David W. Anthony,
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. This book is an attempt to trace the spread of the Indo-European languages and harmonize them with the archaeological record. The author’s major, and decisive, innovation is that he incorporates extensive archaeological information from Ukrainian and Russian sources that has only become available since the fall of the Soviet Union. He uses the common elements from the vocabularies of the Indo-European languages to deduce the early separation of first the Anatolian (Hittite) languages and then Tocharian from primitive Indo-European. He traces the early proto-Indo-European community to the Pontic-Caspian region of the Ukraine and southwestern Russia. This has been the usual answer for more than a century despite a variety of ingenious alternative proposals. Anthony then uses the common elements from the vocabularies of the Indo-European languages to deduce the early separation of first the Anatolian (Hittite) languages and then Tocharian from primitive Indo-European.

A persistent theme of the book is how the hierarchical patron-client structure of early Indo-European society allowed it to absorb newcomers from the surrounding societies and incorporate them as full members of their society. I ran across this idea in Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1991), but Anthony places a lot more emphasis on it. He describes the process as like a “franchise operation”. Thinking back to my Chicago days, I see this as success by giving the newcomers “a piece of the action.”