First, French scholars pressed the case for an association with the Ligurians and Celts, while German prehistorians and linguists, beginning with Gustaf Kossinna,[1] and following Julius Pokorny and Hans Krahe, later linked the Illyrians with the Lusatian culture and Old European hydronyms.
One of Kossinna's hypotheses suggested that at the time of the Hallstatt culture, which followed the Bronze Age in Central Europe (and is generally regarded as Proto-Celtic or early Celtic), a hypothetical Illyrian civilization in the middle Danube Valley was technologically more advanced than that of the early Celts to their immediate west, and elements of the Illyrians' material culture found their way into the original Celtic heartland (Hallstatt), as well as the easternmost Germanic tribes.
[2] Julius Pokorny located the Urheimat between the Weser and the Vistula and east from that region where migration began around 2400 BC.
The problem was that the names of the Venets and Veneds, and similar ethnonyms, are scattered over a huge territory, from the British Isles to the Baltic Sea and from Northern Italy to the Southern Balkans.
"[10] This meant that the people of the Lusatian culture would have advanced to the eastern part of the Alps to the historical territory of the Illyrians around 1200 BC.
[13] In his later work, Krahe substituted Pokorny's hypothesis with that of Old European hydronymy, a network of names of water courses dating back to the Bronze Age and to a time before Indo-European languages had split and developed in central, northern, and western Europe.
The Thracians and Illyrians would have been the link between the central (Italic, Greek, Aryan) and the southern (Pelasg, Luwiy, Hittite) Indo-European groups.
[clarification needed] As Radoslav Katičić linguistically restricted what is to be considered Illyrian,[23] newer archeological investigations made by Alojz Benac and B. Čović, archaeologists from Sarajevo, demonstrated that there was unbroken continuation of cultural development between Bronze and Iron Age archeological material, therefore ethnical continuation, too.
[24] This hypothesis was supported by Albanian archaeologists[25] and Aleksandar Stipčević, who says that the most convincing hypothesis for the genesis of the Illyrians was the one given by Benac; but pointing to Liburnians and their pre-Indo-European and Mediterranean phases in development, Stipčević claims that there was no equal processing[vague] of Illyrian origin in the different areas of the Western Balkans.