I have a lot of old notes that I’d like to begin coding, and they’re currently in password-protected word files, zipped with another password. But I think that to code, I need to take them out of protection in Atlas.ti, and I’m not comfortable doing that, as I’ll still be in and out of the field with my main computer. Any thoughts?

Here are a few small criticisms that occur to me:

The archaeological cultures of pre-Indo-European Europe are extremely diverse, and archaeological cultures are normally less numerous than the language groups that left them. That indicates that Old Europe was not one culture, or even one coherent set of cultures, but much more of a crazily diverse mix. That might raise a few problems when suggesting the pre-Indo-European ancestry of polyphonic singing in Europe.

I’d also suggest that Gimbutas’ ideas about Indo-Europeans introducing “patriarchy” into Europe are a little suspect, to say the least. The notion that Indo-European speakers were horse-mounted patriarchal warriors, where the Old Europeans were gentle matristic folk, appears to be quite incorrect. Many finds indicating a measure of human sacrifice have been recovered from pre-Indo-European sites throughout Europe, and that they were friendlier to women doesn’t necessarily follow from the worship of goddesses.

There’s nothing wrong with using hunting weapons to kill people; the absence of specialised weapons for killing humans indicates the lack of a specific class or generation of individuals responsible for warfare, not warfare’s absence. I can also call to mind a few studies where weapons (like stone maceheads) have been found in pre-Indo-European sites in southeastern Europe, but I’ll have to do some searching to find them for you.

It’s also unlikely that Proto-Indo-European speakers migrated wholesale into Europe, pushing Old Europeans into less fertile land. What happened was likely more akin to recruitment of Old Europeans into an Indo-European society where prospects for social advancement were greater than in the Old European world – hence the clear evidence of a wide spread of language and chariot-technology by the Indo-European pastoralists and much less evidence for the spread of genes from their homeland in the Pontic-Caspian steppe. David Anthony uses an ethnohistorical example, of the expansion of Luo-speaking Acholi in east Africa, to make this point, but there are any number that could be used. This model fits much better with the archaeological data than the conquest model.

It’s odd of Gimbutas to claim that Lithuania was “50% pagan”. It may be true, but the pagan religion of the Baltic shows startling similarities to Vedic (or Indo-Iranian) religion, not to pre-Indo-European beliefs, whatever they happened to be.

I also doubt that songs from Kyrgyzstan will help unravel problems in Indo-European studies (such as whether narrative songs are Indo-European/”Kurgan” or not), as the Kyrgyz people speak a Turkic language, unrelated to PIE. There is a voluminous literate on Indo-European rhythm and poetics, including two excellent recent works – How to Kill a Dragon by Calvert Watkins and Indo-European Poetry and Myth by Martin Litchfield West. I highly recommend both. Indo-European studies as a whole has generated an incredible literature.

I hope you find this critique helpful.

I don’t expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and dive into my book. But I don’t want to see it ignored either. I take your point, John, but I have in fact tried to get the attention of more mainstream publications but without any result. Maybe I should hire a public relations firm. In any case, it’s especially important to me that I get feedback, including meaningful criticism, from those best suited to evaluate it. While I draw very liberally on musical evidence, it’s the anthropological aspect that’s most important, and most in need of thorough critique.

Your book sounds very interesting, and I shall put it on my amazon wishlist (I tend to read these days on my way to work and in the garden, so I like a hard copy). I’ve paid a small amount of interest to Lomax in the past, and I was favourably disposed to a talk by Jerome Lewis (of UCL) that I attended in which he connected the polyphonic hocketing (I think it was) of BaYaka people in central Africa to their loose, egalitarian social structure. I had some qualms with it, but it was an intriguing idea. So the idea of musicology clearing up problems in the evolution of humans is reasonably appealing to me.

That said, I have a gigantic reading list, just like everyone else. I’m rocketing through David Anthony’s The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, about the origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European. I’ve got a social psychology textbook to go through, two books on recursion in human cognition, books VII-IX of Herodotus, Lizot’s Tales of the Yanomami, and a collection of Gordon Childe’s essays to go through before tackling anything else. All unrelated leisure reading. Anthony’s book, by the way, is easily one of the best things I’ve read all year, and this has been a year of incredible books.

Just a thought. Perhaps beating your head against the wall of professional indifference in anthropology isn’t the way to find your audience. You’ve got a big story to tell, one that resonates with all sorts of currently popular themes—music, evolutionary psychology…. I think of the guy who wrote Your Brain on Music and how much publicity he has gotten. Heck, if I were you, I’d try talking up the book to someone at Rolling Stone. Pull off a Jared Diamond and people here will start paying attention to you.

However, think of why you developed an interest in anthropology in the first place and try to forget what happened later. My book is about recreating the earliest history of modern humans and their culture. And yes I’ve actually managed to develop a strategy that has enabled me to speculate meaningfully along such lines, thanks to some remarkable musical clues, supplemented by certain revolutionary findings in population genetics.

As for the technical issues that so often discourage anthropologists from considering musical evidence, the very few technical terms are clearly explained, and there are many musical examples that make their point simply through listening.

So far I have not been able to get a single anthropology journal interested in reviewing the book, nor have I had a response of any kind from any of the review editors I’ve contacted. When I suggested to someone involved in this blog (whose name I can’t recall) that it be reviewed or at least discussed here, I was told it would be considered, and that’s the last I heard. I got a similarly cold response on the Open Anthropology site. You, John, were in fact one of the very few to show any interest at all, for which I’m grateful.

Maybe the powers that be are hoping it will simply go away so they won’t have to be bothered with it and can happily return to their narrow (and often boring and irrelevant) specialties.

Thanks a lot! Efficient help indeed.

I use wikipedia to plug small holes in my knowledge. It’s surprisingly good on philosophy (although, of course, not perfect), and due to the average Wikipedian’s nerdish penchant for internet debating, it also seems to have great stuff on logical fallacies and things like that. I’ve only been tempted to edit when I haven’t found what I was looking for, but by the time I’ve found it (usually in a book, article, or another site), I’m not all that bothered to edit the page. Not very civically minded, I admit.

I’m fairly certain that’s an actual picture of the guy who founded the company/method

-ryan

No, you haven’t been blocked! I think certain links doom comments to getting eaten up in our spam filters. The strange thing is that I don’t see any of your comments in the spam queue. So I am looking into this to see what’s going on. Sorry about that.

Re: Wikipedia. Ya, I actually use it pretty often as well, and a lot of the content is quite good. I also really like reading through some of the talk pages to see the debates from different authors about what should or should not be included on the page. It adds another layer to the whole thing. It’s interesting that the anthro stuff isn’t as good as it could be…maybe more of us should try to pitch in every now and again?