Rating: 
Summary: A good read
Review: A good story and Renfrew challenges many holy cows along the way. But it is weak on the Indian side of the evidence. Renfrew says that the Vedic people did not know Shiva, but that is wrong since Shiva and Rudra are the same and Rudra has many important hymns in the Vedas.
Rating: 
Summary: Immobilist Ideology
Review: A recent edition of "British Archaeology" noted that the ideological prejudice against the idea of population movements among British archaeologists had gotten to the point where some postgraduate student would soon come up with a paper 'proving' that the first humans in Britain weren't immigrants at all, but purely indigenous, symbolically transformed reindeer.Renfew is already well along that road; in this volume he tortures (and/or massively ignores) two centuries of linguistic research in an attempt to argue that as soon as no literate observers are present the basic mechanisms of historical change are completely different. This fairy-tale of peaceful farmers who, once there, never move, and of languages which remain perfectly static for 3000 years, is a stain on the reputation of a notable scholar. He should reconcile himself to the notion that people have feet -- and note that you can walk from Denmark to Greece in a summer.
Rating:
Summary: Immobilist Ideology
Review: A recent edition of "British Archaeology" noted that the ideological prejudice against the idea of population movements among British archaeologists had gotten to the point where some postgraduate student would soon come up with a paper 'proving' that the first humans in Britain weren't immigrants at all, but purely indigenous, symbolically transformed reindeer. Renfew is already well along that road; in this volume he tortures (and/or massively ignores) two centuries of linguistic research in an attempt to argue that as soon as no literate observers are present the basic mechanisms of historical change are completely different. This fairy-tale of peaceful farmers who, once there, never move, and of languages which remain perfectly static for 3000 years, is a stain on the reputation of a notable scholar. He should reconcile himself to the notion that people have feet -- and note that you can walk from Denmark to Greece in a summer.
Rating: 
Summary: book ponders its way towards a theory of bumkin farmers
Review: Colin Renfrew takes a long time getting to the point here, his point being IE languages could have spread simply as agriculture did so. His points are not compelling. He doesn't do the linguistic footwork necessary to show an origin from the Anatolian plateau. He excludes the Balts entirely from his map of primitive Indo-European peoples. Are we to believe Latvian sprang from the Greek? He DOESN'T do any tracing of crops, much less provide genetic evidence of crop dispersals. The two god things he does get around to actually talking about here: enough of the endless Scythian-Cimmerian-Avar displacements and the almost de rigeur academic nonsense of postulating proto-idioms and then drawing on those fictions for archeological context. He puts the endless calculations of, say, Marija Gimbutas, into a reasonable perspective without demeaning her work. He also convinced me the Scythian semi-nomadic way-of-life spread EAST, not west, which provides some interesting comparisons for me at least between Scythian metal-work and that of modern Tibet, although perhaps I read too much into coincidences of design. An interesting read, but only if you're already interested in Indo-European origins. I really wondered why he didn't mention, amidst all the other criticisms of the historical concept of the Aryans, that the name most certainly means farmer, or more precisely, the guy who ploughs. Geoffrey Vasiliauskas
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but overzealous
Review: Colin Renfrew's hypothesis that the spread and development of Indo European languages had more to do with static, less-migratory population groups than military conquest is one that has been tossed about for some time now in linguistic and anthropological circles. I found Renfrew's theories interesting, but I wonder how much of it is reactionary? Anthro-linguistic theory up until the 1940's was dominated by varying degrees of both racism and xenophobia - hence the preoccupation with locating a linguistic Urheimat or wellspring from which Indo-European language developed. Scholars from recent generations have undoubtedly found themselves in the uncomfortable position of sorting through volumes of past linguistic research peppered with references to "Aryans" and "High/Low cultures." Quite simply, past anthropological theory up until the time of Franz Boas held that culture was a byproduct of race. This theory was pushed to its logical extreme in National Socialist Germany. The knee-jerk reaction of post WW2 anthropologists and linguists seems to have been to run in the absolute opposite direction. While this shift in theory holds a great deal of validity, it would seem that a tremendous amount of research has been disregarded. Colin Renfrew in this work passionately and consistently attacks and seeks to refute the findings of many past scholars. In the abstract some of his criticisms are well founded, but after completing the book I felt the ease with which he junks past research clouded his overall thesis. That said, the book is still well written and interesting and belongs on the reading list of anyone interested in the embryonic formation of Indo-European languages
Rating: 
Summary: A Little More Balance, Please!
Review: For those who prefer their IE ancestors waving bloody battle-axes as they horse across Eurasia, instead of pushing plows and herding cows, this book is not congenial reading. Renfrew identifies the "wave of advance" of agriculture into Central Europe from Asia Minor as the foundational event in the spread of IE languages. This puts the time of origin back beyond 4000 bce, possibly even to 7000 bce. The battle-ax gang was a later development, an offshoot, dating to around 2600 bce. As Renfew points out, pastoral nomadism requires the pre-existance of more settled agriculture. Some of what Renfrew has to say is a reaction against those who imagine prehistory as a sort of Conan the Barbarian playground, full of tribal migrations and thrusts. It is possible to support Renfrew's ideas in the main, without denying that various warlike surges took place. The question is, do we attribute the root of the languages we speak to the transient nomads, or to the people who hung on, before and after? There is more to this book than this one issue, but this seems to be the hot one as far as some other reviewers are concerned.
Rating:
Summary: A Little More Balance, Please!
Review: For those who prefer their IE ancestors waving bloody battle-axes as they horse across Eurasia, instead of pushing plows and herding cows, this book is not congenial reading. Renfrew identifies the "wave of advance" of agriculture into Central Europe from Asia Minor as the foundational event in the spread of IE languages. This puts the time of origin back beyond 4000 bce, possibly even to 7000 bce. The battle-ax gang was a later development, an offshoot, dating to around 2600 bce. As Renfew points out, pastoral nomadism requires the pre-existance of more settled agriculture. Some of what Renfrew has to say is a reaction against those who imagine prehistory as a sort of Conan the Barbarian playground, full of tribal migrations and thrusts. It is possible to support Renfrew's ideas in the main, without denying that various warlike surges took place. The question is, do we attribute the root of the languages we speak to the transient nomads, or to the people who hung on, before and after? There is more to this book than this one issue, but this seems to be the hot one as far as some other reviewers are concerned.
Rating:
Summary: reasonable if not compelling
Review: Judging from the reviews posted so far, this appears to be a topic over which there is heated disagreement. Notwithstanding the assertions that Professor Renfew's rejection of mass migrations is nothing more than a political agenda, however, there really do seem to be reasons to doubt whether the spread of Indo-European into Europe was the result of a late immigration. The latest genetic evidence of which I am aware includes studies both of the Y chromosome and of mitochondrial DNA, and both seem to agree in the broad picture that they paint: that modern Europeans are in the main a combination of three groups: (1) an early paleolithic population that separated into a eastern and a western branch during the last ice age (2) a later paleolithic group that settled in central Europe (3) neolithic farmers, late mimmigrants from the Middle East, who spread out along the Mediterranean coast Archaeologically, there seems to have been only one movement of importance that could plausibly be associated with the spread of Indo-European: the movement of the Danubian farmers that seems to correspond to the genetic population (2) plus smaller elements of population (3) from whom they presumably learned agriculture. Indo-European words seem to indicate a level of culture that would be appropriate for the Danubian farmers: the knowledge of grain and grape crops, livestock, metal, wheeled vehicles, and forts, but not cities, weights and measures, irrigation, or an advanced mathematical system. The Indo-European number seven, for example, is apparently borrowed from Semitic, which argues against mathematical sophistication. Judging from the apparent lack of words for them, the early Indo-Europeans do not seem to have been aware of any non-European animals except leopards, which were abundant in neighboring Anatolia. Claims have been made that they had words for monkey, elephant, and even snow leopard, buth they seem to be doubtful: the claimed words for monkey, for example, are almost certainly borrowed from Semitic. Profressor Renfew of course advocates an Anatolian rather than a European origin for Indo-European, and it is harder to comment on specifically that aspect of his thesis. Indo-European apparently did not, as he notes, have a word for olive, nor, one might add, for fig, pomegranate, or antelope, as one might expect from a group originating in Anatolia, but it seems impossible to rule it out. Perhaps the Danubian farmers got not merely their knowledge of farming, but their language as well, from immigrants.
Rating:
Summary: A fascinating book
Review: No one can doubt Mr.Collin Renfrew's erudiction on the subject of the origin of the people who first spoke an indo-european language. No doubt he is one of the most important scholars on this very difficult subject. This does not mean that one has to agree with his very particular and innovative vision of the original place where an indo-european language was spoken. He is the first to acknowledge to arrive at any non-controversial answer. The innovative approach he brings can be summarized by his adoption of many procedural modells to approach what really happenned in terms of social and cultural interchange, and movements in time and space. His style is convincing and his prose easy to follow despite the weighty issues he raises. In my view, I find to be pretty more convincing the hypothesis which ascribe to the Caucasian region the origin of the indo-european people, but I think that Mr.Renfrew's main contribution is to put in the forefront of the debate the tree model almost automatically adopted by all the proponents of an Indo-european people who spoke a proto language, and so exploring with major emphasis the trade-offs ocurred between the brethen inside this tree. Also, the radio-carbon datings presented are amazing and fascinating at the same time.
To summ up, the book is a must to anyone interested in this fascinating issue.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting but very speculative
Review: Renfrew suggests that the ancient history of Europe may have been much more peaceful than previously supposed, with the Indo-European languages spreading from Anatolia along with the invention of agriculture, rather than being imposed by waves of martial nomadic horsemen from the steppes. But the book made me realize how little we know for sure about these ancient populations -- Renfrew's theories (like those of his colleagues) seem to be largely speculation on the basis of the few physical and linguistic remnants that survive.
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