The third possibility is that the foragers were impressed by the abundance of food available for feasting and seasonal festivals among Criş farmers. Perhaps some Bug-Dniester locals were invited to such festivals by the Criş farmers in an attempt to encourage peaceful coexistence. Socially ambitious foragers might have begun to cultivate gardens and raise cattle to sponsor feasts among their own people, even making serving bowls and cups like those used in Criş villages—a political explanation, and one that also explains why Criş pots were copied. Unfortunately neither culture had cemeteries, and so we cannot examine graves to look for evidence of a growing social hierarchy. Status objects seem to have been few, with the possible exception of food itself. Probably both economic insurance and social status played roles in the slow but steady adoption of food production in the Dniester valley.
The importance of herding and cultivation in the Bug-Dniester diet grew very gradually. In Criş settlements domesticated animals contributed 70–80% of the bones in kitchen middens. In Bug-Dniester settlements domesticated animals exceeded hunted wild game only in the latest phase, and only in the Dniester valley, immediately adjacent to Criş settlements. Bug-Dniester people never ate mutton—not one single sheep bone has been found in a Bug-Dniester site. Early Bug-Dniester bakers did not use Criş-style saddle querns to grind their grain; instead, they initially used small, rhomboidal stone mortars of a local style, switching to Criş-style saddle querns only in the middle Bug-Dniester phase. They preferred their own chipped flint axe types to the smaller polished stone Criş axes. Their pottery was quite distinctive. And their historical trajectory led directly back to the local Mesolithic populations, unlike the Criş culture.
Even after 5500–5200 BCE, when a new farming culture, the Linear Pottery culture, moved into the East Carpathian piedmont from southern Poland and replaced the Criş culture, the Dniester valley frontier survived. No Linear Pottery sites are known east of the Dniester valley.26 The Dniester was a cultural frontier, not a natural one. It persisted despite the passage of people and trade goods across it, and through significant cultural changes on each side. Persistent cultural frontiers, particularly at the edges of ancient migration streams, usually are ethnic and linguistic frontiers. The Bug-Dniester people may well have spoken a language belonging to the language family that produced Pre-Proto-Indo-European, while their Criş neighbors spoke a language distantly related to those of Neolithic Greece and Anatolia.
BEYOND THE FRONTIER: PONTIC-CASPIAN FORAGERS BEFORE CATTLE ARRIVED
The North Pontic societies east of the Dniester frontier continued to live as they always had, by hunting, gathering wild plants, and fishing until about 5200 BCE. Domesticated cattle and hot wheatcakes might have seemed irresistibly attractive to the foragers who were in direct contact with the farmers who presented and legitimized them, but, away from that active frontier, North Pontic forager-fishers were in no rush to become animal tenders. Domesticated animals can only be raised by people who are committed morally and ethically to watching their families go hungry rather than letting them eat the breeding stock. Seed grain and breeding stock must be saved, not eaten, or there will be no crop and no calves the next year. Foragers generally value immediate sharing and generosity over miserly saving for the future, so the shift to keeping breeding stock was a moral as well as an economic one. It probably offended the old morals. It is not surprising that it was resisted, or that when it did begin it was surrounded by new rituals and a new kind of leadership, or that the new leaders threw big feasts and shared food when the deferred investment paid off. These new rituals and leadership roles were the foundation of Indo-European religion and society.27
The most heavily populated part of the Pontic-Caspian steppes was the place where the shift to cattle keeping happened next after the Bug-Dniester region. This was around the Dnieper Rapids. The Dnieper Rapids started at modern Dnepropetrovsk, where the Dnieper River began to cut down to the coastal lowlands through a shelf of granite bedrock, dropping 50 m in elevation over 66 km. The Rapids contained ten major cascades, and in early historical accounts each one had its own name, guardian spirits, and folklore. Fish migrating upstream, like the sudak (Lucioperca), could be taken in vast quantities at the Rapids, and the swift water between the cascades was home to wels (Silurusg lanis), a type of catfish that grows to 16 feet. The bones of both types of fish are found in Mesolithic and Neolithic camps near the Rapids. At the southern end of the Rapids there was a ford near Kichkas where the wide Dnieper could be crossed relatively easily on foot, a strategic place in a world without bridges.
The Rapids and many of the archaeological sites associated with them were inundated by dams and reservoirs built between 1927 and 1958. Among the many sites discovered in connection with reservoir construction was Igren 8 on the east bank of the Dnieper. Here the deepest level F contained Late Mesolithic Kukrekskaya flint tools; levels E and E1 above contained Surskii Early Neolithic pottery (radiocarbon dated 6200–5800 BCE); and stratum D1 above that contained Middle Neolithic Dnieper-Donets I pottery tempered with plant fibers and decorated with incised chevrons and small comb stamps (probably about 5800–5200 BCE but not directly dated by radiocarbon). The animal bones in the Dnieper-Donets I garbage were from red deer and fish. The shift to cattle keeping had not yet begun. Dnieper-Donets I was contemporary with the Bug-Dniester culture.28
Figure 8.6 Dnieper-Donets I camp at Girli, Ukraine, probably about 5600–5200 BCE. After Neprina 1970, Figures 3, 4, and 8.
Campsites of foragers who made Dnieper-Donets I (DDI) pottery have been excavated on the southern borders of the Pripet Marshes in the northwest and in the middle Donets valley in the east, or over much of the forest-steppe and northern steppe zone of Ukraine. At Girli (figure 8.6) on the upper Teterev River near Zhitomir, west of Kiev, a DDI settlement contained eight hearths arranged in a northeast-southwest line of four pairs, each pair about 2–3 m apart, perhaps representing a shelter some 14 m long for four families. Around the hearths were thirty-six hundred flint tools including microlithic blades, and sherds of point-based pots decorated with comb-stamped and pricked impressions. The food economy depended on hunting and gathering. Girli was located on a trail between the Dnieper and South Bug rivers, and the pottery was similar in shape and decoration to some Bug-Dniester ceramics of the middle or Samchin phase. But DDI sites did not contain domesticated animals or plants, or even polished stone axes like those of the Criş and late Bug-Dniester cultures; DDI axes were still chipped from large pieces of flint.29
Forager Cemeteries around the Dnieper Rapids
Across most of Ukraine and European Russia post-glacial foragers did not create cemeteries. The Bug-Dniester culture was typical: they buried their dead by ones and twos, often using an old campsite, perhaps the one where the death occurred. Graveside rituals took place but not in places set aside just for them. Cemeteries were different: they were formal plots of ground reserved just for funerals, funeral monuments, and public remembrance of the dead. Cemeteries were visible statements connecting a piece of land with the ancestors. During reservoir construction around the Dnieper Rapids archaeologists found eight Mesolithic and forager Neolithic cemeteries, among them Vasilievka I (twenty-four graves), Vasilievka II (thirty-two graves), Vasilievka III (forty-five graves), Vasilievka V (thirty-seven graves), Marievka (fifteen graves), and Volos’ke (nineteen graves). No comparable cluster of forager cemeteries exists anywhere else in the Pontic-Caspian region.
Several different forager populations seem to have competed with one another around the Dnieper Rapids at the end of the Ice Age. Already by about 8000 BCE, as soon as the glaciers melted, at least three skull-and-face types, a narrow-faced gracile type (Volos’ke), a broad-faced medium-weight type (Vasilievka I), and a broad-faced robust type (Vasilievka III) occupied different cemeteries and were buried in different poses (contracted and extended). Two of the nineteen individuals buried at Volos’ke and two (perhaps three) of the forty-five at Vasilevka III were wounded by weapo
ns tipped with Kukrekskaya-type microlithic blades. The Vasilievka III skeletal type and burial posture ultimately spread over the whole Rapids during the Late Mesolithic, 7000–6200 BCE. Two cemeteries that were assumed to be Early Neolithic (Vasilievka II and Marievka) because of the style of the grave now are dated by radiocarbon to 6500–6000 BCE, or the Late Mesolithic.
Only one of the Dnieper Rapids cemeteries, Vasilievka V, is dated to the Middle Neolithic DDI period by radiocarbon dates (5700–5300 BCE). At Vasilevka V thirty-seven skeletons were buried in supine positions (on their backs) with their hands near the pelvis, with their heads to the northeast. Some were buried singly in individual pits, and others apparently were layered in reused graves. Sixteen graves in the center of the cemetery seem to represent two or three superimposed layers of burials, the first hint of a collective burial ritual that would be elaborated greatly in the following centuries. Eighteen graves out of thirty-seven were sprinkled with red ochre, again a hint of things to come. The grave gifts at Vasilievka V, however, were very simple, limited to microlithic flint blades and flint scrapers. These were the last people on the Dnieper Rapids who clung to the old morality and rejected cattle keeping.30
Foragers on the Lower Volga and Lower Don
Different styles of pottery were made among the Early Neolithic foragers who lived even farther east, a longer distance away from the forager/farmer frontier on the Dniester. Forager camps on the lower Volga River dated between 6000 and 5300 BCE contained flat-based open bowls made of clay tempered with crushed shell and vegetal material, and were decorated by stabbing rows of impressions with a triangular-ended stick or drawing incised diamond and lozenge shapes. These decorative techniques were different from the comb-stamps used to decorate DDI pottery in the Dnieper valley. Flint tool kits on the Volga contained many geometric microliths, 60–70% of the tools, like the flint tools of the earlier Late Mesolithic foragers. Important Early Neolithic sites included Varfolomievka level 3 (radiocarbon dated about 5900–5700 BCE) and Kair-Shak III (also dated about 5900–5700 BCE) in the lower Volga region; and the lower levels at Rakushechni Yar, a dune on the lower Don (dated 6000–5600 BCE).31 At Kair Shak III, located in an environment that was then semi-desert, the economy was based almost entirely on hunting onagers (Equus hemionus). The animal bones at Varfolomievka, located in a small river valley in the dry steppe, have not been reported separately by level, so it is impossible to say what the level 3 Early Neolithic economy was, but half of all the animal bones at Varfolomievka were of horses (Equus caballus), with some bones of aurochs (Bos primigenius). Fish scales (unidentified) were found on the floors of the dwellings. At Rakushechni Yar, then surrounded by broad lower-Don valley gallery forests, hunters pursued red deer, wild horses, and wild pigs. As I noted in several endnotes in this chapter, some archaeologists have claimed that the herding of cattle and sheep began earlier in the lower Don-Azov steppes, but this is unlikely. Before 5200 BCE the forager-farmer frontier remained confined to the Dniester valley.32
THE GODS GIVE CATTLE
The Criş colonization of the Eastern Carpathians about 5800 BCE created a robust and persistent cultural frontier in the forest-steppe zone at the Dniester valley. Although the Bug-Dniester culture quickly acquired at least some domesticated cereals, pigs, and cattle, it retained an economy based primarily on hunting and gathering, and remained culturally and economically distinct in most ways. Beyond it, both in the forest-steppe zone and the steppe river valleys to the east, no other indigenous societies seem to have adopted cereal cultivation or domesticated animals until after about 5200 BCE.
In the Dniester valley, native North Pontic cultures had direct, face-to-face contact with farmers who spoke a different language, had a different religion, and introduced an array of invasive new plants and animals as if they were something wonderful. The foragers on the frontier itself rapidly accepted some cultivated plants and animals but rejected others, particularly sheep. Hunting and fishing continued to supply most of the diet. They did not display obvious signs of a shift to new rituals or social structures. Cattle keeping and wheat cultivation seem to have been pursued part-time, and were employed as an insurance policy against bad years and perhaps as a way of keeping up with the neighbors, not as a replacement of the foraging economy and morality. For centuries even this halfway shift to partial food production was limited to the Dniester valley, which became a narrow and well-defined frontier. But after 5200 BCE a new threshold in population density and social organization seems to have been crossed among European Neolithic farmers. Villages in the East Carpathian piedmont adopted new customs from the larger towns in the lower Danube valley, and a new, more complex culture appeared, the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture. Cucuteni-Tripolye villages spread eastward. The Dniester frontier was breached, and large western farming communities pushed into the Dniester and South Bug valleys. The Bug-Dniester culture, the original frontier society, disappeared into the wave of Cucuteni-Tripolye immigrants.
But away to the east, around the Dnieper Rapids, the bones of domesticated cattle, pigs, and, remarkably, even sheep began to appear regularly in garbage dumps. The Dnieper Rapids was a strategic territory, and the clans that controlled it already had more elaborate rituals than clans elsewhere in the steppes. When they accepted cattle keeping it had rapid economic and social consequences across the steppe zone.
CHAPTER NINE
Cows, Copper, and Chiefs
The Proto-Indo-European vocabulary contained a compound word (*weik-potis) that referred to a village chief, an individual who held power within a residential group; another root (*re-) referred to another kind of powerful officer. This second root was later used for king in Italic (rēx), Celtic (rīx), and Old Indic (raj-), but it might originally have referred to an official more like a priest, literally a “regulator” (from the same root) or “one who makes things right” (again the same root), possibly connected with drawing “correct” (same root) boundaries. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European had institutionalized offices of power and social ranks, and presumably showed deference to the people who held them, and these powerful people, in return, sponsored feasts at which food and gifts were distributed.1 When did a hierarchy of social power first appear in the Pontic-Caspian region? How was it expressed? And who were these powerful people?
Chiefs first appeared in the archaeological record of the Pontic-Caspian steppes when domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats first became widespread, after about 5200–5000 BCE.2 An interesting aspect of the spread of animal keeping in the steppes was the concurrent rapid rise of chiefs who wore multiple belts and strings of polished shell beads, bone beads, beaver-tooth and horse-tooth beads, boars tusk pendants, boars-tusk caps, boars-tusk plates sewed to their clothing, pendants of crystal and porphyry, polished stone bracelets, and gleaming copper rings. Their ornaments must have clacked and rustled when they walked. Older chiefs carried maces with polished stone mace-heads. Their funerals were accompanied by the sacrifice of sheep, goats, cattle, and horses, with most of the meat and bones distributed to the celebrants so only a few symbolic lower leg pieces and an occasional skull, perhaps attached to a hide, remained in the grave. No such ostentatious leaders had existed in the old hunting and gathering bands of the Neolithic. What made their sudden rise even more intriguing is that the nitrogen levels in their bones suggest that more than 50% of their meat diet continued to come from fish. In the Volga region the bones of horses, the preferred wild prey of the earlier hunters, still outnumbered cattle and sheep in kitchen trash. The domesticated cattle and sheep that played such a large ritual role were eaten only infrequently, particularly in the east.
What seems at first to be the spread of a new food economy on second look appears to be deeply interwined in new rituals, new values associated with them, and new institutions of social power. People who did not accept the new animal currency, who remained foragers, did not even use formal cemeteries, much less sponsor such aggrandizing public funeral feasts. Their dead still were bur
ied simply, in plain clothing, in their old camping places. The cultural gap widened between those who tended domesticated animals, including foreign sheep and goats, and those who hunted native wild animals.
The northern frontier of the new economy coincided with the ecological divide between the forests in the north and the steppes in the south. The northern hunters and fishers refused to be shackled to domesticated animals for another two thousand years. Even in the intervening zone of forest-steppe the percentage of domesticated animal bones declined and the importance of hunted game increased. In contrast, the eastern frontier of the new economy did not coincide with an ecotone but instead ran along the Ural River, which drained the southern flanks of the Ural Mountains and flowed south through the Caspian Depression into the Caspian Sea. East of the Ural River, in the steppes of northern Kazakhstan, steppe foragers of the Atbasar type continued to live by hunting wild horses, deer, and aurochs. They lived in camps sheltered by grassy bluffs on low river terraces or on the marshy margins of lakes in the steppes. Their rejection of the new western economy possibly was rooted in ethnic and linguistic differences that had sharpened during the millennia between 14,000 and 9,000 BCE, when the Khvalynian Sea had divided the societies of the Kazakh and the Russian steppes. Regardless of its cause, the Ural valley became a persistent frontier dividing western steppe societies that accepted domesticated animals from eastern steppe societies that rejected them.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 19
