Kin, Clan and Community in Prehistoric Europe

About this book

This book analyzes the latest trends in Indo-European linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and archaeogenetics in an attempt to shed new light on the social structure of the pastoralist society of Proto-Indo-European speakers. Individual chapters are dedicated to the anthropology of kinship terminology, the lexicon of kinship that is reconstructable for the proto-language, and the philological evidence for close-kin and cousin marriage in ancient Indo-European and neighboring cultures. Five chapters offer detailed discussion of the lexicon of kinship in Anatolian, Germanic, Latin, Avestan and, for the first time ever, Albanian--a branch that has hitherto only been treated in fragmentary form. The result is the first comprehensive study of Indo-European family structure from linguistic, archaeological, and genetic angles, and an important contribution to the understanding of how social-familial structures developed in early-historic and prehistoric times.