Samara Culture - Indo-European Urheimat

Indo-European Urheimat

These three cultures (the Samara, and successors the Khvalynsk and early Yamna) have roughly the same range. Marija Gimbutas was the first to regard it as the Urheimat (homeland) of the Proto-Indo-European language and to hypothesize that the Eneolithic culture of the region was in fact Indoeuropean. If this model is true, then the Samara culture becomes overwhelmingly important for Indo-European studies.

Most Indo-europeanists before Gimbutas had hypothesized these stages of development:

• formation in a homeland on the steppes.
• diaspora into Europe, the middle east, and the central Asian subcontinent.
• formation of daughter languages over the now far-flung range.

Gimbutas applied the term kurgan ("mound") to the cultures of the diaspora phase. Developed kurgans do not appear in the Eneolithic culture, but there are signs of their development occurring.