Tocharica et archaeologica
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It is my pleasure to announce the publication of the following volume which has just appeared:
Victor H. Mair, ed. Tocharica et archaeologica : A Festschrift in Honor of J. P. Mallory (Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph No. 69) (September 1, 2024)
This volume of celebratory papers, assembled upon the retirement of J. P. Mallory from his two decades as editor of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, has been written by his colleagues in admiration and gratitude for his long service to the journal and to the field in general. The contents mirror the broad range of the honoree's own expertise and interest in Indo-European studies. Above all is his consuming passion for the history of the Tocharians and their language, a subject on which he has labored diligently throughout his career: Who were the Tocharians? Where did they come from? Where did they end up? With what other languages was their own tongue related? This consuming quest led him to delve deeply into the realms of linguistics, archeology, and cultural anthropology, all of which are represented in the papers collected in this volume. Indo-European studies has been much enriched by J. P. Mallory's dedication to the journal that he edited with such care and precision. This monograph reflects the esteem and respect in which the contributors, all specialists in related fields, hold the honoree, J. P. Mallory. Foreword; Victor H. Mair – Preface; Douglas Q. Adams – On the Significance of Some Iranian Loanwords in Tocharian; Donald Ringe – A New Argument from Old Principles: Tocharian A cmol ‘birth’ and Its Implications; Melanie Malzahn – Tocharian B ārkwi, A ārki ‘white’ Revisited; Brian D. Joseph – More on Albanian Negation; Václav Blažek – Hippologica Euroasiatica: Tocharian A lāk*; Adrian Poruciuc – Gothic hlaiw as a Loan Word in Slavic and Romanian; Victor H. Mair and Diana Shuheng Zhang – How to Ride Your Elephant: Sanskritic Dream Omens in Tocharian; Harald Haarmann – The Innovation of Wheel and Wagon: Transport Technology as a Multicultural Joint Venture of Pastoralists and Agriculturalists; Peter S. Wells – Ornate Drinking Vessels as Indices of Feasting in Bronze and Iron Age Europe; Alexandra Comşa – Some Pathological Conditions of the (Bronze Age) Tumular Ochre Bearers in Connection with Their Environment
I join my colleagues in presenting this Festschrift to Jim Mallory as a token of our admiration and gratitude for all that he has done to advance our field. If you want to know where it all started, permit me to say that I am the proud owner of volume 1, number 1 (Spring, 1973) issue of The Journal of Indo-European Studies in which Jim's article titled "A Short History of the Indo-European Problem" (pp. 21-65) was published without his knowledge while he was still a graduate student at UCLA by his supervisor, Marija Gimbutas, whose article in that same issue was the only one that preceded his: "Old Europe c. 7000-3500 B.C.: The Earliest European Civilization before the Infiltration of the Indo-European Peoples" (pp. 1-20). To this day, Jim has never looked back.
Selected readings
- J. P. Mallory, "The Problem of Tocharian Origins: An Archaeological Perspective", Sino-Platonic Papers, 259 (November, 2015), 1-63.
- J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).
- J. P.Mallory, The Origins of the Irish (London–New York: Thames & Hudson, 2013).
- J. P. Mallory, In search of the Irish dreamtime : archaeology & early Irish literature (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016).
- J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams, Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (London and Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn, 1997).
Laura Morland said,
December 21, 2024 @ 2:30 pm
Congratulations on producing this festschrift!
From my perspective, the article with the most intriguing title is your own:
Victor H. Mair and Diana Shuheng Zhang – How to Ride Your Elephant: Sanskritic Dream Omens in Tocharian.
(I was startled, however, to learn that the journal's publisher has such a troubled history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Indo-European_Studies#History)
Victor Mair said,
December 21, 2024 @ 4:07 pm
Be sure to read all three paragraphs of that section.
David Marjanović said,
December 22, 2024 @ 11:39 am
From there:
I feel you. In my field, a very important paper was accepted for publication in April of 2022 and came out in July of that year. The acknowledgments contain this sentence: "Funding from an endowment to Oxford University from the Vladimir Potanin Foundation was used to employ a student to conduct segmentation of some fossil material and to facilitate collaboration between P.S. and the UK researchers." Potanin is the Nickel King, the second- or third-richest man in Russia, who has been under sanctions by the UK since June 2022 as a "key supporter of the Kremlin"; three of the eight authors are based at Oxford, and seven of the eight are based in the UK. If not Potanin, who else would have financed this labor in service of basic research? ("Segmentation" refers to actually getting a 3D image out of raw CT-scan data. It's time-consuming work when the scans are of bone in rock.)
Less tragi- and more comically, the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was started with money from a creationist who appears to have been duped by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.