Kin, Clan and Community in Indo-European Society

This book analyzes the latest trends in Indo-European linguistics, archaeology, anthropology, and archaeogenetics in an attempt to shed new light on the social structure of the pastoralist society of Proto-Indo-European speakers. Individual chapters are dedicated to the anthropology of kinship terminology, the lexicon of kinship that is reconstructable for the proto-language, and the philological evidence for close-kin and cousin marriage in ancient Indo-European and neighboring cultures. Five chapters offer detailed discussion of the lexicon of kinship in Anatolian, Germanic, Latin, Avestan and, for the first time ever, Albanian–a branch that has hitherto only been treated in fragmentary form. The result is the first comprehensive study of Indo-European family structure from linguistic, archaeological, and genetic angles, and an important contribution to the understanding of how social-familial structures developed in early-historic and prehistoric times.