Copper ornaments were among the gifts and baubles traded eastward across the steppes from the Danube valley to the Volga-Ural region with the first domesticated animals. The regular, widespread appearance of copper in the Pontic-Caspian steppes signals the beginning of the Eneolithic. The copper was Balkan in origin and probably was obtained with the animals through the same trade networks. From this time forward Pontic-Caspian steppe cultures were drawn into increasingly complicated social, political, and economic relations with the cultures of the Balkans and the lower Danube valley. The gulf between them, however, only intensified. By 4400–4200 BCE, when the Old European cultures were at their peak of economic productivity, population size, and stability, their frontier with the Pontic-Caspian herding cultures was the most pronounced cultural divide in prehistoric Europe, an even starker contrast than that between the northern forest hunters and the steppe herders. The Neolithic and Eneolithic cultures of the Balkans, Carpathians, and middle and lower Danube valley had more productive farming economies in an age when that really mattered, their towns and houses were much more substantial, and their craft techniques, decorative aesthetics, and metallurgy were more sophisticated than those of the steppes. The Early Eneolithic herding cultures of the steppes certainly were aware of the richly ornamented and colorfully decorated people of Old Europe, but steppe societies developed in a different direction.3
THE EARLY COPPER AGE IN OLD EUROPE
There is an overall rhythm to the Eneolithic over most of southeastern Europe: a rise to a new level of social and technological complexity, its flourishing, and its subsequent disintegration into smaller-scale, more mobile, and technologically simpler communities at the opening of the Bronze Age. But it began, developed, and ended differently in different places. Its beginning is set at about 5200–5000 BCE in Bulgaria, which was in many ways the heart and center of Old Europe. Pontic-Caspian steppe societies were pulled into the Old European copper-trade network at least as early as 4600 BCE, more than six hundred years before copper was regularly used in Germany, Austria, or Poland.4
The scattered farming hamlets of Bulgaria and southern Romania, about 5200–5000 BCE, blossomed into increasingly large and solidly built agricultural villages of large multiroomed timber and mud-plaster houses, often two-storied, set in cleared and cultivated landscapes surrounded by herds of cattle, pigs, and sheep. Cattle pulled ards, primitive scratch-plows, across the fields.5 In the Balkans and the fertile plains of the lower Danube valley, villages were rebuilt on the same spot generation after generation, creating stratified tells that grew to heights of 30–50 feet, lifting the village above its surrounding fields. Marija Gimbutas has made Old Europe famous for the ubiquity and variety of its goddesses. Household cults symbolized by broad-hipped female figurines were practiced everywhere. Marks incised on figurines and pots suggest the appearance of a notation system.6 Fragments of colored plaster suggest that house walls were painted with the same swirling, curvilinear designs that appeared on decorated pottery. Potters invented kilns that reached temperatures of 800–1100°C. They used a low-oxygen reducing atmosphere to create a black ceramic surface that was painted with graphite to make silver designs; or a bellows-aided high-oxygen atmosphere to create a red or orange surface, intricately painted in white ribbons bordered with black and red.
Pottery kilns led to metallurgy. Copper was extracted from stone by mixing powdered green-blue azurite or malachite minerals (possibly used for pigments) with powdered charcoal and baking the mixture in a bellows-aided kiln, perhaps accidentally at first. At 800°C the copper separated from the powdered ore in tiny shining beads. It could then be tapped out, reheated, forged, welded, annealed, and hammered into a wide variety of tools (hooks, awls, blades) and ornaments (beads, rings, and other pendants). Ornaments of gold (probably mined in Transylvania and coastal Thrace) began to circulate in the same trade networks. The early phase of copper working began before 5000 BCE.
Balkan smiths, about 4800–4600 BCE, learned to fashion molds that withstood the heat of molten copper, and began to make cast copper tools and weapons, a complicated process requiring a temperature of 1,083°C to liquefy copper metal. Molten copper must be stirred, skimmed, and poured correctly or it cools into a brittle object full of imperfections. Wellmade cast copper tools were used and exchanged across southeastern Europe by about 4600–4500 BCE in eastern Hungary with the Tiszapolgar culture; in Serbia with the Vinča D culture; in Bulgaria at Varna and in the Karanovo VI tell settlements; in Romania with the Gumelnitsa culture; and in Moldova and eastern Romania with the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture. Metallurgy was a new and different kind of craft. It was obvious to anyone that pots were made of clay, but even after being told that a shiny copper ring was made from a green-stained rock, it was difficult to see how. The magical aspect of copperworking set metalworkers apart, and the demand for copper objects increased trade. Prospecting, mining, and long-distance trade for ore and finished products introduced a new era in inter-regional politics and interdependence that quickly reached deep into the steppes as far as the Volga.7
Kilns and smelters for pottery and copper consumed the forests, as did two-storied timber houses and the bristling palisade walls that protected many Old European settlements, particularly in northeastern Bulgaria. At Durankulak and Sabla Ezerec in northeastern Bulgaria and at Tîrpeşti in Romania, pollen cores taken near settlements show significant reductions in local forest cover.8 The earth’s climate reached its post-glacial thermal maximum, the Atlantic period, about 6000–4000 BCE, and was at its warmest during the late Atlantic (paleoclimatic zone A3), beginning about 5200 BCE. Riverine forests in the steppe river valleys contracted because of increased warmth and dryness, and grasslands expanded. In the forest-steppe uplands majestic forests of elm, oak, and lime trees spread from the Carpathians to the Urals by 5000 BCE. Wild honeybees, which preferred lime and oak trees for nests, spread with them.9
THE CUCUTENI-TRIPOLYE CULTURE
The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture occupied the frontier between Old Europe and the Pontic-Caspian cultures. More than twenty-seven hundred Cucuteni-Tripolye sites have now been discovered and examined with small excavations, and a few have been entirely excavated (figure 9.1). The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture first appeared around 5200–5000 BCE and survived a thousand years longer than any other part of the Old European world. Tripolye people were still creating large houses and villages, advanced pottery and metals, and female figurines as late as 3000 BCE. They were the sophisticated western neighbors of the steppe people who probably spoke Proto-Indo-European.
Cucuteni-Tripolye is named after two archaeological sites: Cucuteni, discovered in eastern Romania in 1909, and Tripolye, discovered in central Ukraine in 1899. Romanian archaeologists use the name Cucuteni and Ukrainians use Tripolye, each with its own system of internal chronological divisions, so we must use cumbersome labels like Pre-Cucuteni III/Tripolye A to refer to a single prehistoric culture. There is a Borges-like dreaminess to the Cucuteni pottery sequence: one phase (Cucuteni C) is not a phase at all but rather a type of pottery probably made outside the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture; another phase (Cucuteni A1) was defined before it was found, and never was found; still another (Cucteni A5) was created in 1963 as a challenge for future scholars, and is now largely forgotten; and the whole sequence was first defined on the assumption, later proved wrong, that the Cucuteni A phase was the oldest, so later archaeologists had to invent the Pre-Cucuteni phases I, II, and III, one of which (Pre-Cucuteni I) might not exist. The positive side of this obsession with pottery types and phases is that the pottery is known and studied in minute detail.10
The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture is defined most clearly by its decorated pottery, female figurines, and houses. They first appeared about 5200–5000 BCE in the East Carpathian piedmont. The late Linear Pottery people of the East Carpathians acquired these new traditions from the late Boian-Giuleşti and late Hamangia cultures of the lower Danube valley. They adopted Boian and Hamangia design motifs in pot
tery, Boian-style female figurines, and some aspects of Boian house architecture (a clay floor fired before the walls were raised, called a ploshchadka floor in Russian). They acquired objects made of Balkan copper and Dobrujan flint, again from the Danube valley. The borrowed customs were core aspects of any tribal farming culture—domestic pottery production, domestic architecture, and domestic female-centered rituals—and so it seems likely that at least some Boian people migrated up into the steep, thickly forested valleys at the peakline of the East Carpathians. Their appearance defined the beginning of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture—phases Pre-Cucuteni I (?) and II (about 5200–4900 BCE).
Figure 9.1 Early Eneolithic sites in the Pontic-Caspian region.
The first places that showed the new styles were clustered near high Carpathian passes, and perhaps attracted migrants partly because they controlled passage through the mountains. From these high Carpathian valleys the new styles and domestic rituals spread quickly northeastward to Pre-Cucuteni II settlements located as far east as the Dniester valley. As the culture developed (during pre-Cucteni III/Tripolye A) it was carried across the Dniester, erasing a cultural frontier that had existed for six hundred to eight hundred years, and into the South Bug River valley in Ukraine. Bug-Dniester sites disappeared. Tripolye A villages occupied the South Bug valley from about 4900–4800 BCE to about 4300–4200 BCE.
The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture made a visible mark on the forest-steppe environment, reducing the forest and creating pastures and cultivated fields over wider areas. At Floreşti, on a tributary of the Seret River, the remains of a late Linear Pottery homestead, radiocarbon dated about 5200–5100 BCE, consisted of a single house with associated garbage pits, set in a clearing in an oak-elm forest—tree pollen was 43% of all pollen. Stratified above it was a late Pre-Cucuteni III village, dated about 4300 BCE, with at least ten houses set in a much more open landscape—tree pollen was only 23%.11
Very few Bug-Dniester traits can be detected in early Cucuteni-Tripolye artifacts. The late Bug-Dniester culture was absorbed or driven away, removing the buffer culture that had mediated interchanges on the frontier.12 The frontier shifted eastward to the uplands between the Southern Bug and Dnieper rivers. This soon became the most clearly defined, high-contrast cultural frontier in all of Europe.
The Early Cucuteni-Tripolye Village at Bernashevka
A good example of an early Cucuteni-Tripolye farming village on that moving frontier is the site of Bernashevka, wholly excavated by V. G. Zbenovich between 1972 and 1975.13 On a terrace overlooking the Dniester River floodplain six houses were built in a circle around one large structure (figure 9.2). The central building, 12 by 8 m, had a foundation of horizontal wooden beams, or sleeper beams, probably with vertical wall posts morticed into them. The walls were wattle-and-daub, the roof thatched, and the floor made of smooth fired clay 8–17 cm thick on a sub-floor of timber beams (a ploshchadka). The door had a flat stone threshold, and inside was the only domed clay oven in the settlement—perhaps a central bakery and work building for the village. The houses ranged from 30m2 to 150m2 in floor area. The population of the village probably was forty to sixty people. Two radiocarbon dates (5500–5300 BCE) seem two hundred years too old (table 9.1), perhaps because the dated wood fragments were from burned heartwood that had died centuries before the village was occupied.
Figure 9.2 Bernashevka settlement on the Dniester River. After Zbenovich 1980, figure 3.
No cemetery was found at Bernashevka or at any other Cucuteni-Tripolye village. Like the Criş people, the Cucuteni-Tripolye people did not ordinarily bury their dead. Parts of human skeletons are occasionally found in ritual deposits beneath house floors, human teeth were used occasionally as beads, and at Drãguşeni (Cucuteni A4, about 4300–4000 BCE) loose human bones were found in the litter between houses. Perhaps bodies were exposed and permitted to return to the birds somewhere near the village. As Gimbutas noted, some Tripolye female figurines seem to be wearing bird masks.
TABLE 9.1 Early Eneolithic Radiocarbon Dates
Half the pottery at Bernashevka was coarse ware: thick-walled, relatively crude vessels tempered with sand, quartz, and grog (crushed ceramic sherds) decorated with rows of stabbed impressions or shallow channels impressed with a spatula in swirling patterns (figure 9.3). Some of these were perforated strainers, perhaps used for making cheese or yogurt. Another 30% were thin-walled, fine-tempered jugs, lidded bowls, and ladles. The last 20% were very fine, thin-walled, quite beautiful lidded jugs and bowls (probably for individual servings of food), ladles (for serving), and hollow-pedestaled “fruit-stands” (perhaps for food presentation), elaborately decorated over the entire surface with stamped, incised, and channeled motifs, some enhanced with white paint against the orange clay. Lidded bowls and jugs imply that food was served in individual containers at some distance from the hearth where it was cooked, and their careful decoration implies that the presentation of food involved an element of social theater, an unveiling.
Figure 9.3 Artifacts of the Pre-Cucuteni II/III-Tripolye A period from the sites of Bernashevka (most), Bernovo (labeled), and Lenkovtsi (labeled). After Zbenovich 1980, figures 55, 57, 61, 69, 71, 75, 79; and Zbenovich 1989, figure 65, 74.
Every house at Bernashevka contained fragmented ceramic female figurines with joined legs, exaggerated hips and buttocks, and schematic rodlike heads, about 10 cm long (figure 9.3). Simple incisions indicated the pubis and a girdle or waistband. Figurines were found at various places on the house floors; there was no obvious domestic shrine or altar. The number of figurines per house ranged from one to twenty-one, but four houses had nine or more. Almost two thousand similar figurines have been found in other Pre-Cucuteni II-III/Tripolye A sites, occasionally arranged in groups seated in chairs. At the Tripolye A site of Luka-Vrublevetskaya on the Dniester, they were made of clay tempered with a mixture of wheat, barley, and millet grains—all the grains cultivated in the village—and with finely ground flour. These, at least, seem to have symbolized the generative fertility of cultivated grain. But they were only one aspect of domestic cults. Under every house at Bernashevka was the skull of a domesticated cow or bull. One house also had wild animal symbols: the skull of a wild aurochs and the antlers of a red deer. Preconstruction foundation deposits of cattle horns and skulls, and occasionally of human skulls, are found in many Tripolye A villages. Bovine and female spirit powers were central to domestic household cults.
The Bernashevka farmers cultivated emmer and spelt wheats, with some barley and millet. Fields were prepared with mattocks made of antler (nineteen examples were found) and polished slate (twenty examples); some of these might have been attached to ards, which were primitive plows. The grain was harvested with flint blades of the Karanovo type (figure 9.3).
The animal bones from Bernashevka are the largest sample from any early Cucuteni-Tripolye site: 12,657 identifiable bones from a minimum of 804 animals. About 50% of the bones (60% of the individuals) were from wild animals, principally red deer (Cervus elaphus) and wild pig. Roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) and the wild aurochs (Bos primigenius) were hunted occasionally. Many early Cucuteni-Tripolye sites have about 50% wild animal bones. Like Bernashevka, most were frontier settlements established in places not previously cleared or farmed. In contrast, at the long-settled locale of Tirpeşti the Pre-Cucuteni III settlement produced 95% domesticated animal bones. And even in frontier settlements like Bernashevka, about 50% of all animal bones were from cattle, sheep/goat, and pigs. Cattle and pigs were more important in heavily forested areas like Bernashevka, where cattle constituted 75% of the domesticated animal bones, whereas sheep and goats were more important in villages closer to the steppe border.
Pre-Cucuteni II Bernashevka was abandoned before copper tools and ornaments became common enough to lose casually; no copper artifacts were left in the settlement. But only a few centuries later small copper artifacts became common. At Tripolye A Luka-Vrublevetskaya, probably occupied about 4800–4600 BCE, 12 copper objects
(awls, fishhooks, a bead, a ring) were found among seven houses in piles of discarded shellfish, animal bones, and broken crockery. At Karbuna, near the steppe boundary, probably occupied about 4500–4400 BCE, a spectacular hoard of 444 copper objects was buried in a fine late Tripolye A pot closed with a Tripolye A bowl (figure 9.4). The hoard contained two cast copper hammer-axes 13–14 cm long, hundreds of copper beads, and dozens of flat “idols,” or wide-bottomed pendants made of flat sheet copper; two hammer-axes of marble and slate with drilled shaft-holes for the handle; 127 drilled beads made of red deer teeth; 1 drilled human tooth; and 254 beads, plaques, or bracelets made of Spondylus shell, an Aegean shell used for ornaments continuously from the first Greek Neolithic through the Old European Eneolithic. The Karbuna copper came from Balkan ores, and the Aegean shell was traded from the same direction, probably through the tell towns of the lower Danube valley. By about 4500 BCE social prestige had become closely linked to the accumulation of exotic commodities, including copper.14
Figure 9.4 Part of the Karbuna hoard with the Tripolye A pot and bowl-lid in which it was found. All illustrated objects except the pot and lid are copper, and all are the same scale. After Dergachev 1998.
As Cucuteni-Tripolye farmers moved eastward out of the East Carpathian piedmont they began to enter a more open, gently rolling, drier landscape. East of the Dniester River annual precipitation declined and the forests thinned. The already-old cultural frontier moved to the Southern Bug river valley. The Tripolye A town of Mogil’noe IV, among the first established in the South Bug valley, had more than a hundred buildings and covered 15–20 hectares, with a population of perhaps between four hundred and seven hundred. East of the Southern Bug, in the Dnieper valley, were people of a very different cultural tradition: the Dnieper-Donets II culture.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 20
