesn't get too far into that; like Jared Diamond, his theories are weakest when he speculates about the motivation and morality of ancient peoples. But one feature that more than compensates for these asides is that Anthony includes *images* of nearly everything, something not every archaeology book does, always to its own detriment. Reading about an endless series of broken pots and trying to remember why they were significant is taxing enough. Why make me struggle to visualize all that pottery as well? It was so much more enlightening to read about a clay bowl or a horse-shaped axe, and then see an image of the thing on the very next page.Overall, an incredibly interesting book, and one which I think will be of great importance as we struggle to understand the civilization of this period, and the ways in which it shaped the modern world.

This is a terrific book for those interested in just who the original Indo Europeans were, BUT it is also a tough read. Forge ahead, but prepare to skim some sections.The book begins with an explanation of how linguistic scholars have re-created (or at least imagined) the Indo European language from which most of the languages of Europe, including English, ultimately developed. He then moves to archaelogy, gathering and presenting the physical evidence on where -- and when -- the people who spoke that ancestral Indo-European actually emerged.This is important in terms of understanding history, but it may be even more important in terms of avoiding a misunderstanding of history. For the past two centuries, there has been a lot done by linguists on the Indo-European language, but much less on the archaeological side about the actual Indo-European people. . This allowed the development of nationalistic and racist myths with little or no historical basis, myths that have had terrible consequences. The myth of the "Aryan race" is best disproved by actual archaeological researchAnd the writer presents and evaluates a massive amount of archaeological evidence, much of it work carried out by Soviet scientists which has only recently become available in the west. He also includes discussions of his own work, including a very interesting discussion of how he estimated times and place for the emergence of horse-riding. From this evidence, he does draw conclusions which seem born out by what is known, and which I found absolutely fascinating.The problem is the sheer weight of the evidence. Several reviewers have suggested that much of the technical archaeological discussion -- and there is SO much of it, site after site, tomb after tomb, pot after pot -- could better be put in footnotes and/or appendices. For a non-professional reader like myself, this would have avoided the sensation of plodding through a whole lot of minutiae to get to the points.For professionals, I am sure the detail is valuable and interesting. (I didn't find the sections on linguistics at all dull, which may be because I know a bit about it.) But for popular readers, less would definitely be more. I learned a lot from this book, and -- in the expository sections -- the writing is a pleasure to read. Because of the massive detail, however, I am giving it four stars instead of five.