Digging into the Past

Abstract The third chapter describes how archaeologists establish dates, distinguishing between relative and absolute dating; the former method arranges material in chronological order only while the latter also assigns a fixed calendrical date to artifacts, establishing a chronological framework for discoveries. The chapter also discusses radio-dating and surveys the climatological prehistory of Eurasia, using reconstructed vocabulary to place Proto-Indo-European within that time-frame. Reconstructed vocabulary shows the Indo-Europeans had achieved a Neolithic technology and places the last Indo-European unity in the late Chalcolithic. Differing patterns of gender markedness in reconstructed terms for livestock define three different stages of animal domestication by the Proto-Europeans.