Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

From his 1990 article, "The Baby and the Bathwater: Migration in Archaeology", onwards David Anthony set himself on a sometimes-controversial course: tackling subject matter that many, if not most, archaeologists would rather avoid. During that time, Anthony, along with a handful of others, has pioneered American participation in the study of Eurasian prehistory, including writing the winner of the 2010 SAA Book Award, "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World." In-between and since these seminal publications, David Anthony has continued to be highly influential among not just his fellow archaeologists, but also historical linguists and geneticists. His recent achievements include co-authored publications on an archaeolinguistic study of the wheel, various publications on the genetics of ancient Eurasian steppe populations, pastoralism, and the publication of the results of his and Dorcas Brown’s Samara Valley Project. This session explores the continuing influence of David Anthony’s work and celebrating his many contributions to archaeology, historical linguistics, and genetics.

Other Keywords
Bronze Age • Mortuary Analysis • Neolithic • ancient DNA • Iron Age • Migration • Cultural Transmission • Communities of Practice • Pazyryk • Technology

Geographic Keywords
Republic of Azerbaijan (Country) • State of Kuwait (Country) • Turkmenistan (Country) • Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (Country) • Republic of Tajikistan (Country) • Asia (Continent) • Isle of Man (Country) • Republic of Uzbekistan (Country) • Kyrgyz Republic (Country) • Republic of Kazakhstan (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)
Documents
  • The Agricultural Lexicon of Western Indo-European: Crop Names (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Weiss.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The first speakers of Indo-European languages who entered Europe brought with them a fairly coherent agro-technological package. This is clear from the significant agreements that can be shown to exist in the lexicon describing the ard and its subparts among the Western...

  • Assessing Connections between the Spoked Wheel and Bronze Age Elite Social Identities (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James Johnson.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The wheel may be the greatest, and most enduring, technological innovation in human history. Certainly, the wheel transformed the potential and efficacy of transportation technologies, trade and exchange systems, not to mention human mobility. The innovation of the wheel produced...

  • Conceptualizing Eurasian Steppe Space, Place and Movement (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Bryan Hanks.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The scholarly contributions by David Anthony have added significantly to current understandings of prehistory in the Eurasian steppes. Drawing on multiple lines of evidence, ranging from historical sources, archaeological data, genetics and linguistics, he has developed...

  • Diffusion, Migration, and "Culture" in the Eurasian Bronze Age (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Frachetti. Paula Dupuy. Taylor Hermes.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The past 25 years has led to a completely new understanding of Eurasian Prehistory. Archaeometric analysis, landscape archaeology, and aDNA have allowed longstanding debates to be silenced, and fundamental principles underpinning key concepts such as social interaction,...

  • From Bit Wear to Ancient DNA: Steppe-ing Out (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Anthony. Dorcas Brown.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We found our first entry into steppe archaeology in 1989-1992 through a study of microwear caused by bits on horse teeth, which we hoped would identify bitted, and therefore ridden or driven, horses. From then through to the publication of the Samara Valley Project (2016) we...

  • Genetic Insights into Indo-European Origins (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Reich.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient genomic data has provided important new clues that help to address the more than 200-year-old problem of the origin of Indo-European languages. Beginning in 2015, a series of papers have shown that Yamnaya steppe pastoralists--who spread over the steppes north of the...

  • Horses in Iron Age Steppe Burials: Their Enduring Socio-political Role (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katheryn Linduff. Karen Rubinson.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horses have been a large part of the David Anthony’s research interests. Horses also played a significant role in the Pazyryk Culture (4th-3rd centuries BCE), a group of peoples buried in the Altai Mountains, in the region where modern Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan meet....

  • Horses in Iron Age Steppe Burials: Their Enduring Socio-Political Role (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Rubinson. Katheryn Linduff.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Horses have been a large part of David Anthony's research interests. Horses also played a significant role in the Pazyryk Culture (4th-3rd centuries BCE), a group of peoples buried in the Altai Mountains in the region where modern Russia, Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan meet....

  • Leapfrog Migration: Bumppo and Beyond (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stuart Fiedel.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. David Anthony and I coined the concept and term "Leapfrog Migration" for a graduate seminar at the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. We called its first iteration the "Natty Bumppo model" after the frontier scout hero of Cooper’s "Leatherstocking Tales." We used it to explain...

  • The Lengyel Interaction Sphere in East-Central Europe during the Fifth Millennium BC (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Peter Bogucki.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sites of the Lengyel Culture are found from the Drava River in Croatia to the lowlands of northern Poland during the fifth millennium BC. While the Lengyel Culture is clearly in the great "Danubian" tradition as a successor to the first farmers of this area several centuries...

  • The Linguistic Legacy of the Pitted Ware Culture (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Guus Kroonen. Rune Iversen.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Scandinavian hunter-, fisher- and gatherer-based Pitted Ware culture is chronologically situated in the Neolithic. However, it challenges our traditional view on cultural and social evolution by representing a return to an otherwise abandoned hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In...

  • Recent Archaeological Research at Dún Ailinne, an Iron Age Royal Site in County Kildare, Ireland (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Douglas Campana. Pam Crabtree. Susan Johnston. Zenobie Garrett.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Dún Ailinne is an Iron Age (ca. 600 BCE-400 CE) site in Country Kildare, Ireland. It is considered as one of the Irish "royal" sites. These sites are mentioned in the early medieval literature and are large sites surrounded by an inverted bank and ditch and containing monumental...

  • The Stone Bridge: Obsidian Circulation and the Friction of Persistent Frontiers (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Smith.

    This is an abstract from the "Wheels, Horses, Babies and Bathwaters: Celebrating the Impact of David W. Anthony on the Study of Prehistory" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Jose Saramago’s classic "The Stone Raft", the Iberian peninsula breaks free from Europe to float unmoored into the Atlantic, etching into continental geology what David Anthony has termed a "persistent frontier": a fault line demarcating durable cultural, ethnic, and...