A Hartwick College anthropology professor will be recognized by his peers for his book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World.
David Anthony will receive the Society for American Archaeology's Book Award at the organization's annual conference in St. Louis, Mo., on April 16. Anthony said he already had planned to attend the conference and present a paper and the award was “just a complete surprise.”
Anthony said he shares the honor with his wife and collaborator Dorcas Brown, who illustrated the book and has contributed to the work as researcher and editor. They worked on the book during a sabbatical in 2006, he said, and they have plans for another project in the Ukraine later this year.
“We're not resting on our laurels,” Anthony said.
“The Horse, the Wheel, and Language” has been well-regarded, Anthony said, but this is the 550-page book's first award.
“It's a great honor. I'm just as pleased as I could be,” he said. “No book like this has been written for at least 30 years.”
The society annually awards the prize to honor a recently published, scholarly book that "has had, or is expected to have, a major impact on the direction and character of archaeological research," according to the group's website.
The award selection is made from among nominations submitted to a society committee and is considered a prestigious honor among members, said John Neikirk, publications manager for the Society for American Archaeology.
More than 3,000 archaeologists, including professionals and students from around the world, attend the society's annual conference, which will be marking its 75th anniversary, the website said. The meeting features forums covering a range of topics and time periods. The society awards another prize for a book that is written for the general public and presents results of archaeological research to a broader audience.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, published by Princeton University Press in 2007, combines 20 years of Anthony's research in the steppes of Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan, a media release from Hartwick College said. Anthony presented a theory on the homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language, the root of most of the languages of South and Southwest Asia spoken by about half the world's population. For more than 200 years, the source of Proto-Indo-European has remained a mystery to linguists, archaeologists and others.
In the program for the 75th conference, the society said Anthony's book “is a revolutionary melding of complex linguistic data with the rich archaeological record to address the formerly intractable problem of Indo-European origins. David Anthony deftly pulls together the linguistic arguments, a large body of Russian archaeology not generally accessible to the English-speaking world, and his own extensive research to address big questions, such as the extent to which language borders can be detected with material culture, the role of migration as an explanation for culture change, and the origins of pastoral nomadism.”
“Anthony's accomplishment is inspiring in its scope and commitment to seriously engaging complex and detailed archaeological evidence, ranging from individual sites, graves, and artifacts, while challenging the traditional archaeological skepticism of linguistics.”
Anthony, who joined Hartwick in 1987, specializes in the archaeology of North American prehistoric American Indians in the northeastern woodlands and prehistoric cultures of the Eurasian steppes and eastern Europe.
He and Brown have co-authored many articles and co-directed excavation projects, the Hartwick release said. Among ventures was the Samara Valley Project, a four-year excavation project in the Russian steppes conducted with the help of Hartwick students and funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society.
Source: The Daily Star