Revisiting Dispersions Celtic and Germanic ca. 400 BC ca. 400 AD, Proceedings of the International Interdisciplinary Conference held at Dolenjski muzej, Novo mesto, Slovenia October 12th 14th, 2018

The major concerns of the Novo mesto Conference were (1) to take a further look at Indo-European and, particularly, Germano-Celtic dispersions in light of research across the three decades following the 1988 Bellagio Conference at which Colin Renfrew’s (subsequently withdrawn) “Out of Anatolia” hypothesis that Indo-European speech was brought into Europe by early cultivators was presented and critiqued, and (2) to revisit the ever-puzzling “Negau Helmet” inscriptions in their Slovenian homeland with papers and discussions by local and foreign scholars alike; a revisit that generated innovative solutions while raising new issues about our very earliest textual evidence for Germanic and its ritualistic implications. Following a Preface by T. L. Markey and Luka Repanšek, Markus Egetmeyer provides a fascinating paper entitled Mesopotamia as the Magnet, Greece as a Second Choice, Remarks on the Dispersal of the Indo-European Languages. In direct contra-distinction to Renfrew’s earlier thesis, Egetmeyer shows how I-E speech actually penetrated western Anatolia from Europe before it was established in Greece. This is followed by John Colarusso’s An Ancient Loan into Proto-Indo-European from the Caucasus; and Stefan Zimmer’s Celtic, Germanic and HARIGASTI TEIWA; T. L. Markey and Daphne Nash Briggs next offer a revealing paper on Porcine Husbandry (domestic) and Hunting (wild): Totem and Taboo; Bernard Mees clarifies The Trilingual Würmlach (Bumlje) Inscriptions; and Václav Blažek produces Onomastic Evidence for Early Germanic and Celtic Contact in Central Europe; while Luka Repanšek speculates Towards the Interpretation of *Is 7; The monograph concludes with Mitja Guštin’s attention-grasping “The Amber Route” during the Late Iron Age and Roman Imperial Periods, from the 5th Century BC to the 3rd Century AD.