The Horse, the Wheel, and Language

By David W. Anthony

This book explores the origin and spread of Indo-European languages. It's my first exposure to analytic archeology, and linguistic archeology. 

Analytic archeology example-- With the right horse bones, you can tell how old the horse was when that horse died. In a herd of wild horses, the age of the horses are distributed. If those horses were slaughtered and left in a heap, then the age of their bones are also distributed. For domesticated horses, males are slaughtered at about two years and females at about age six. 

So, while you can't look at a single horse bone and know if the horse was wild or domesticated, you can look at a heap of horse bones and see how the ages cluster. If they cluster around age two and six, then those bones were from domesticated horses.

Linguistic archeology-- how much can you learn about a people, not from their language, which is dead and gone, but from their daughter languages? How do linguists know when a word is borrowed from another language, or when a word is similar between the two languages because they share the same parent language?

If daughter languages contain similar words for wheel, cart and axil, then you can be fairly certain that the parent language had the same, and that the parent society had wheels and carts with axils.