Figure 8.3 Mesolithic and Neolithic sites from the Carpathian Mountains to the Ural River.
Criş ceramic vessels were hand-made by the coiling method, and included plain pots for cooking and storage, and a variety of fine wares with polished reddish-brown surfaces—tureens, bowls, and cups on pedestals (figure 8.2). Decorative designs were incised with a stick on the clay surface before firing or were impressed with a fingernail. Very rarely they were painted in broad brown stripes. The shapes and designs made by Criş settlers in the East Carpathians were characteristic of periods III and IV of the Criş culture; older sites of stages I and II are found only in eastern Hungary, the Danube valley, and Transylvania.
Criş farmers never penetrated east of the Prut-Dniester watershed. In the Dniester valley they came face-to-face with a dense population of local foragers, known today as the Bug-Dniester culture, named after the two river valleys (Dniester and South Bug) where most of their sites are found. The Bug-Dniester culture was the filter through which farming and stockbreeding economies were introduced to Pontic-Caspian societies farther east (figure 8.3).
The Criş people were different from their Bug-Dniester neighbors in many ways: Criş flint tool kits featured large blades and few scrapers, whereas the foragers used microlithic blades and many scrapers; most Criş villages were on the better-drained soils of the second terrace, convenient for farming, and most foragers lived on the floodplain, convenient for fishing; whereas Criş woodworkers used polished stone axes, the foragers used chipped flint axes; Criş pottery was distinct both in the way it was made and its style of decoration; and Criş farmers raised and ate various exotic foods, including mutton, which has a distinctive taste. Four forged cylindrical copper beads were found at the Criş site of Selishte, dated 5800–5600 BCE (6830 ± 100 BP).12 They show an early awareness of the metallic minerals in the mountains of Transylvania (copper, silver, gold) and the Balkans (copper), something the foragers of southeastern Europe had never noticed.
Some archaeologists have speculated that the East Carpathian Criş culture could have been an acculturated population of local foragers who had adopted a farming economy, rather than immigrant pioneers.13 This is unlikely given the numerous similarities between the material culture and economy of Criş sites in the Danube valley and the East Carpathians, and the sharp differences between the East Carpathian Criş culture and the
local foragers. But it really is of no consequence—no one seriously believes that the East Carpathian Criş people were genetically “pure” anyway. The important point is that the people who lived in Criş villages in the East Carpathians were culturally Criş in almost all the material signs of their identity, and given how they got there, almost certainly in nonmaterial signs like language as well. The Criş culture came, without any doubt, from the Danube valley.
The Language of the Criş Culture
If the Starcevo—Criş—Karanovo migrants were at all similar to pioneer farmers in North America, Brazil, southeast Asia, and other parts of the world, it is very likely that they retained the language spoken in their parent villages in northern Greece. Forager languages were more apt to decline in the face of agricultural immigration. Farmers had a higher birth rate; their settlements were larger, and were occupied permanently. They produced food surpluses that were easier to store over the winter. Owning and feeding “cultured” animals has always been seen as an utterly different ethos from hunting wild ones, as Ian Hodder emphasized. The material and ritual culture and economy of the immigrant farmers were imposed on the landscapes of Greece and southeastern Europe and persisted there, whereas the external signs of forager identity disappeared. The language of the foragers might have had substrate effects on that of the farmers, but it is difficult to imagine a plausible scenario under which it could have competed with the farmers’ language.14
What languages were spoken by Starčevo, Criş, and Karanovo I pioneers? The parent language for all of them was spoken in the Thessalian plain of Greece, where the first Neolithic settlements were founded about 6700–6500 BCE probably by seafarers who island-hopped from western Anatolia in open boats. Katherine Perlés has convincingly demonstrated that the material culture and economy of the first farmers in Greece was transplanted from the Near East or Anatolia. An origin somewhere in western Anatolia is suggested by similarities in pottery, flint tools, ornaments, female figurines, pintadera stamps, lip labrets, and other traits. The migrants leapfrogged to the Thessalian plain, the richest agricultural land in Greece, almost certainly on the basis of information from scouts (probably Aegean fishermen) who told their relatives in Anatolia about the destination. The population of farmers in Thessaly grew rapidly. At least 120 Early Neolithic settlements stood on the Thessalian plain by 6200–6000 BCE, when pioneers began to move north into the temperate forests of southeastern Europe. The Neolithic villages of Thessaly provided the original breeds of domesticated sheep, cattle, wheat, and barley, as well as red-on-white pottery, female-centered domestic rituals, bracelets and beads made of Aegean Spondylus shell, flint tool types, and other traditions that were carried into the Balkans. The language of Neolithic Thessaly probably was a dialect of a language spoken in western Anatolia about 6500 BCE. Simplification and leveling should have occurred among the first colonist dialects in Thessaly, so the 120 villages occupied five hundred years later spoke a language that had passed through a bottleneck and probably was just beginning to separate again into strongly differentiated dialects.15
The tongue spoken by the first Criş farmers in the East Carpathian foothills about 5800–5600 BCE was removed from the parent tongue spoken by the first settlers in Thessaly by less than a thousand years—the same interval that separates Modern American English from Anglo-Saxon. That was long enough for several new Old European Neolithic languages to have emerged from the Thessalian parent, but they would have belonged to a single language family. That language family was not Indo-European. It came from the wrong place (Anatolia and Greece) at the wrong time (before 6500 BCE). Curiously a fragment of that lost language might be preserved in the Proto-Indo-European term for bull, *tawro—s, which many linguists think was borrowed from an Afro-Asiatic term. The Afro-Asiatic super-family generated both Egyptian and Semitic in the Near East, and one of its early languages might have been spoken in Anatolia by the earliest farmers. Perhaps the Criş people spoke a language of Afro-Asiatic type, and as they drove their cattle into the East Carpathian valleys they called them something like *tawr-.16
FARMER MEETS FORAGER: THE BUG-DNIESTER CULTURE
The first indigenous North Pontic people to adopt Criş cattle breeding and perhaps also the Criş word for bull were the people of the Bug-Dniester culture, introduced a few pages ago. They occupied the frontier where the expansion of the Criş farmers came to a halt, apparently blocked by the Bug-Dniester culture itself. The initial contact between farmers and foragers must have been a fascinating event. The Criş immigrants brought herds of cultured animals that wandered up the hillsides among the deer. They introduced sheep, plum orchards, and hot wheat-cakes. Their families lived in the same place all year, year after year; they cut down the trees to make houses and orchards and gardens; and they spoke a foreign language. The foragers’ language might have been part of the broad language family from which Proto-Indo-European later emerged, although, since the ultimate fate of the Bug-Dniester culture was extinction and assimilation, their dialect probably died with their culture.17
The Bug-Dniester culture grew out of Mesolithic forager cultures that dwelt in the region since the end of the last Ice Age. Eleven Late Mesolithic technological-typological groups have been defined by differences in flint tool kits just in Ukraine; other Late Mesolithic flint tool-based groups have been identified in the Russian steppes east of the Don River, in the North Caspian Depression, and in coastal Romania. Mesolithic camps have been found in the lower Danube valley and the coastal steppes northwest of the Black Sea, not far from the Criş settlement area. In the Dobruja, the pe
ninsula of rocky hills skirted by the Danube delta at its mouth, eighteen to twenty Mesolithic surface sites were found just in one small area northwest of Tulcea on the southern terraces of the Danube River. Late Mesolithic groups also occupied the northern side of the estuary. Mirnoe is the best-studied site here. The Late Mesolithic hunters at Mirnoe hunted wild aurochs (83% of bones), wild horse (14%), and the extinct Equus hydruntinus (1.1%). Farther up the coast, away from the Danube delta, the steppes were drier, and at Late Mesolithic Girzhevo, on the lower Dniester, 62% of the bones were of wild horses, with fewer aurochs and Equus hydruntinus. There is no archaeological trace of contact between these coastal steppe foragers and the Criş farmers who were advancing into the upland forest-steppe.18
The story is different in the forest-steppe. At least twenty-five Bug-Dniester sites have been excavated in the forest-steppe zone in the middle and upper parts of the South Bug and Dniester River valleys, in the transitional ecological zone where rainfall was sufficient for the growth of forests but there were still open meadows and some pockets of steppe. This environment was favored by the Criş immigrants. In it the native foragers had for generations hunted red deer, roe deer, and wild boar, and caught riverine fish (especially the huge river catfish, Siluris glanis). Early Bug-Dniester flint tools showed similarities both to coastal steppe groups (Grebenikov and Kukrekskaya types of tool kits) and northern forest groups (Donets types).
Pottery and the Beginning of the Neolithic
The Bug-Dniester culture was a Neolithic culture; Bug-Dniester people knew how to make fired clay pottery vessels. The first pottery in the Pontic-Caspian region, and the beginning of the Early Neolithic, is associated with the Elshanka culture in the Samara region in the middle Volga River valley. It is dated by radiocarbon (on shell) about 7000–6500 BCE, which makes it, surprisingly, the oldest pottery in all of Europe. The pots were made of a clay-rich mud collected from the bottoms of stagnant ponds. They were formed by the coiling method and were baked in open fires at 450–600°C (figure 8.4).19 From this northeastern source ceramic technology diffused south and westward. It was adopted widely by most foraging and fishing bands across the Pontic-Caspian region about 6200–6000 BCE, before any clear contact with southern farmers. Early Neolithic pottery tempered with vegetal material and crushed shells appeared at Surskii Island in the Dnieper Rapids in levels dated about 6200–5800 BCE. In the lower Don River valley a crude vegetal-tempered pottery decorated with incised geometric motifs appeared at Rakushechni Yar and other sites such as Samsonovka in levels dated 6000–5600 BCE.20 Similar designs and vessel shapes, but made with a shell-tempered clay fabric, appeared on the lower Volga, at Kair Shak III dated about 5700–5600 BCE (6720 ± 80 BP). Older pottery was made in the North Caspian at Kugat, where a different kind of pottery was stratified beneath Kair Shak-type pottery, possibly the same age as the pottery at Surskii Island. Primitive, experimental ceramic fragments appeared about 6200 BCE also at Matveev Kurgan in the steppes north of the Sea of Azov. The oldest pottery south of the middle Volga appeared at the Dnieper Rapids (Surskii), on the lower Don (Rakushechni Yar), and on the lower Volga (Kair Shak III, Kugat) at about the same time, around 6200–6000 BCE (figure 8.4).
The earliest pottery in the South Bug valley was excavated by Danilenko at Bas’kov Ostrov and Sokolets II, dated by five radiocarbon dates about 6200–6000 BCE, about the same age as Surskii on the Dnieper.21 In the Dniester River valley, just west of the South Bug, at Soroki II, archaeologists excavated two stratified Late Mesolithic occupations (levels 2 and 3) dated by radiocarbon to about 6500–6200 BCE. They contained no pottery. Pottery making was adopted by the early Bug-Dniester culture about 6200 BCE, probably the same general time it appeared in the Dnieper valley and the Caspian Depression.
Farmer-Forager Exchanges in the Dniester Valley
After about 5800–5700 BCE, when Criş farmers moved into the East Carpathian foothills from the west, the Dniester valley became a frontier between two very different ways of life. At Soroki II the uppermost occupation level (1) was left by Bug-Dniester people who clearly had made contact with the incoming Criş farmers, dated by good radiocarbon dates at about 5700–5500 BCE. Some of the ceramic vessels in level 1 were obvious copies of Criş vessels—round-bodied, narrow-mouthed jars on a ring base and bowls with carinated sides. But they were made locally, using clay tempered with sand and plant fibers. The rest of the pottery in level 1 looked more like indigenous bag-shaped South Bug ceramics (figure 8.5). Continuity in the flint tools between level 1 and the older levels 2 and 3 suggests that it was the same basic culture, and all three levels are traditionally assigned to the Bug-Dniester culture.
Figure 8.4 Top: Early Neolithic ceramics of Elshanka type on the middle Volga (7000–6500 BCE); middle: ceramics and flint tools from Kugat (perhaps 6000 BCE), North Caspian; bottom: ceramics and flint tools from Kair-Shak III (5700–5600 BCE) North Caspian. After (top) Mamonov 1995; and (middle and bottom) Barynkin and Kozin 1998.
The Bug-Dniester people who lived at Soroki II in the level 1 camp copied more than just Criş pottery. Botanists found seed impressions in the clay vessels of three kinds of wheat. Level 1 also yielded a few bones from small domesticated cattle and pigs. This was the beginning of a significant shift—the adoption of an imported food-production economy by the native foragers. It is perhaps noteworthy that the exotic ceramic types copied by Soroki II potters were small Criş pedestaled jars and bowls, probably used to serve drink and food rather than to store or cook it. Perhaps Criş foods were served to visiting foragers in jars and bowls like these inside Criş houses, inspiring some Bug-Dniester families to re-create both the new foods and the vessels in which they were served. But the original decorative motifs on Bug-Dniester pottery, the shapes of the largest pots, the vegetal and occasional shell temper in the clay, and the low-temperature firing indicate that early Bug-Dniester potters knew their own techniques, clays, and tempering formulas. The largest pots they made (for cooking? storage?) were shaped like narrow-mouthed baskets, unlike any shape made by Criş potters.
Three kinds of wheat impressions appeared in the clay of early Bug-Dniester pots at two sites in the Dniester valley: Soroki II/level 1 and Soroki III. Both sites had impressions of emmer, einkorn, and spelt.22 Was the grain actually grown locally? Both sites had a variety of wheats, with impressions of chaff and spikelets, parts removed during threshing. The presence of threshing debris suggests that at least some grain was grown and threshed locally. The foragers of the Dniester valley seem to have cultivated at least small plots of grain very soon after their initial contact with Criş farmers. What about the cattle?
In three Early Bug-Dniester Neolithic sites in the Dniester valley occupied about 5800–5500 BCE, domesticated cattle and swine averaged 24% of the 329 bones recovered from garbage pits, if each bone is counted for the NISP; or 20% of the animals, if the bones are converted into a minimum number of individuals, or MNI. Red deer and roe deer remained more important than domesticated animals in the meat diet. Middle Bug-Dniester sites (Samchin phase), dated about 5600–5400 BCE, contained more domesticated pigs and cattle: at Soroki I/level 1a, a Middle-phase site, cattle and swine made up 49% of the 213 bones recovered (32% MNI). By the Late (Savran) phase, about 5400–5000 BCE, domesticated pigs and cattle totaled 55% of the animal bones (36% MNI) in two sites.23 In contrast, the Bug-Dniester settlement sites in the South Bug valley, farther away from the source of the domesticated animals, never showed more than 10% domesticated animal bones. But even in the South Bug valley a few domesticated cattle and pigs appeared at Bas’kov Ostrov and Mit’kov Ostrov very soon after the Criş farmers entered the Eastern Carpathian foothills. The “availability” phase, in Zvelebil’s three-phase description of farmer-forager interactions, was very brief.24 Why? What was so attractive about Criş foods and even the pottery vessels in which they were served?
Figure 8.5 Pottery types of the Bug-Dniester culture. The four vessels in the top row appear to have been copied after
Cris types seen in Figure 8.2. After Markevich 1974; and Dergachev 1999.
There are three possibilities: intermarriage, population pressure, and status competition. Intermarriage is an often-repeated but not very convincing explanation for incremental changes in material culture. In this case, imported Criş-culture wives would be the vehicle through which Criş-culture pottery styles and foods should have appeared in Bug-Dniester settlements. But Warren DeBoer has shown that wives who marry into a foreign tribe among tribal societies often feel so exposed and insecure that they become hyper-correct imitators of their new cultural mores rather than a source of innovation. And the technology of Bug-Dniester ceramics, the method of manufacture, was local. Technological styles are often better indicators of ethnic origin than decorative styles. So, although there may have been intermarriage, it is not a persuasive explanation for the innovations in pottery or economy on the Dniester frontier.25
Was it population pressure? Were the pre-Neolithic Bug-Dniester foragers running out of good hunting and fishing grounds, and looking for ways to increase the amount of food that could be harvested within their hunting territories? Probably not. The forest-steppe was an ideal hunting territory, with maximal amounts of the forest-edge environment preferred by deer. The abundant tree pollen in Criş-period soils indicates that the Criş pioneers had little impact on the forest around them, so their arrival did not greatly reduce deer populations. A major component of the Bug-Dniester diet was riverine fish, some of which supplied as much meat as a small adult pig, and there is no evidence that fish stocks were falling. Cattle and pigs might have been acquired by cautious foragers as a hedge against a bad year, but the immediate motive probably was not hunger.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 18
