The major concerns of the Novo mesto Conference were twofold: (1) to take a further look at Indo-European and, particularly, Germano-Celtic dispersions in light of research across the three decades following the 1988 Bellagio Conference at which Colin Renfrew’s (subsequently withdrawn) “Out of Anatolia” hypothesis that Indo-European speech was brought into Europe by early cultivators was presented and critiqued, and (2) to revisit the ever-puzzling “Negau Helmet” inscriptions in their Slovenian homeland with papers and discussions by local and foreign scholars alike; a revisit that generated innovative solutions while raising new issues about our very earliest textual evidence for Germanic and its ritualistic implications.

 
Following a Preface by T. L. Markey and Luka Repanšek, Markus Egetmeyer provides a fascinating paper entitled Mesopotamia as the Magnet, Greece as a Second Choice, Remarks on the Dispersal of the Indo-European Languages. In direct contra-distinction to Renfrew’s earlier thesis, Egetmeyer shows how I-E speech actually penetrated western Anatolia from Europe before it was established in Greece. This is followed by John Colarusso’s An Ancient Loan into Proto-Indo-European from the Caucasus; and Stefan Zimmer’s Celtic, Germanic and Harigasti Teiwa; T. L. Markey and Daphne Nash Briggs next offer a revealing paper on Porcine Husbandry (domestic) and Hunting (wild): Totem and Taboo; Bernard Mees clarifies The Trilingual Würmlach (Bumlje) Inscriptions; and Václav Blažek produces Onomastic Evidence for Early Germanic and Celtic Contact in Central Europe; while Luka Repanšek speculates Towards the Interpretation of *Is 7; The monograph concludes with Mitja Guštin’s attention-grasping “The Amber Route” during the Late Iron Age and Roman Imperial Periods, from the 5th Century BC to the 3rd Century AD.