The sudden shift to large-scale copper production that began about 2100–2000 BCE in the earliest Sintashta settlements must have been stimulated by a sharp increase in demand. Central Asia is the most likely source. The increase in metal production deeply affected the internal politics of northern steppe societies, which quickly became accustomed

Its cognates in Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Germanic, and Armenian meant “felt,” “roll,” “beat,” and “press.” “Felt” seems to be the meaning that unites them, since the verbs describe operations in the manufacture of felt. Felt is made by beating or pressing wool fibers until they are pounded into a loose mat. The mat is then rolled up and pressed

An interesting aspect of the spread of animal keeping in the steppes was the concurrent rapid rise of chiefs who wore multiple belts and strings of polished shell beads, bone beads, beaver-tooth and horse-tooth beads, boars tusk pendants, boars-tusk caps, boars-tusk plates sewed to their clothing, pendants of crystal and porphyry, polished stone

The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary and comparative Indo-European mythology reveal what two of those important integrative institutions were: the oath-bound relationship between patrons and clients, which regulated the reciprocal obligations between the strong and the weak, between gods and humans; and the guest-host relationship,

The Proto-Indo-European vocabulary contained a compound word (*weik-potis) that referred to a village chief, an individual who held power within a residential group; another root (*re-) referred to another kind of powerful officer. This second root was later used for king in Italic (rēx), Celtic (rīx), and Old Indic (raj-), but it might originally

Decades of historical research have shown, surprisingly, that while the borders separating Europeans and Native Americans were important, those that separated different British cultures were just as significant. Eastern North America was colonized by four distinct migration streams that originated in four different parts of the British Isles. When

Steppe miners and craftsmen mined their own abundant ores and made their own metal tools and weapons; in fact, the enormous copper mines of Russia and Kazakhstan and the tin mines of the Zeravshan show that the Bronze Age civilizations of the Near East depended on them.

Large, sustained migrations, particularly those that moved a long distance from one cultural setting into a very different one, or folk migrations, can be identified archaeologically. Emile Haury knew most of what to look for already in his excavations in Arizona in the 1950s: (1) the sudden appearance of a new material culture that has no local

The possible homeland locations can be narrowed further by identifying the neighbors. The neighbors of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European can be identified through words and morphologies borrowed between Proto-Indo-European and other language families.