David W. Anthony

David W. Anthony is an American anthropologist who is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Hartwick College. He specializes in Indo-European migrations, and is a proponent of the Kurgan hypothesis. Anthony is well known for his award-winning book The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (2007).

Quotes

• The rise, fall and recovery of migration models is partly embedded in paradigm shifts in archaeological theory, with all the socio-political factors of academic competition that are entailed.
  The insistent clamour of the homeless, the migrant and the refugee is rarely still and we cannot but face its consequences on an academic as well as a human level.
  • David W. Anthony, commenting on the resurgence of migrationism in the late 1980s, in "Prehistoric Migration as Social Process", Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation (21-31), ed. John Chapman and Helena Hamerow (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997), p. 21, as quoted by E. F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, 2001), Ch. 10

• In David Anthony’s pithy phrase, ‘The Rig Veda was a ritual canon, not a racial manifesto. If you sacrificed in the right way to the right gods, which required performing the great traditional prayers in the traditional language, you were an Aryan, otherwise you were not.’
  • in : Nick Collins - How Maritime Trade and the Indian Subcontinent Shaped the World (2022)

The Horse, the Wheel and Language

• They might have moved several times, perhaps by sea, from the Western Pontic steppes to south-eastern Europe to western Anatolia to Greece, making their trail hard to find.
  • (Anthony, 2007, p. 369), quoted in : Wheels, Languages and Bullshit (Or How Not To Do Linguistic Archaeology) Jonathan Sherman Morris. Philology, vol. 3/2017, pp. 57–108

Quotes about David W. Anthony

• In his The Horse the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes shaped the Modern World, published in 2007, Anthony presented at length a demilitarized version of the Kurgan theory. Although on its central thesis we are in plain disagreement, I find Anthony’s book lively, imaginative and on many points very helpful. Especially valuable is his survey and synthesis of what Soviet and Russian archaeologists have discovered about the Neolithic and Bronze Age steppe. It will be obvious how much I am indebted to his work, and I regret that this chapter must focus on what I find wrong with it.
  • Militarism and the Indo-Europeanizing of Europe -- Robert Drews

• Anthony explicitly admits, “at many critical points” (p. 465) it is the linguistic model that guides the archaeological interpretation rather than the reverse. Such a procedure almost necessarily means that the archaeological record is consistently manipulated to fit the linguistic model that it is meant to confirm; the reasoning is circular. What is initially stated as a hypothesis or tentative linguistic identification on one page becomes an established fact a few pages later, bending the archaeological record to fit the model. Nevertheless, the book’s enduring value will be its rich and vivid synthesis of an extremely complex corpus of archaeological data from Neolithic times through the Bronze Age, stretching from the Balkans to Central Asia. Anthony writes extremely well and masterfully describes material culture remains, teasing out incredible amounts of information on the nature and scale of subsistence activities, social structure, and even ritual practices...
  • Review: Perils of Carts before Horses: Linguistic Models and the Underdetermined Archaeological Record Reviewed Work(s): The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David Anthony Review by: Philip L. Kohl Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 111, No. 1 (Mar., 2009), pp. 109-111

• Just when it appeared that the Pontic Steppe theory of Indo-European origins was about to be consigned to the dustbin of history, together with Marija Gimbutas’ reputation for her later work among all but the most ardent feminists, it was resurrected by the anthropologist, David W. Anthony, in his 2007 book The Horse, the Wheel and Language, portentously subtitled How Bronze-Aged Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.
  ...we are in the presence of a self-referencing and self-promoting clique of linguistic young-earth creationists, including a heavily biased linguist on a mission to keep alive the sacred flame of Indo-European exceptionalism and to deny its external relations (Ringe), a jovial bullshit merchant (Anthony) who never lets any inconvenient empirical evidence get in the way of narrative and two groupies (Lewis and Pereltsvaig) whose excessive zeal in attacking anyone who argues for an earlier date unwittingly turns the spotlight on their shabby little guild.
  • Wheels, Languages and Bullshit (Or How Not To Do Linguistic Archaeology) Jonathan Sherman Morris. Philology, vol. 3/2017, pp. 57–108