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Conference at which Colin Renfrew’s (subsequently withdrawn) “Out of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.