The Roots of the Indo-European Diaspora: New Perspectives on the North Pontic Hypothesis Marc Vander Linden Free University of Brussels It is unquestionable that the increase in Nostraticist works has greatly modified our perception of the Indo-European language family by suggesting its insertion into a larger whole. This paper seeks to explore the implications of this new body of knowledge for the archaeology of the Proto-Indo-European problem on the basis of a review of the recent literature on the 4 th and the beginning of the 3 rd millennia BC in the north Pontic area. Introduction Over the last few decades, the field of historical linguistics has witnessed the development of a series of provocative, and hence much debated, works that suggest placing Indo-European and other language families into a larger unit, the so-called Nostratic hypothesis. I do not intend here to summarize this complex body of data and hypotheses generated over the last few years; nor do I intend to set forth any judgment of those ideas (see for instance the very critical perspective of Dixon [1997]), nor of the various archaeological re-appropriations of Nostraticist theories. Actually, the value of such a hypothesis lies not only in its degree of elaboration, but it rests, first of all, in its creative implications (see Reichler-Béguelin 1994). In this sense, if we are to place Proto-Indo-European into a larger whole, we must not simply look for ways to connect PIE and Nostratic. We need also, following the normal flow of history, to understand why and essentially how, at a given moment in a given area, the Proto-Indo- European cultural and linguistic common stock split from this larger whole. To put it another way, we need to ascertain how Proto-Indo- European became an autonomous entity, with its distinct historical trajectory itself subject to later diffusion.