References
For those who are interested, there are lots of places to dive in and pursue aspects of the Indo-European story, as evidenced by the many hyperlinks given in the text of this web site. Below, I have listed some of the more important books which have helped me and would serve as a beginner's Indo-European library.www.amazon.com/Horse-Wheel-Language-Bronze-Age-Eurasian/dp/069114818X/ref=monarch_sidesheet#detailBullets_feature_div
David Anthony's 2010 book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World was a best seller (for its limited category) and started my interest in Indo-European studies. Anthony is an archeologist and the purpose of his book is to prove the steppe theory of the proto-Indo-European homeland. It's a 568 page book which goes into deep detail about the burial customs of dozens of cultures, so it's hard to absorb on first reading. But Anthony is a good writer, and he does pick up some linguistic and sociological insights, so it's a good text, especially if you read it three or four times.
J.P. Mallory is also an archeologist focused on Indo-Europeans, and he wrote a very accessible book in 1989 titled "In Search of the Indo-Europeans", covering language, archeology and myth. It is not up to date will all the new research, but it's a good overview of the field and can sometimes be found on Abebooks for under $3.
There are two books which I used in Chapter 1 that do a good job of tracing Indo-European vocabulary back to early and proto- Indo-European culture.
The Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society by Emile Benveniste was published in 1969 but does a good job of gathering all the cognates associated with topics such as economy. kinship relations, social status, royalty and religion, and putting them in a context. More technical than desired for someone just beginning Indo-European studies.
A very similar book, published in 2006 is The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by J. P. Mallory and D. Q. Adams. Mallory is a pre-eminent PIE archeologist and Adams is a PIE linguist, so the book is thorough, but again, sometimes very technical.
There are two books by pre-eminent IE scholars on Indo-European myth traditions. How to Kill a Dragon is by Calvert Watkins and Indo-European Poetry and Myth is by M.L. West. Both are towering masterpieces of scholarly achievement and largely unreadable to the lay person. But they're much fun to pick up and read a chapter or two and marvel at the scholarship in the field.
