However, ethnographers and archaeologists paid attention to another side
of Marrs theory. Marr waged a war against Indo-Europeanist comparative
historical linguistics, which supposed that a protolanguage had branched into
different languages during the course of the migration of ethnic groups from
their original homeland. His version of linguistic history was that different
socioeconomic developmental stages produced different languages, which remained
in todays world as relicts. The most important origin of linguistic
changes was not external mass migrations but revolutionary shifts of socioeconomic
systems, as well as the intercrossing (skreshchenie) of words and languages.
37 His followers applied this idea to cultural and ethnic history, adding an
ethnoterritorial aspect to it. His closest disciple, Ivan Meshchaninov, argued
that material culture changed according to the developmental stages, and while
migration could stimulate these changes, foreign (chuzhie) elements derived
from migration were secondary to local elements.38