The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 2 volumes.

• Author: KROLL, PAUL W.
• Position: Review

The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia, 2 volumes. Edited by VICTOR H. MAIR. Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph, no. 26. Washington, D.C.: THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF MAN; Philadelphia: UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA MUSEUM PUBLICATIONS, 1998. Pp. 899 + maps, tables, figs., illus. $165 (paper).

The two volumes at hand bring together forty-some papers, most of which were presented at the International Conference on the Bronze Age and Iron Age Peoples, held 19-21 April 1996 at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, under the direction of Victor H. Mair. This is a feast of scholarly interpretation, reportage, laboratory results, and speculation centering on the recent excavations of burial goods, skeletons, and dessicated corpses of the early inhabitants of the Tarim Basin and surrounding areas. During the past fifteen years scholars from diverse disciplines and from across the world have joined forces in an effort of cooperation to study the finds. Mair has been in the forefront of this effort and two informative and suggestive essays of his, "Priorities" (pp. 4-44) and "Die Sprachamobe: An Archeolinguistic Parable" (pp. 835-55), frame the papers presented here.

Volume 1 (pp. 1-534) includes nine papers under the heading "Archeology' five under "Migration and Nomadism," and twelve under "Linguistics' of which the contributions by Eric P. Hamp ("Who Were the Tocharians? Linguistic Subgrouping and Diagnostic Idiosyncrasy," pp. 307-46), Werner Winter ("Lexical Archaisms in the Tocharian Languages," pp. 347-57), Georges-Jean Pinault ("Tokharian Languages and Pre-Buddhist Culture," pp. 358-71), Douglas Q. Adams ("On the History and Significance of Some Tocharian B...