Khvalynsk had many more animal sacrifices than any DDII cemetery: 52 (or 70) sheep/goat, 23 cattle, and 11 horses, to accompany the burials of 158 humans. (The published reports are inconsistent on the number of sheep/goat.) The head-and-hoof form of sacrifice appeared for the first time: at least 17 sheep/goat and 9 cattle were slaughtered and only the skull and lower leg bones were buried, probably still attached to the animal’s hide. In later steppe funerals the custom of hanging a hide containing the head and hooves over the grave or burying it in the grave was very common. The head and hide symbolized a gift to the gods, and the flesh was doled out to guests at the funeral feast. Parts of domesticated animals were offered in all phases of the funerals at Khvalynsk: on the grave floor, in the grave fill, at the edge of the grave, and in twelve special sacrificial deposits stained with red ochre, found above the graves (figure 9.7). The distribution of animal sacrifices was unequal: 22 graves of 158 (14 percent) had animal sacrifices in the grave or above it, and enough animals were sacrificed to supply about half of the graves were they distributed equally. Only 4 graves (100, 127, 139, and 55–57) contained multiple species (cattle and sheep, sheep and horse, etc.) and all four of those also were covered by ochre-stained ritual deposits above the grave, with additional sacrifices. About one in five people had sacrificed domestic animals, and one in forty had multiple domestic animals.
The role of the horse in the Khvalynsk sacrifices is intriguing. The only animals sacrificed at Khvalysnk I were domesticated sheep/goat, domesticated cattle, and horses. Horse leg parts occurred by themselves, without other animal bones, in eight graves. They were included with a sheep/goat head-and-hoof offering in grave 127, and were included with sheep/goat and cattle remains in sacrificial deposit 4 (figure 9.7). It is not possible to measure the bones—they were discarded long ago—but horses certainly were treated symbolically like domesticated animals at Khvalynsk: they were grouped with cattle and sheep/goat in human funeral rituals that excluded obviously wild animals. Carved images of horses were found at other cemeteries dated to this same period (see below). Horses certainly had a new ritual and symbolic importance at Khvalynsk. If they were domesticated, they would represent the oldest domesticated horses.25
There is much more copper at Khvalynsk than is known from the entire DDII culture, and the copper objects there are truly remarkable (figure 9.7). Unfortunately most of it, an astonishing 286 objects, came from the 43 (?) graves of the Khvalynsk II excavation, still unpublished though analyses of some of the objects have been published by Natalya Ryndina. The Khvalynsk I excavation yielded 34 copper objects found in 11 of the 158 published graves. The copper from excavations I and II showed the same trace elements and technology, the former characteristic of Balkan copper. Ryndina’s study of 30 objects revealed three technological groups: 14 objects made at 300–500°C, 11 made at 600–800°C, and 5 made at 900–1,000°C. The quality of welding and forging was uniformly low in the first two groups, indicating local manufacture, but was strongly influenced by the methods of the Tripolye A culture. The third group, which included two thin rings and three massive spiral rings, was technically identical to Old European status objects from the cemeteries of Varna and Durankulak in Bulgaria. These objects were made in Old Europe and were traded in finished form to the Volga. In the 158 graves of Khvalynsk I, adult males had the most copper objects, but the number of graves with some copper was about equal between the sexes, five adult male graves and four adult female graves. An adolescent (gr. 90 in figure 9.7) and a child were also buried with copper rings and beads.26
Polished stone mace-heads and polished serpentine and steatite stone bracelets appeared with copper as status symbols. Two polished stone maces occurred in one adult male grave (gr. 108) and one in another (gr. 57) at Khvalynsk. Grave 108 also contained a polished steatite bracelet. Similar bracelets and mace-heads were found in other Khvalynsk-culture cemeteries on the Volga, for example, at Krivoluchie (Samara oblast) and Khlopkovskii (Saratov oblast). Some mace heads were given “ears” that made them seem vaguely zoomorphic, and some observers have seen horse heads in them. A clearly zoomorphic polished stone mace head appeared at Varfolomievka, part of a different culture group on the lower Volga. Maces, copper, and elaborate decoration of the body appeared with domesticated animals, not before.27
Khvalynsk settlements have been found at Gundurovka and Lebyazhinka I on the Sok River, north of the Samara. But the Khvalynsk artifacts and pottery are mixed with artifacts of other cultures and ages, making it difficult to isolate features or animal bones that can be ascribed to the Khvalynsk period alone. We do know from the bones of the Khvalynsk people themselves that they ate a lot of fish; with an average 15N measurement of 14.8%, fish probably represented 70% of their meat diet. Pure Khvalynsk camps have been found on the lower Volga in the Ryn Peski desert, but these were specialized hunters’ camps where onagers and saiga antelope were the quarry, comprising 80–90 percent of the animal bones. Even here, at Kara Khuduk I, we find a few sheep/goat and cattle bones (6–9 %), perhaps provisions carried by Khvalynsk hunters.
In garbage dumps found at sites of other steppe cultures of the same period east of the Don (see below), horse bones usually made up more than half the bones found, and the percentage of cattle and sheep was usually under 40%. In the east, cattle and sheep were more important in ritual sacrifices than in the diet, as if they were initially regarded as a kind of ritual currency used for occasional (seasonal?) sanctified meals and funeral feasts. They certainly were associated with new rituals at funerals, and probably with other new religious beliefs and myths as well. The set of cults that spread with the first domesticated animals was at the root of the Proto-Indo-European conception of the universe as described at the beginning of chapter 8.
NALCHIK AND NORTH CAUCASIAN CULTURES
Many archaeologists have wondered if domesticated cattle and sheep might have entered the steppes through the Eneolithic farmers of the Caucasus as well as from Old Europe.28 Farming cultures had spread from the Near East into the southern Caucasus Mountains (Shulaveri, Arukhlo, and Shengavit) by 5800–5600 BCE. But these earliest farming communities in the Caucasus were not widespread; they remained concentrated in a few riverbottom locations in the upper Kura and Araxes River valleys. No bridging sites linked them to the distant European steppes, more than 500 km to the north and west. The permanently glaciated North Caucasus Mountains, the highest and most impassable mountain range in Europe, stood between them and the steppes. The bread wheats (Triticum aestivum) preferred in the Caucasus were less tolerant of drought conditions than the hulled wheats (emmer, einkorn) preferred by Criş, Linear Pottery, and Bug-Dniester cultivators. The botanist Zoya Yanushevich observed that the cultivated cereals that appeared in Bug-Dniester sites and later in the Pontic-Caspian steppe river valleys were a Balkan/Danubian crop suite, not a Caucasian crop suite.29 Nor is there an obvious stylistic connection between the pottery or artifacts of the earliest Caucasian farmers at Shulaveri and those of the earliest herders in the steppes off to the north. If I had to guess at the linguistic identity of the first Eneolithic farmers at Shulaveri, I would link them with the ancestors of the Kartvelian language family.
The Northwest Caucasian languages, however, are quite unlike Kartvelian. Northwest Caucasian seems to be an isolate, a survival of some unique language stock native to the northern slopes of the North Caucasus Mountains. In the western part of the North Caucasian piedmont, overlooking the steppes, the few documented Eneolithic communities had stone tools and pottery somewhat like those of their northern steppe neighbors; these communities were southern participants in the steppe world, not northern extensions of Shulaveri-type Caucasian farmers. I would guess they spoke languages ancestral to Northwest Caucasian, but only a few early sites are published. The most important is the cemetery at Nalchik.
Near Nalchik, in the center of the North Caucasus piedmont, was a cemetery containing 147 graves with contracted skeletons lying on their sides in red ochre—stained
pits in groups of two or three under stone cairns. Females lay in a contracted pose on the left side and males on their right.30 A few copper ornaments, beads made of deer and cattle teeth, and polished stone bracelets (like those found in grave 108 at Khvalynsk and at Krivoluchie) accompanied them. One grave yielded a date on human bone of 5000–4800 BCE (possibly too old by a hundred to five hundred years, if the dated sample was contaminated by old carbon in fish). Five graves in the same region at Staronizhesteblievsk were provided with boars-tusk plaques of the DDII Mariupol type, animal-tooth beads, and flint blades that seem at home in the Early Eneolithic.31 An undated cave occupation in the Kuban valley at Kamennomost Cave, level 2, which could be of the same date, has yielded sheep/goat and cattle bones stratified beneath a later level with Maikop-culture materials. Carved stone bracelets and ornamental stones from the Caucasus—black jet, rock crystal, and porphyry—were traded into Khvalynsk and Dnieper-Donets II sites, perhaps from people like those at Nal’chik and Kamennomost Cave 2. The Nalchik-era sites clearly represent a community that had at least a few domesticated cattle and sheep/goats, and was in contact with Khvalynsk. They probably got their domesticated animals from the Dnieper, as the Khvalynsk people did.
THE LOWER DON AND NORTH CASPIAN STEPPES
In the steppes between Nalchik and Khvalynsk many more sites, of different kinds, are dated to this period. Rakushechni Yar on the lower Don, near the Sea of Azov, is a deeply stratified settlement site with a cluster of six graves at the edge of the settlement area. The lowest cultural levels, with shell-tempered pottery lightly decorated with incised linear motifs and impressions made with a triangular-ended stick, probably dated about 5200–4800 BCE, contained the bones of sheep/goat and cattle. But in the interior steppes, away from the major river valleys, equid hunting was still the focus of the economy. In the North Caspian Depression the forager camp of Dzhangar, also dated 5200 BCE (on animal bone) and with pottery similar to Rakushechni Yar, yielded only the bones of wild horses and onagers.32
On the eastern side of the lower Volga, sites such as Varfolomievka were interspersed with Khvalynsk hunters’ camps such as Kara Khuduk I.33 The settlement at Varfolomievka is stratified and well dated by radiocarbon, and clearly shows the transition from foraging to herding in the North Caspian Depression. Varfolomievka was first occupied around 5800–5600 BCE by pottery-making foragers who hunted onagers and horses (level 3). The site was reoccupied twice more (levels 2B and 2A). In level 2B, dated about 5200–4800 BCE, people constructed three pit-houses. They used copper (one copper awl and some amorphous lumps of copper were found) and kept domesticated sheep/goats, though “almost half” the animal bones at Varfolomievka were of horses. Bone plaques were carved in the shape of horses, and horse metacarpals were incised with geometric decorations. Three polished stone mace-head fragments were found here. One was carved into an animal head at one end, perhaps a horse (figure 9.6). Four graves were dug rather casually into abandoned house depressions at Varfolomievka, like the similar group of graves at the edge of Rakushechni Yar. Hundreds of beads made of drilled and polished horse teeth were deposited in ochre-stained sacrificial deposits near the human graves. There were also a few deer teeth, several kinds of shell beads, and whole boars’ tusk ornaments.
These sites in the southern steppes, from the lower Don to the lower Volga, are dated 5200–4600 BCE and exhibit the bones of sheep/goat and occasionally cattle, small objects of copper, and casual disposal of the dead. Small settlements provide most of the data, unlike the cemetery-based archaeological record for Khvalynsk. Pots were shell-tempered and decorated with designs incised or pricked with a triangular-ended stick. Motifs included diamond-like lozenges and, rarely, incised meanders filled with pricked ornament. Most rims were simple but some were thickened on the inside. A. Yudin has grouped these sites together under the name of the Orlovka culture, after the settlement of Orlovka, excavated in 1974, on the Volga. Nalchik seems to have existed at the southern fringe of this network.34
THE FOREST FRONTIER: THE SAMARA CULTURE
One other culture interacted with northern Khvalynsk in the middle Volga region, along the forest-steppe boundary (see figure 9.1). The Samara Neolithic culture, distinguished by its own variety of “collared” pots covered with pricked, incised, and rocker-stamped motifs, developed at the northern edge of the steppe zone along the Samara River. The pottery, tempered with sand and crushed plants, was similar to that made on the middle Don River. Dwellings at Gundurovka near Samara had dug-out floors, 20 m by 8 m, with multiple hearths and storage pits in the floors (this settlement also contained Khvalynsk pottery). Domesticated sheep/goat (13% of 3,602 bones) and cattle (21%) were identified at Ivanovskaya on the upper Samara River, although 66% of the bones were of horses. The settlement of Vilovatoe on the Samara River yielded 552 identifiable bones, of which 28.3% were horse, 19.4% were sheep/goat, and 6.3% were cattle, in addition to beaver (31.8%) and red deer (12.9%). The Samara culture showed some forest-culture traits: it had large polished stone adzes like those of forest foragers to the north.
Samara people created formal cemeteries (figure 9.8). The cemetery at S’yezzhe (see-YOZH-yay) contained nine burials in an extended position on their backs, different from the Khvalynsk position and more like that of DDII. Above the graves at the level of the original ground surface was a ritual deposit of red ochre, broken pottery, shell beads, a bone harpoon, and the skulls and lower leg bones (astragali and phalanges) of two horses—funeral-feast deposits like the above-grave deposits at Khvalynsk. S’yezzhe had the oldest horse head-and-hoof deposit in the steppes. Near the horse head-and-hoof deposit, but outside the area of ochre-stained soil, were two figurines of horses carved on flat pieces of bone, similar to others found at Varfolomievka, and one bone figurine of a bull. The S’yezzhe people wore boar’s-tusk plaques like those of the Dnieper-Donets II culture, one of which was shaped exactly like one found at the DDII cemetery of Yasinovatka in the Dnieper valley.35
Figure 9.8 S’yezzhe cemetery, Samara oblast. Graves 1–9 were a cemetery of the Samara culture, Early Eneolithic. Graves 10 and 11 were later. After Vasiliev and Matveeva 1979.
COWS, SOCIAL POWER, AND THE EMERGENCE OF TRIBES
It is impossible to say how much the people buried at Khvalynsk really knew of the societies of Old Europe, but they certainly were connected by a trade network of impressive reach. Cemeteries across the Pontic-Caspian steppes (DDII, Khvalynsk, S’yezzhe, Nalchik) became larger or appeared for the first time, suggesting the growth of larger, more stable communities. Cattle and sheep were important in the diet at some DDII settlements on the Dnieper River, but farther east they seem initially to have been more important in funeral rituals than in the daily diet, which was still dominated by horse meat. In the east, domesticated cattle and sheep seem to have served as a kind of currency in a new set of rituals and religious beliefs.
Participation in long-distance trade, gift exchange, and a new set of cults requiring public sacrifices and feasting became the foundation for a new kind of social power. Stockbreeding is by nature a volatile economy. Herders who lose animals always borrow from those who still have them. The social obligations associated with these loans are institutionalized among the world’s pastoralists as the basis for a fluid system of status distinctions. Those who loaned animals acquired power over those who borrowed them, and those who sponsored feasts obligated their guests. Early Proto-Indo-European included a vocabulary about verbal contracts bound by oaths (*h1óitos-), used in later religious rituals to specify the obligations between the weak (humans) and the strong (gods). Reflexes of this root were preserved in Celtic, Germanic, Greek, and Tocharian. The model of political relations it references probably began in the Eneolithic. Only a few Eneolithic steppe people wore the elaborate costumes of tusks, plaques, beads, and rings or carried the stone maces that symbolized power, but children were included in this exceptional group, suggesting that the rich animal loaners at least tried to see that their children inherited
their status. Status competition between regional leaders, *weik-potis or *re- in later Proto-Indo-European, resulted in a surprisingly widespread set of shared status symbols. As leaders acquired followers, political networks emerged around them—and this was the basis for tribes.
Societies that did not accept the new herding economy became increasingly different from those that did. The people of the northern forest zone remained foragers, as did those who lived in the steppes east of the Ural Mountains. These frontiers probably were linguistic as well as economic, given their persistence and clarity. The Pre-Proto-Indo-European language family probably expanded with the new economy during the Early Eneolithic in the western steppes. Its sister-to-sister linguistic links may well have facilitated the spread of stockbreeding and the beliefs that went with it.
One notable aspect of the Pontic-Caspian Early Eneolithic is the importance of horses, in both diet and funeral symbolism. Horse meat was a major part of the meat diet. Images of horses were carved on bone plaques at Varfolomievka and S’yezzhe. At Khvalynsk, horses were included with cattle and sheep in funeral rituals that excluded obviously wild animals. But, zoologically, we cannot say whether they looked very different from wild horses—the bones no longer exist. The domestication of the horse, an enormously important event in human history, is not at all well understood. Recently, however, a new kind of evidence has been obtained straight from the horse’s mouth.
CHAPTER TEN
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 22
