In my imagination, Prof Hadjeamin changed from female to male, to be honest. I started with the same mindset you described, but later thought that the Amaloxian civilization is going to be for TTL´s Historical Studies what Sumer and Egypt are for ours, not like what the Danubian cultures are IOTL: one of the major areas of ancient history, insted of a subject covered by a lot of feminists. Of course Prof Hadjeamin could still be a female under these circumstances, but later he clearly became male in my imagination somehow. (Maybe because I´m a male lecturer?) So when I read these lines, I had to check my first posting to see if I had used female personal pronouns before, and I was relieved to see that I hadn`t.
I loved your analysis and this kind of discussion is really what makes writing a TL worth the effort. I think I share a lot of your views, so if this does not transpire in my following rant because I focus on the differences or something, let it be stated beforehand.
I suspect as much, too, but it´s really really hard to tell, and we have next to no information as to which groups may have been matrifocal, patrifocal, matrilinear, patrilinear etc. Just like we don`t know about where language groups began and ended. In this timeline, I´ll posit that the groups living in what is today Romania, Moldavia, much of Bulgaria and Serbia and parts of Hungary spoke varieties of the same language and shared a significant degree of cultural similarities / convergences. This is the area in which Vinca signs, miniature figurines, very early metalworking, Aegaen-imported spondylus shells as symbols of, well, something, and the absence of megalithic architecture coincide. Upriver all along the Danube and farther West, there was another sort of early trade network and highway of influence, so similarities do occur and it makes sense to group all the Linear Ceramics (LBK) populations under the "Old Europe" umbrella, but as we move West (or South, for that matter), there are also marked divergences among these early agricultural societies. Maybe there were three, four, five or even more language groups in this area? Maybe in some of them, daughters went to live with their husbands` families when they married, while in others, the sons went into the wife`s family? Maybe in the "elders` councils" of some of them, women used to talk more than men, while in others, it was the other way round. Where were things how? We simply don`t know. I´ll go distribute some of these characteristics randomly all over the map of "Old Europe", therefore. This is going to be counterbalanced ITTL by the powerful influence which Amaloxia is going to exert, of course.
The analogy is quite fitting, I agree. Crop packages, herded animals and the kinds of metalworking provide for a significantly different foundation, too, of course.
I absolutely agree.
Does she really spell out a causal chain opposed to the one you portrayed? Also, I think, there are only so many realistic ways to sell a theory in a given social background. But yeah, I`m sure it wasn`t a black-and-white situation IOTL. Which doesn`t mean
a) that later Amaloxian civilization wouldn`t develop just that kind of black-and-white view ITTL as their cultural, political, and social foundation and
b) that the scholars of my timeline are going to converge and agree on the issue more than those of OTL.
I agree that the fact that we haven`t found a lot of_unambiguous_weapons in "Old European" sites doesn`t mean nobody ever smashed another one´s head in, or that no clan or village ever engaged in mass violence against another. It is very probable, in my view, that they didn`t use their axes just for cutting down trees, and they didn`t use their sickles just for cutting emmer wheat, and that they didn`t use their bows and flintstone-headed arrows just for hunting deer. Yet, the absence of_unambiguous_weapons does tell us something in a context in which other simultaneous cultures had such items (the copper-spiked mace heads of Novodanilovka, for example): it can mean that they had no special social group whose role it was (at least prominently among other things) to conduct military activities.
(There is another possible interpretation, too: the PIE groups, living in the woodless steppe, had no use for axes, and not being agriculturalists, they had no use for sickles, either. So maybe their improvements in mace-head durity and strength were prompted by the sheer need for a close-combat weapon. This is a viable explanation. I´ll still go with the other one, even in the absence of horses, because while agriculturalist small-scale warfare is often burning down the Other`s village, pastoralist small-scale warfare is often stealing cattle. The former tends to be avoided until deemed inevitable, and when it becomes inevitable, it requires a lot of people from your group to engage in the attack. The latter is reversible and often practiced as a ritual, and it works best with just a couple of fast guys. I´m oversimplifying here, of course.)
So, ITTL, when the Amaloxians begin to build a proto-state and maintain a sort of professional military force, I think it makes a lot of sense for them to move from using any kind of object in reach which is suited to inflicting damage to using a broader variety of instruments and to adapt them for improved efficiency. If you`re a farmer most of the time, and you sometimes want to avenge a family member or maybe your village has to drive off a bunch of foragers who have been plundering your orchards and hunting your goats, then you`ll take your sickle and your flail and your axe to the conflict, but since you need your sickle most of the time for cutting wheat, you want it to be suited for that task. Not too straight or long or heavy, and just sharp enough for cereals. Such stuff isn`t cheap in the eneolithic or early bronze age, so the habit of keeping various sickles around - some for warfare, some for cutting weat - won`t necessarily pop up. When you have a "temple guard", though, you can expect them to adapt what is there to create something which is primarily good at killing other people.
So you`re closer to TTL`s position of Lenefr than to that of Hadjeamin? ;-)
I`m not sure. I tend to think that the quality of war is changing at that moment, too.
Just to qualify: I´m not a follower of the ideological agenda of our myth`s author, and I don`t think the Danubian culture was peaceful because it was matriarchal. To note: Several centuries before PIE groups probably had a great role in bringing about the collapse of the Gumelnita culture and its replacement with the Cernavoda culture, "Old European" Cris / Pre-Cucuteni groups moved Eastwards and completely made the mostly-foraging Bug-Dniester culture disappear. And the entire arrival of the agricultural groups from Anatolia in a hunting-and-gathering Europe millennia before certainly wasn`t only peaceful, either.
But the wave of new arrivals certainly changed things deeply along the Danube in the late 5th millennium BCE, too. "Uniting against the greater foe" could be an apt description for what I´m making the Old Europeans do ITTL, but I´d also emphasise that with that, a new stage of military development is reached.
That`s no coincidence, I had something similar on my mind as well.
A very interesting judgment.
While I`m not perfectly sure if this is really how it happened IOTL, I think some interesting similarities and differences can be drawn from this analogy.
A similarity is that this model is not going to remain a local exception if it is successful; it´s going to cause ripples of influence around it.
Among the differences, I´d note that here, the massively larger (or a part thereof), technologically more advanced and less mobile group is enslaving a smaller group. That should provide for a different dissemination of the new social structures compared to OTL.
